Context Collapse
Interview conducted by Carolyn Biltoft, associate professor of International History at Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)
In collaboration with IHEID
Born in 1983, RYAN RUBY is an American writer, currently based in Berlin. His essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. His debut novel, The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), is a gothic meditation about the power of somber ideas and seductive yet manipulative friendships.
His most recent work, Context Collapse (Seven Stories Press, 2024), is a book-length poem, which offers a sweeping history of poetry from the Bronze Age to Greece and to Renaissance Italy. With a detour to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, the reader is introduced to the creative writing departments of the American Midwest before finally reaching the complexities of Silicon Valley. Ryan Ruby will read selected passages from the poem, followed by a wider conversation about his work and a discussion on what literature and poetry still have to offer today and how they might continue to orient us in the future.