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Author's Forum Presents: The Book of Wonders

A Conversation with Douglas Trevor and Peter Ho Davies
Monday, December 4, 2017
5:30-7:00 PM
Gallery, room #100 Hatcher Graduate Library Map
A lonely female accountant falls for a man who seems to have stepped out of a Greek myth; a scholar uncovers a lost Shakespearean couplet and decides to quit academia; a celebrated author experiments with downloading a story from her brain and uploading it to another. In these and other stories, Douglas Trevor explores situations--both unsettling and comic--in which people lose their bearings, reinvent themselves, and resolve, sometimes haplessly, to make sense of their lives. Characters are kidnapped by teenagers; they are bitten by raccoons. Some of them go on Prozac; while others rely on bowling to persevere. Running through these nine stories is the ghostly, and at times material, presence of books themselves. What does it mean to turn to books for comfort? Or to uncover the ways in which the stories we absorb and revisit not only open up worlds but also close them off? In a variety of moods and settings, The Book of Wonders reminds us not only of the struggle to connect, but also of what the most unlikely of people may realize they share.

Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. Girls I Know won the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize. Doug’s short fiction has appeared most recently as a Ploughshares Solo, and in The Iowa Review, New Letters, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He has also had stories in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines. Doug lives in Ann Arbor, where he is the current Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and a Professor of Renaissance Literature in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of two novels, The Fortunes (winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and the Chautauqua Prize) and The Welsh Girl (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World(winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize) and Equal Love (A New York Times Notable Book).

His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian and Washington Post among others, and has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its Best of Young British Novelists.

Davies is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award.

Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University, and is currently on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Building: Hatcher Graduate Library
Website:
Event Type: Other
Tags: Books, Writing
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Institute for the Humanities, The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University Library