Tuesday Oct 28, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.
Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.
The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”
About the Translator
About the Moderator.
Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval the essay collection Death by Landscape and a novel called A Diagnosis coming in 2026. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have been published in places like the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, the Nation, WIRED, Frieze, BOMB, Paris Review, and n+1. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Sarah Lawrence and is an editor at e-flux journal.