Desire and Fate

Join author David Rieff in conversation with Heyday’s publisher Steve Wasserman on Rieff’s latest book, Desire and Fate. Rieff has in recent years been one of America’s most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression. In an age dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, Rieff’s book offers a bracing antidote, serving as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, Rieff’s Desire and Fate is characterized by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking.

David Rieff is a journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and policy analyst. Beginning in the 1990s, he has reported on wars and humanitarian crises from Bosnia through Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Libera, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, to Ukraine today. He is the author of numerous books, including Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, and The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century. He has written on international migration, contemporary Latin America, and, most recently, on the uses and abuses of historical memory in his book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. He is also the author of a book about his late mother, Susan Sontag, titled Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. He lives in New York City.

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday since 2016. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. He is a past deputy editor of the op-ed page and Sunday opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor for nearly nine years of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill & Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; editorial director at Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literary agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, James Fenton, and David Thomson. He is the author of the recently published Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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