Harry Ransom Center

Fresh off her recent appearance at the New Yorker Festival, author Tessa Hadley will join us at the Ransom Center on Wednesday, November 4, at 6 p.m. for a rare public reading. She will read from Alone with a Book (2026) and After the Funeral (2023). Hadley's archive, acquired by the Ransom Center in 2025, documents her career through notebooks, contracts, reviews, correspondence, emails, and digital files.

RSVP for free tickets at the link in our bio.

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams, and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Reception made possible by Central Market.

Join author Andrew Durbin for a reading and discussion of The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026). The program will feature a reading by Durbin, followed by a conversation between Durbin and Dr. Christine Robinson, the Ransom Center’s Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography. Book sales, signing, and a reception made possible by Central Market will follow the program.

Attend for free with an RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-reading-andrew-durbins-the-wonderful-world-that-almost-was-tickets-1990519716054?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true

Durbin’s dual biography explores the intertwined lives and art of the influential photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thek, focusing on their complex relationship from the 1950s to the 1970s, their shared artistic circles (including Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, and Fran Lebowitz), and their lasting impact on American art.

Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. His book The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek was published earlier this year. He is also the author of the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian’s posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London.