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The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements and revolutionary thinkers, delivers a timely new take on the lives of influential philosophers Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, and others. At The Existentialist Café journeys to 1930s Paris to explore a passionate cast of philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries who would spark a rebellious wave of postwar liberation movements. From anticolonialism to feminism and gay rights, join Bakewell as she discusses with David L. Ulin what the pioneering existentialists can teach us about confronting questions of freedom today.
Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.
