When: Friday, 10 February 2012, 6:30–8:30 pm

Where: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)

How: Free; no RSVP necessary

More importantly: “Beer for this event has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.”

Why: Please join the London-based White Review for an evening of Chauvin, chauvinism, and their many inheritances. Featuring Ned Beauman on carbon chauvinism and humility in the universe; Joshua Cohen on the absolute best Chauvin biography never written; Jeremy M. Davies on whether any form of literature, however ambiguous, indeterminate, playful, or condemnatory, can escape being a chauvinist for something; and Diego Trelles Paz on Chauvin and national progress in Latin America.

More Who:

Joshua Cohen is the author of Witz (Dalkey Archive Press). Four New Messages is forthcoming this summer from Graywolf Press.

Ned Beauman was born in London and now lives in New York. His novel Boxer, Beetle won the 2011 UK Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the 2012 Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction.

Jeremy M. Davies is the author of Rose Alley (Counterpath Press). He is senior editor at Dalkey Archive Press.

Diego Trelles Paz, born in Lima, is the author of Hudson el redentor (Hudson the redeemer) and the novel El círculo de los escritores asesinos (The circle of assassin writers). His anthology The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction brings together thirty-three young Latin American writers. Open Letter Books will release it this summer in the US. He is currently a professor of Latin American literature at Binghamton University.

Nicolas Chauvin: “received seventeen wounds, all from the front, had three fingers amputated, suffered a shoulder fracture and a horridly disfiguring facial wound, and was honored with a saber, a red ribbon, and a pension of two hundred francs—such is the grizzled old veteran who lies in the sun in his native soil still awaiting a wooden cross to mark his grave.” So Jacques Arago described the Napoleonic hero Nicolas Chauvin in the entry for chauvinisme in his 1845 Dictionnaire de la conversation. The many subsequent retellings of the story of Chauvin do little more than add to Arago’s likely (which is to say unlikely) fiction. Out of the muddle of all Chauvin’s possible lives is his eponymic bequest—the curse of nation-states and romantic relationships for going on two centuries.

The White Review is a not-for-profit, London-based arts and literature quarterly. Taking its cue from the fin-de-siècle Parisian publication La Revue Blanche, each print edition of the White Review combines a unique collection of new writing, interviews, and reportage by emerging talent and established names, as well as original works of art. Presented as a collectible book, each issue is printed on luxurious cream paper with a dust jacket that unfolds as a limited edition print. The White Review’s fourth print issue is due out in March 2012.