EMMA DONOGHUE &
HARI KUNZRU
Monday
November 12, 2012
7:30 pm (doors open at 6:45 pm)
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
800 Bagby
Directions & Parking
General admission tickets: $5, on sale BUY HERE! Learn more about tickets here.
Reading followed by an on-stage interview, book sale and signing. To submit questions for the authors click here.
Pre-order books by the authors through Brazos Bookstore for pickup at the event by clicking here. Books will be pre-signed whenever possible.
EMMA DONOGHUE, born in Dublin, writes fiction, literary history, biography, stage and radio plays, and fairytales. National Book Award winner Colum McCann says that "Emma Donoghue is one of the great literary ventriloquists of our time. Her imagination is kaleidoscopic. . . . In her hands the centuries dissolve, and then they crystallize back again into powerful words on the page." She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Slammerkin, Life Mask) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood). Her international bestseller Room sold more than one million copies, was a New York Times Best Book of 2010, and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Room, written from the perspective of a five-year-old narrator who is held captive with his mother, was described by The New Yorker as “an astounding, terrifying novel….It’s a testament to Donoghue’s imagination and empathy that she is able to fashion radiance from such horror.” The Washington Post called it “one of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year…. fantastically evocative….You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded.” Michael Cunningham wrote, “Room is that rarest of entities, an entirely original work of art.” Donoghue will read from her new story collection Astray, coming out in October. Using rich historical details, the stories, all centered around wayward characters, take readers from Puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana, and the Yukon frontier.
HARI KUNZRU, a British writer of Kashmiri descent, is “wise beyond his years, [a] novelist in superb command of his craft” (The Washington Post). He has published four novels and a book of short stories, including Transmission and My Revolutions, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His first novel The Impressionist received many honors, including the Somerset Maugham Award, and Granta named him one of 20 best young British novelists. His most recent novel Gods Without Men is composed of a network of narratives that skip through time, anchored by a rock formation in southern California called the Pinnacles and the central story of a family whose autistic child disappears in the desert. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas (to which Kunzru’s work has been compared), calls Gods Without Men “a beautifully written echo chamber of a novel,” and Douglas Coupland in The New York Times Book Review describes it as “gorgeous and wise.” In starred reviews, Publishers Weekly calls it a “pitch-perfect masterwork” and Kirkus Reviews “an astonishing tour de force.”
LINKS:
Visit Emma Donoghue's personal website
A video interview with Emma Donoghue on iVillage
An interactive webpage for Emma Donoghue's Room
A review of Room in The New York Times
Visit Hari Kunzru's personal website
A review of Gods Without Men in The New York Times
An essay on postmodernism by Hari Kunzru in The Guardian
A review of Gods Without Men in The New Yorker
