Four Novels: A Reading

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Book of My Lives, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and three books of short stories, including Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. An aspiring screenwriter ends up on a seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence, in Hemon's novel The Making of Zombie Wars (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In its starred review, Booklist writes, “Zestfully funny in his skewering of hypocrisy and pretension and warmly insightful regarding family, friendship, lust, and love, Hemon astutely ties it all together.”

CANCELLED

T. Geronimo Johnson received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his M.A. in Language, Literacy, and Culture from UC Berkeley. He has taught writing and held fellowships—including a Stegner Fellowship and an Iowa Arts Fellowship—at ASU, Iowa, Berkeley, Western Michigan University and Stanford. He is also a curriculum designer for Bay Area non-profits and director of the UC Berkeley Summer Creative Writing Program. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New American Voices, the Indiana Review, the LA Review, and Illuminations, among others. His first novel Hold it ‘Til it Hurts was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. He is currently a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Johnson’s latest novel, Welcome to Braggsville (William Morrow), long-listed for a National Book Award in fiction, is a dark and socially provocative southern-fried comedy about four liberal UC Berkeley students who stage a mock lynching during a Civil War reenactment. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences. The Washington Post calls it, “The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year.” NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Sherman Alexie has called Jonathan Evison "the most honest white man alive." His debut novel, All About Lulu won critical acclaim, including the Washington State Book Award, and landed on many year-end “Best of” lists.  In his latest novel, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (Algonquin Books), a seventy-eight-year-old widow sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise only to discover that she’s been living the past sixty years of her life under entirely false pretenses.