
BABEL: Anthony Doerr
Join Just Buffalo Literary Center for an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author Anthony Doerr.

All the Light We Cannot See
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW‘S TOP TEN BOOK
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
Since the publication of his first stories, Doerr has been lauded for his lyricism, his precise attention to the physical world, and his gift for metaphor.
His latest novel is the instant New York Times bestselling Cloud Cuckoo Land, a soaring novel about the power of story and a hauntingly beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart. A “wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates” (The New York Times Book Review), it was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Doerr is also the author of the runaway bestseller All The Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal and a finalist for the National Book Award. The book spent more than 200 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 5.7 million copies in North America plus another 9.5 million copies worldwide. An eagerly anticipated limited series adaptation is forthcoming from Netflix.
His other books include the novel About Grace, the short story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Among his many honors Doerr has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, five O. Henry Prizes, the Story Prize (considered the most prestigious prize in the US for a collection of short stories), and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award (the largest prize in the world for a single short story). Doerr lectures all over the country on originality, the importance of failure, and the role of wonder in contemporary life.

Also by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks
A New York Times Notable Book
A National Book Award Finalist
Named a “Best Book of the Year” by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more
Tickets
Individual BABEL event tickets include a ticket for in-person attendance at Kleinhans Music Hall, as well as a virtual link to view from home via Livestream. All tickets will be issued electronically for the 2022–2023 season, though you may opt to have a paper ticket mailed to you in as well. (NOTE: Any paper tickets sold on or after March 24, will be held at the will call table inside the lobby the night of the event.)
- General Admission: $40 each
- General Admission with Library Card: $35 each (have your BECPL card ready!)
- VIP Patron: $100 each (includes catered pre-event reception attended by the featured author and preferred seating)
- Student: $10 each (must present a valid Student ID at events)
NOTE: Currently, proof of COVID-19 vaccination is not required for entry to BABEL events. We will continue to monitor health & safety recommendations and communicate any changes or updates to ticketholders as necessary. Please note that we are unable to provide refunds for tickets.
Featured Artist
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Anthony DoerrPulitzer Prize Winner, Bestselling Author, & Novelist
Since the publication of his first story collection, The Shell Collector, in 2002, Anthony Doerr has been lauded for his lyricism, his precise attention to the physical world, and his gift for metaphor. The San Francisco Chronicle characterized Doerr’s literary ancestry as a combination of “Henry David Thoreau (for his pantheistic passions) and Gabriel García Márquez (for his crystal-cut prose and dreamy magic realism).”
Doerr’s novel, the runaway New York Times bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr brings his keen naturalist’s eye and his empathetic engagement with humanity’s largest questions to the parallel stories of Marie, a blind girl living in occupied France, and Werner, a German orphan whose extraordinary mechanical abilities earn him a place among the Nazi elite. The novel was on over a dozen year-end lists, including Barnes & Noble, Slate, NPR’s Fresh Air, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, Kirkus, The New York Times, The Washington Post,and The Christian Science Monitor. All the Light We Cannot See spent more than three and a half years on The New York Times bestseller list and an eagerly anticipated limited series adaptation is forthcoming from Netflix.
Nature is also an important theme in Doerr’s novel About Grace, the story of a scientist who flees the country after having a premonition that he causes the accidental death of his baby daughter. Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rome is a carefully observed account of the year he spent as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, accompanied by his wife and infant twin sons. His second story collection, Memory Wall, features characters from all over the world grappling with issues of preservation and extinction, permanence and evanescence.
“For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time,” Doerr said when discussing Memory Wall. “And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I’m lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get to experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth. So, in a lot of ways, my fiction is about trying to pay homage to the grandeur of the scales of time in the natural world. And I feel like memory is a part of that. Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time.”
Up next is Cloud Cuckoo Land, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. In a story spanning the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, a public library in modern-day Idaho, and a spaceship bound for a distant exoplanet decades from now, the heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are linked by an ancient text that provides solace and the most profound human connection to characters in peril. They all learn the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a better world. Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,” Cloud Cuckoo Land is “a marvel” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) about the power of story and a hauntingly beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.
Doerr’s fiction has been translated into over forty languages, and is anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He was the editor of The Best American Short Stories 2019. Doerr won the Story Prize, the most prestigious prize in the US for a collection of short stories; and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the largest prize in the world for a single short story.
Doerr lectures all over the country on originality, the importance of failure, and the role of wonder in contemporary life. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, he now lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons.

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