Eric Karpeles
The Quest for Czapski
Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in an interview with painter, writer, and translator Eric Karpeles as they discuss two new books about Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski:
Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski and Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp
Bolinas friends with shared Commonweal history, Michael, and Eric will speak about a wide range of topics raised by Czapski, including history, creativity, spirituality, and the idea of a moral compass.
Eric Karpeles
A Fellow of the Czeslaw Milosz Institute at the Claremont Colleges, Eric Karpeles has given the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, worked as a volunteer ambulance driver, spoken on Proust at Berkeley and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, walked from Bath to Oxford, interviewed composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim onstage, and collaborated on a book of mathematical equations and Hebrew references used as a prop in a film by the Coen Brothers.
Karpeles studied at the Art Students League of New York as a boy and was awarded a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris as a young man. A voracious reader whose idea of hell is being on public transportation without a book, he likes to cook, or, perhaps more tellingly, he likes to eat. He once had tea with Indira Gandhi and has lived with the same man for forty years.
