David Lazar, essayist, editor and educator, read from his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire as part of this semester’s Read/Write Series at the University of Rhode Island. Lazar read “On the Art of Survival: North by Northwest,” a personal, existential meditation on the intersections of Hitchcock, Flannery O’Connor and Franz Kafka. He followed with “Calling for His Past,” reminiscing on the public telephone as a source of “serendipity.”

Lazar, sardonic and perceptive, read passages like the following: “Freud says there are never only two people in bed, and just so, there were rarely only two people on public telephones in New York.” He followed the reading with Q&A, discussing the influence of Montaigne, the historical stock of the essay as genre and his own goals as an essayist.

See David Lazar’s personal website to read more about his work: http://lazar.org/