Episode 18
André Aciman is a memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar. He is the New York Times-bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me. His other published work includes Out of Egypt (which won the Whiting Award for Non-Fiction), Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, False Papers, and Alibis. Homo Irrealis, his latest collection of essays, was published in January 2021.
Aciman is the director of The Writers’ Institute and is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.
We had the great honor to speak to André Aciman about his last book, his first published collection of essays in a decade. We spoke to André about what pleases him about the essay form; how readers respond to his work, in sometimes surprising ways; why he returned to the characters in Call Me Be Your Name; what he teaches his CUNY graduate students about writing; how his work has explored the themes of exile, memory, and belonging; and his time teaching Division of Continuing Education courses in the late 1970s.