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2021/2022 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series

Inprint Hernan Diaz and Alejandro Zambra Reading

Monday May 9, 2022 7:30 pm

Where

Brockman Hall for Opera, Rice University
Entrance #18 off Rice Boulevard
Houston, TX 77005
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This in-person reading will take place at the Brockman Hall for Opera at Rice University, and will be available to season subscribers for viewing on the Inprint website.

 

EVENT DETAILS: Hernan Diaz and Alejandro Zambra will give a brief readings from their new novels Trust and Chilean Poet, followed by an on-stage conversation with Mark Haber, Bookseller at Brazos Bookstore, and a book sale and signing.

Free parking will be available in West Lot #2, which can be accessed via Rice Boulevard, Entrance #18. For a map with the parking location, click here.

Born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, HERNAN DIAZ is a celebrated fiction writer whose debut novel In the Distance was called “an original Western” that is “bound to live on as a classic” (The New York Times). An instant success, In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of a Whiting Award and the Saroyan International Prize for “a gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition” (Pulitzer Prize finalist citation). “A page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness, and home,” says The Guardian, “One of the many delights of In the Distance is the way the writing oscillates between the austere and the lyrical, the realistic and the dream-like.” Diaz is also the author of the nonfiction book Borges, between History and Eternity and edits the Spanish academic journal Revista Hispánica Moderna. He has published essays and short stories in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Cabinet, Kenyon Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Diaz will read from and talk about his new novel Trust, a story of wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, and truth and perception in 1920s New York City. Chronicling the controversial marriage of a Wall Street tycoon and the daughter of a penniless aristocrat, Trust explores how power and money can manipulate facts and reality. Diaz, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, is the Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University.

ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA – Chilean novelist, short story writer, and poet – is “the defining light of today’s Latin American literature” (John Wray). His debut novel Bonsai was the winner of the Chilean Critics Award and the film adaptation was presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Also the author of the novels The Private Life of Trees and Ways of Going Home, Zambra was named one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” and was included on the distinguished Bogotá39 list. He is also well known for his story collection My Documents, which was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and “conveys with striking honesty what it’s like to be Chilean today” (Publishers Weekly). Zambra’s Multiple Choice extends this reflection in the form of a standardized test, chronicling his childhood under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. About Multiple Choice, Valeria Luiselli writes, “When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head. His prose is as compact as a grain of gunpowder, but its allusions and ramifications branch out and illuminate even the most remote corners of our minds.” His essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Zambra joins us to read from and talk about his new novel Chilean Poet, translated by Megan McDowell. Said to be the most substantial work of his career, Chilean Poet is a moving story about fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and the many forms of family. The reception has been enthusiastic – El País calls it “exemplary, humorous, and moving”; and in Letras Libres, Rodrigo Fresán sees it as “the Great Chilean Novel about the poetry of his generation.” Will Corral in World Literature Today describes it as “a charming, very rare, and disconcerting tribute to the poet’s vocation…. one of the two masterpieces of this century by his selected cohort, and Zambra is just getting started.” He lives in Mexico City.

MARK HABER is the operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway award for debut novel. His second book, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss will be released in May 2022.