Globalization has touched almost every aspect of daily life; it makes sense, then, that literature also has a new role in this expansive new world. In his brief and thought-provoking discussion of the novel in the era of globalization, Kirsch, a poet, critic, and author of Why Trilling Matters, considers the work of some of today’s most innovative and authoritative writers, including Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolaño, and Margaret Atwood. The narrative of the global age, Kirsch, suggests, depends less on traditional genre than on the writer’s way of imagining the world. Kirsch will be in conversation with Heba F. El-Shazli, assistant professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and adjunct faculty at Georgetown University’s Master’s Degree Program at the Center for Democracy and Civil Society.