Talks & Conversations

Hisham Matar: A Month in Siena

Lectures and Book Signings
Stairs leading up to a group of colorful buildings of different shapes and sizes.

Cover from Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena (2019) courtesy of the author

Cover from Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena (2019) courtesy of the author

Join us for a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar from A Month in Siena, a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. After finishing his memoir The Return, Matar traveled to Siena, Italy, seeking solace and pleasure. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, he immersed himself in eight significant paintings dating from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

This book is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the world around us. Matar will take questions from the audience and sign books after the reading.

About Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo. He has lived most of his adult life in London, but since 2010 he has a home in New York City. His debut novel, In the Country of Men (2008), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. He is also the author of the novel Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), which was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune.

His memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016), which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, explores the mysterious disappearance of his father. My Friends (2024), a novel about exile, friendship, and family, which won the 2024 Orwell prize for political fiction, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.  

Matar serves as a professor at Barnard College and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He lives in London and New York.

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Abstracted objects, including a guitar, vase, papers, and playing cards, are gathered on a tabletop in this horizontal still life painting. The objects are made up of areas of mostly flat color and many are outlined in black, creating the impression that the some shapes are two-dimensional and assembled almost like a collage. The brown table has an oval top and a curving pedestal foot. At the center of the jumble on the tabletop, a guitar lies on its side with the neck facing us and reaching to our right. Beneath the black fretboard and neck, the curving form of the guitar is painted tomato red. The upper half is represented by a squared-off brown form. The guitar seems to rest atop or in front of an array of stacked shapes, like splayed pieces of paper, in white, lavender purple, and pale blue. A curving form painted in turquoise to our left seems to be a vase holding a spray of three flowers. The vase is shown against a white square painted with horizontal black lines, like sheet music. A dark gray form at the middle of the table, beneath the guitar, could be the silhouette of a bird facing our left. Just to the right of the bird, a pair of playing cards lie on a blue area. Painted in turquoise against gray, one card has six dots and the other one club. A chair with a curved, arching top and a gray upholstered seat is pulled up to the table to our right. The front left leg is light gray with turned knobs near the foot and halfway up the leg; the right leg is painted black, as if in shadow. Panels of pale tan suggest wainscotting behind the table beneath a pale gray wall across the background. The overall impression of the painting is fragmented as even single objects seem to be broken up into planes and areas of color. The artist signed and underlined his name with red paint in the lower left corner: “Picasso.”

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