On Thursday, March 5 at 7:30 p.m., best-selling author and novelist Nathan Englander will deliver the Diane Feigenson Lecture in Jewish Literature. His lecture, entitled “Guilt, Memory, and the Beta-God: Nathan Englander on kaddish.com,” will be held at Fairfield University’s Barone Campus Center Oak Room. The event is free and open to the public.

The lecture includes a short reading from the novel, kaddish.com, followed by a talk about the genesis of stories, mourning and memory, ideas of the afterlife, and technology’s intersection with faith and the modern world. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

In addition to kaddish.com, Englander is the author of two novels, Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and two short story collections, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. For the latter, he received the 2012 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction and essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, as well as The Oprah Magazine.

Englander was named one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He was a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin.

The Feigenson Lectureship is in memory of professor Diane Feigenson who taught in the English Department and the Judaic Studies Program at Fairfield University for many years. Among the courses she taught were “Literature of the Holocaust” and "Modern Jewish Literature.” This biennial lectureship is made possible through the generosity of the Feigenson family.

Reservations are requested for this lecture. Please contact the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at bennettcenter@fairfield.edu or call 203-254-4000, ext. 2066. For more information about other Bennett Center events, visit fairfield.edu/bennett.