Flying Books and Knopf Canada invite you to celebrate Sarah Bakewell and her book At The Existentialist Café: Freedom Being & Apricot Cocktails. Join Sarah for an evening of pondering Being-in-the-world, the Other, freedom and responsibility, and an apricot cocktail or two, or three.

“At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell’s group portrait of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and the other ‘Continental’ philosophers who flourished before and after World War II, is a work of deep intelligence and sympathy, reminding us how exciting those thinkers can be. And it’s a page-turner.” — Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

Featuring an on-stage dialogue between:

Author Sarah Bakewell speaking on behalf of Jean-Paul Sartre (“There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”)

Journalist Emily H. Keeler speaking on behalf of Simone de Beauvoir (“Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.”)

Philosopher G. Anthony Bruno on behalf of Albert Camus (“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”)

SARAH BAKEWELL had a wandering childhood in Europe, Australia and England. After studying at the University of Essex, she was a curator of early printed books at Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer. Her book on Michel de Montaigne How to Live won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bakewell lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.

EMILY H. KEELER is a literary critic, editor, and journalist. She co-founded Little Brother Magazine in 2012 and was Books Editor at The National Post. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quill & Quire, and Hazlitt. She is a Senior Editor at The Walrus.

G. ANTHONY BRUNO IS faculty lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he teaches continental philosophy, early modern philosophy, existentialism and biomedical ethics. He was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn. He completed his PhD in 2013 in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works on issues in metaphysics and epistemology in Kant, German idealism and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy.