Best-selling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name discusses memory, mirage, and the mood of the fantasy life.

In his new essay collection Homo Irrealis, bestselling author André Aciman turns his attention to the state of mind where we spend most of our time, “the might-be and the might-have-been.” This irrealis mood knows no boundaries between what is and what isn't, between what happened and what won't: Aciman describes it as “a mirage of the world that artists long to hold.” From meditations on subway poetry and an empty Italian street to Freud, Sebald, Proust and others via portraits of cities including Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

André Aciman will discuss the irrealis mood and the essay form and take questions from the audience.

ILFDublin also invites you to also watch a screening of Eric Rohmer’s My Night With Maud. Tickets can be purchased from Volta.ie for €2.99.

“April 1971. I am 20 years old. My life is about to change. I don’t know it yet. But just a few more steps and something new, like a new wind, a new voice, a new way of thinking and seeing things will course through my life.”from André Aciman’s essay Eric Rohmer and Me.

André will be in conversation with journalist and cultural critic Helen Meany.

Presented with the support of theIstituto Italiano di Cultura andEmbassy of Italy in Ireland

Holding The Mirage: André Aciman