Thursday,
November 10 at 6:30 pm
Masha
Hamilton
The Distance Between Us
Lamar Herrin
House of the Deaf
Joint Reading • Discussion • Booksigning
Discussion topic: “Literature and Why it Matters in this Time of Violent (and Simplistic) Extremes”
Distance
Between Us:
As she did in her luminous and poetic debut,
Staircase of a Thousand Steps, Masha Hamilton delivers another
illuminating and perceptive look at the Middle East in The
Distance Between Us. After war correspondent Caddie Blair
loses her colleague and lover in an ambush, she is devastated
by grief and unmoored by the sudden loss of her journalistic
detachment. Operating without her normal instinct and internal
compass, Caddie becomes a member of the community, no longer
an outsider, and therefore increasingly vulnerable, and volatile,
especially in the face of her growing desire for revenge.
House
of the Deaf:
Ben Williamson has lost a daughter. While studying abroad
in Madrid, Michelle Williamson was caught in a bombing
by Basque
separatists, a bombing that killed her and several members
of the Guardia Civil at a post
in a park. For Ben, this act of violence has left only questions,
and at a moment of despair he decides to seek out the reasons
for Michelle's death. As Ben begins to
learn about the endless tensions beneath the surface of Spanish
culture, he
finds that he wants someone to answer for his loss.
Masha
Hamilton teaches fiction writing at Gotham Writers' Workshop
and is the author of the novels The Distance Between Us (Unbridled
Books) and Staircase of a Thousand Steps, (BlueHen/Penguin Putnam
Publishing Group), a selection by Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers and ABA Booksense. As a journalist, she worked for
the AP in Israel, as the Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles
Times, and she wrote a column on Moscow for U.S. newspapers, including
the Chicago Sun-Times, the Dallas Morning News and the Miami
Herald.
Lamar
Herrin is the author of four previous novels: The
Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee, The Rio Loja Ringmaster,
American Baroque, and The Lies Boys Tell. His short
stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Epoch.
Herrin is also the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts and is a professor of creative writing and contemporary
literature at Cornell University.