Esther Allen on The Suicides with Forrest Gander
6:30 pm | Doors 6:00 pm
Et al. Gallery | 2831A Mission Street | San Francisco, CA
Et al. Gallery welcomes Esther Allen as she presents her translation of The Suicides, the third book of Antonio Di Benedetto’s unofficial trilogy. Forrest Gander will join her in conversation.
About The Suicides
A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds.
The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolaño and deemed “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the “Dirty War.”
Esther Allen’s translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama received the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, she then translated the other two volumes in Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, The Silentiary (2022) and The Suicides (2025). A professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College, Allen was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government, and her essays and translations have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, and other publications.
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and multi-genre writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations. His recent book, Twice Alive, focuses on human and ecological intimacies.