Peter Brooks and Brigid Doherty will talk about Brooks’ new book Seduced by Story: On the Use and Abuse of Narrative (New York Review of Books) on Wednesday, December 7 at 6 p.m. The event can be attended in person at Labyrinth Books or via livestream; to register, visit labyrinthbooks.com.

David Shields calls Seduced by Story “A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks’ lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good.”

Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale, Brooks is the author of numerous books including The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, as well as of two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor’s Body.

Doherty holds a joint appointment in German and art and archaeology at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on the interdisciplinary study of 20th-century art and literature, with special emphasis on the history of German modernism and on relationships among the visual arts, literature, and aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories. She is currently completing a book on contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel’s “Rorschach Pictures.”