Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A conversation with Lauren Oyler at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 15/11/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
The first step to becoming a better writer is becoming a better reader. But what makes a piece of writing—whether a book or blog post, essay or cover letter—"good"? Who determines that criteria, and does it even matter?
Hailed “the pre-eminent and most widely read critic of her generation” by the Times, Lauren is celebrated for her irreverence, wit, and willingness to dissent from popular opinion. Blending personal narrative with cutting analysis, her writing seizes upon micro- and macro-phenomena, from semicolons to the moralization of art, in order to capture the essence of life and culture in the twenty-first century.
This discussion was followed by a 60-minute workshop on criticism.
About the speaker:
Lauren Oyler is a critic and novelist based in Berlin. Her writing appears regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. Her first novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. A collection of her essays, all previously unpublished, will appear in 2024. She is a 2023—24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris.
The American Library in Paris Scholar of Note program is generously sponsored by the de Groot Foundation.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation with Lauren Oyler at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 15/11/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
The first step to becoming a better writer is becoming a better reader. But what makes a piece of writing—whether a book or blog post, essay or cover letter—"good"? Who determines that criteria, and does it even matter?
Hailed “the pre-eminent and most widely read critic of her generation” by the Times, Lauren is celebrated for her irreverence, wit, and willingness to dissent from popular opinion. Blending personal narrative with cutting analysis, her writing seizes upon micro- and macro-phenomena, from semicolons to the moralization of art, in order to capture the essence of life and culture in the twenty-first century.
This discussion was followed by a 60-minute workshop on criticism.
About the speaker:
Lauren Oyler is a critic and novelist based in Berlin. Her writing appears regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. Her first novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. A collection of her essays, all previously unpublished, will appear in 2024. She is a 2023—24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris.
The American Library in Paris Scholar of Note program is generously sponsored by the de Groot Foundation.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
