Karl Marx: Private Eye with Jim Feast in conversation with Jonathan Lethem

Karl Marx: Private Eye with Jim Feast in conversation with Jonathan Lethem Saturday, September 14th, 2:30pm to 4pm

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our third event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a book talk on "Karl Marx: Private Eye" with author Jim Feast in conversation with Jonathan Lethem. Co-sponsored by Cornell's Society for the Humanities.

A rattling good yarn and a suspenseful whodunit, against the backdrop of real historical events, that brings sixteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes together with Karl Marx and his brilliant daughter Eleanor to solve a cascading series of murders at a Bohemian spa. Karl Marx Private Eye is a page-turner filled with tricky clues, colorful detectives, and an "exotic" setting. Written in a brilliant parody of Arthur Conan Doyle, this cozy historical mystery will keep readers guessing until its shocking final pages.

Jim Feast helped found the action-oriented literary group the Unbearables, known for such events as a protest against the commodification of the Beats at NYU's Kerouac Conference; annual readings with poets spread out across the Brooklyn Bridge; and a blindfold tour of the Whitney Museum. In the early 1980s, he met and married Nhi Chung, author of Among the Boat People. She introduced him to Chinatown movie theaters, which played the path-breaking Hong Kong noir detective films of those days, giving him a new way to look at the murder mystery. Feast has worked for Fairchild Publications and later taught at Kingsborough Community College. He edited seven books by Ralph Nader, including his three novels, and worked with Barney Rosset on his autobiography. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as more recent best-sellers, The Feral Detective and The Arrest. Several of his novels have been made into major movies, and his shorter works can often be found in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and many other venues. One of the MacArthur "Genius" grant winners, Lethem is well-known and widely respected for his vivid literary style, sardonic humor, and deep understanding of American culture. He recently published The Collapsing Frontier with PM Press.