“I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself.”
Sunday, February 1st, 2026
On Wednesday, 18 February, 2026, Another Look will present Nobel prizewinning Patrick Modiano’s 2007 novella, In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books). The event will take place, as always, at 7 p.m. at Levinthal Hall, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.
Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.
They will be joined by Chloe Edmondson, a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of French and Italian. She is the France-Stanford Center Fellow for the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History. You will remember her from our event Madame de LaFayette’s The Princesse de Clèves in 2019. We have invited Stanford actor, director, and drama professor and Rush Rehm to round out the panel. (You will remember Rush from our 2016 event on Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line: A Confession.)
The Nobel announcement recognized Modiano’s “consistent exploration of memory and the elusive nature of personal history, often set against the backdrop of occupied Paris.”
He has been praised for his “subtle, clear style and his ability to bring anonymous lives to light, making him a modern-day Proust in the eyes of some.”
According to World Literature Today, “Modiano’s fictional world is not postapocalyptic, like the fictional worlds of Beckett, but postrelational . . . a world where familiar patterns, whether placed in memory, neighborhoods, or situations, are dispersed and left to languish on the wind.”
Panelists include Another Look director Robert Pogue Harrison and Another Look founding director Tobias Wolff.
Meanwhile, Another Look has done a Q&A interview with Modiano’s translator, Chris Clarke. You can read: “No one saw the Nobel coming”: A Q&A with Modiano’s translator on the Another Look website.
You can register for the event on the link below – and please share the link (and the poster and event square we’ve attached) with your friends:
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-03yUMbsSWWwJdijPIQg3w#/registration
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-03yUMbsSWWwJdijPIQg3w#/registration
Nobel lecture:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2014/modiano/lecture/
Nobel Award speech:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2014/ceremony-speech/
