Literature is always on trend. Two events this week honored the written word—how old school! Or maybe the old is transitioning, re-“platforming” in the present.

At the 92^nd Street Y, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s post-World War I novel at 100 was center stage with readings by a new generation of American actors featuring Maya Hawke, Joy Sunday, Sarah Pidgeon, Dominic Sessa, Titus
Welliver, Will Harrison, Richard Schiff. The Hemingway classic illustrates the post-war ethos of emasculation, with Brett flirting with Romero, the bullfighter, the book’s one man of action–albeit with few words.

“Yours is a lost generation,” said Gertrude Stein to Hemingway, as reported in his A Moveable Feast.

The stellar evening’s Q&A featured members of Hemingway’s family, Angela Hemingway Charles, Patrick Hemingway Adams, and Brendan Hemingway among them, conversing with Thomas Beller and Jay McInerney who gamely confessed that he always wanted to be Jake Barnes, the novel’s narrator, before modifying: his eloquence, “not his impotence.”

At the Morgan Library & Museum where a stunning Rembrandt drawing exhibition was open for the evening’s attendees, Harper’s Magazine held its second annual awards ceremony honoring NPR President Katherine Maher and novelist, essayist John Edgar Wideman. The ceremony ended with remarks from Rachel Kushner. Even she had difficulty speaking over the buzzy din in the Morgan’s modern restaurant space as Harper’s covers of yore projected on a scrim overhead featured Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Zadie Smith.

Seated at a cocktail table with her friend Alexis Okeowo, a celebrated New Yorker writer and editor, Smith commented on the guests’ evening attire. Yes, a layered froufrou mini-skirt revealed lots of leg; many showed ink on bare skin. Generous to young journalists and substackers eager for her wisdom, Smith offered advice even though authors today navigate new territories in the age of A.I. and social media: just write.