Cynthia Haven is the author of Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the first-ever biography of the French theorist. It was named one of the top books of 2018 by The San Francisco Chronicle and reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. She writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, and has also contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, Die Welt, Zvezda, Colta, Zeszyty Literackie, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, and Civilization. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. She is currently working on "The Spirit of the Place": Czesław Miłosz in California for Heyday Books. Email: clh [at] stanford.edu
Website: http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/
by Cynthia Haven What is worse – coronavirus itself, or the social and economic catastrophe that comes with it? René Girard, one of the leading thinkers of our era, argued that the biological and social aspects of a plague are interwoven: he points out that historians still debate whether the Black Death was a cause…