Peter Brooks and Philip Nord will be at Labyrinth Books on Tuesday, April 18 at 6 p.m. conversing about Mr. Brook’s Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year (Basic Books $32).

According to Victor Brombert, Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University and author of Trains of Thought, the book is “Challenging and judicious, wide-ranging yet consistently focused,” and “a delight to read. In full control of literary and political history, Peter Brooks makes an unimpeachable case for the importance of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as a prophetic historical novel, and in the process corrects and redeems the conventional image of Flaubert as a political reactionary and aloof resident in an ivory tower.”

In his new book, Peter Brooks uses letters between Flaubert and his novelist friend and confidante George Sand to tell the story of Flaubert and his work, exploring his political commitments and his understanding of war, occupation, insurrection, and bloody political repression.

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University. The author of several critically acclaimed books, including Reading for the Plot, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, and Enigmas of Identity, he currently teaches comparative literature at Princeton University. Philip Nord is professor of history at Princeton and the author, among other books, of The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in 19th Century France, and of France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era.

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