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2020/2021 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series

Inprint Aminatta Forna & Samanta Schweblin Reading

Monday March 26, 2018 7:30 pm

Where

Stude Concert Hall, Rice University, Entrance #18 & #20
6100 Main St.
Houston, TX 77005 United States
+ Google Map

For a Stude Concert Hall map and parking instructions click here


Presentation to recipient of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing at Rice University preceding the reading. 


Following the reading, Aminatta Forna and Samanta Schweblin will be interviewed on-stage by Daniel Peña, a Pushcart Prize winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, whose debut novel BANG was just published by Arte Público Press.


Download a flier about the reading here.


AMINATTA FORNA “is a born storyteller,” writes The Boston Globe. Her novels include The Hired Man, named a best book of the year by NPR and the San Francisco ChronicleThe Memory of Love, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Best Book Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award; and Ancestor Stones, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and named a New York Times Editor’s Choice book. Her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water tells the story of going back to Sierra Leone to investigate the execution of her dissident father. She received the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and was a finalist for the 2016 Neustadt Prize. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. She will be reading from her novel Happiness, coming out in March 2018. Set in modern day London, a chance encounter and a tale of love, loss, cruelty, and kindness raise questions about the meaning of happiness.


“SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN is one of the most promising voices in modern literature,” according to Mario Vargas Llosa. Fever Dream, her first novel and the first of her books to be translated into English from Spanish, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Kirkus, in a starred review, calls it “a taut, exquisite page-turner…. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future.” The New Yorker says “the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.” She is also the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and was named to Granta’s list of best writers in Spanish under 35. Her story collection Pájaros en la Boca (Mouthful of Birds), for which she received the Casa de las Américas Prize, will come out in English in 2018. Born in Argentina, she now lives in Germany.


Reading followed by a book sale and signing.

To order books by Aminatta Forna & Samanta Schweblin at a discount click here.

To submit questions for Aminatta Forna & Samanta Schweblin click here.

To learn more about the 2017/2018 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Series click here


LINKS:


“Aminatta Forna: We must take back our stories and reverse the gaze,” in The Guardian, February 17, 2017. An extract from a keynote speech given by Aminatta Forna to the African Studies Association.


“Aminatta Forna: a life in writing,” The Guardian, May 3, 2013.


“Between Pain and Peace,” by Maaza Mengiste, in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 9, 2011. A review of The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna.


“This Week in Fiction: Samanta Schweblin on an Adult Man’s Infantilization,” an interview with Deborah Treisman in The New Yorker, May 22, 2017.


“Argentian star Samanta Schweblin’s destabilizing English debut, Fever Dream,” a book review by Ellie Robins, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2017.


“The Sick Thrill of Fever Dream,” by Jia Tolentino, in The New Yorker, January 4, 2017. A review of Fever Dream.

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