Congratulations to Family Action Network (FAN) on their 40^th anniversary season!

We are pleased to collaborate with FAN as they welcome Kieran Setiya, Ph.D., author of the new book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Setiya will be interviewed by Jim Holt. This virtual event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Click HERE to reserve your spot!

This event will be recorded and available later on the FAN website and YouTube channel.

AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Life is Hard from The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Setiya that will start immediately after the webinar. The link to register for the AFTER-HOURS program will appear in red font at the top of an email from The Book Stall. Look for it right after your receipt arrives!

About the Book: There is no cure for the human condition: life is hard. But Kieran Setiya, Ph.D. believes philosophy can help. He offers us a map for navigating rough terrain, from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world. In his profound and personal book Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, Setiya draws on ancient and modern philosophy as well as fiction, history, memoir, film, comedy, social science, and stories from Setiya’s own experience. Life Is Hard is a book for this moment—a work of solace and compassion.

Warm, accessible, and good-humored, Life is Hard is about making the best of a bad lot. It offers guidance for coping with pain and making new friends, for grieving the lost and failing with grace, for confronting injustice and searching for meaning in life. Countering pop psychologists and online influencers who admonish us to “find our bliss” and “live our best lives,” Setiya acknowledges that the best is often out of reach. Instead, he asks how we can weather life’s adversities, finding hope and living well when life is hard.

About the Author: Kieran Setiya, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, which was selected as a Best Book of 2022 by The Economist and The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the LA Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, Aeon, and The Yale Review.

About the Interviewer: Jim Holt is the author of the 2012 book Why Does the World Exist?, an international best-seller that has been translated into twenty languages. He is also the author of When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought (2018) and Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes (2008). A longtime contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, he is currently at work on Living: Theory and Practice, which will be published by Farrar Straus Giroux in the United States and by Viking in the UK.