Presentation and Book Launch / “The Threshold and the Ledger,” with Tom McCarthy, Jeff Dolven, Lisabeth During, and Heidi Julavits

Date: Saturday, 18 October 2025, 6:30–8:30 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Please join us for the inaugural summit of the Gowanus School of Threshold Theory, convened to mark the publication of Tom McCarthy’s new book The Threshold and the Ledger.

A sustained reading of a single poem, “Salt and Bread,” by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, McCarthy’s book focuses on two of the poem’s central terms—the threshold and ledger—to pose a series of questions: Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary-state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded?

Extrapolating on the poem’s theme from short film clips of their choosing, the named presenters—plus a mystery guest—will each contribute a prolegomenon toward a General Theory of the Threshold.

A Q&A will follow.

About the Participants
Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet Books, 2017), as well as two books of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (Dispersed Holdings, 2022). He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet.

Lisabeth During is an associate professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and author of The Chastity Plot (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Heidi Julavits is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction and writes for magazines on topics such as land art, avalanches, and volcanic eruptions. She’s a co-founder of The Believer magazine and a professor at Columbia University.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Granta, 2006) and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (New York Review Books, 2017). His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation (Knopf), was published in 2021. Since 2022, he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen and lives in Berlin.