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The Evening Interview with Nick Hornby & Susan Orlean

Writer's Symposium by the Sea & Warwick's present

The Evening Interview with Nick Hornby & Susan Orlean

Friday, February 23, 2024 - 7:00pm PST

Brown Chapel - Point Loma Nazarene University
3900 Lomaland Dr.
San Diego, CA 92106
The Evening Interview with Nick Hornby & Susan Orlean
The Evening Interview with Nick Hornby & Susan Orlean
Buy Tickets Here

This is a ticketed event.

  • Check-In at 6:15PM. Most seating is first-come, first-served.
  • "With Book" Ticketholders will receive books at check-in the evening of the event.
  • Parking is free for all events. Please note that campus parking is limited, so we suggest arriving early to locate a parking spot. Parking lots are indicated on this campus map.
  • Please call the Warwick's Book Department at 858-454-0347 for more information.

Part of the 29th Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea. Other events include Paulette Jiles on February 20th, Judy Woodruff on February 21st, Elizabeth Gilbert on February 22nd.

On Friday, February 23rd at 7:00pm, the Writer's Symposium by the Sea and Warwick's will host Nick Hornby and Susan Orlean for an Evening Interview with Dean Nelson.

Nick Hornby is the author of seven bestselling novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down, as well as several works of nonfiction. Many of his books have been turned into successful films and TV series. He has been Oscar nominated twice, for his screenplays of An Education and Brooklyn. His ten-part short-form TV series State of the Union, directed by Stephen Frears, was recently broadcast by Sundance TV and the BBC and won three Emmy Awards. He lives in London.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles.

About Dickens and PrinceA Particular Kind of Genius: Every so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely—until it's not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince.

Equipped with a fan's admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class, and centuries—each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose legacy resounded far beyond their own time.

When Prince's 1987 record Sign o' the Times was rereleased in 2020, the iconic album now came with dozens of songs that weren't on the original—Prince was endlessly prolific, recording 102 songs in 1986 alone. In awe, Hornby began to wonder, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? He soon found his answer in Victorian novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, who died more than a hundred years before Prince began making music.

Examining the two artists' personal tragedies, social statuses, boundless productivity, and other parallels, both humorous and haunting, Hornby shows how these two unlikely men from different centuries "lit up the world." In the process, he creates a lively, stimulating rumination on the creativity, flamboyance, discipline, and soul it takes to produce great art.

About On Animals:

Susan Orlean—the beloved New Yorker staff writer hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post—gathers a lifetime of musings, meditations, and in-depth profiles about animals.

"How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages," writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career.

These stories consider a range of creatures—the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with who are central to human life. In her own backyard, Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens. In a different backyard, in New Jersey, she meets a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers—something none of her neighbors knew about until one of the tigers escapes. In Iceland, the world's most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free; in Morocco, the world's hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic. We meet a show dog and a lost dog and a pigeon who knows exactly how to get home.

Equal parts delightful and profound, enriched by Orlean's stylish prose and precise research, these stories celebrate the meaningful cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.

Dean Nelson is the founder and director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is also the founder and host of the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea. A forty-year veteran journalist, Nelson's byline has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, USA Today, San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, San Diego magazine, Westways magazine, Mpls/St. Paul magazine, and more. He lives in San Diego with his wife.

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius By Nick Hornby Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780593541821
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Books - November 15th, 2022

On Animals By Susan Orlean Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9781982181543
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster - June 21st, 2022