Events
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Start: 7:00 pm
Co-presented by KING COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM. For the sixth year, New York City will host the PEN World Voices Festival, this year April 26 – May 2. Featured will be over 130 writers from over forty countries (see www.pen.org). We are pleased to be able to help present this Bellevue reading by two featured writers at this year's festival—part of a PEN and publisher initiative to get more of this richness around the US. Coming here will be two highly regarded fiction writers: each known in their countries and beyond, each with multiple books published (although each is traveling here on behalf of a first book published in the US), and each the recipient of major literary awards. Here from Melbourne is Australian novelist, playwright and essayist CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS. The Slap (Penguin), which received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, is the first of his four novels to be published in the US. "A controversial and daring novel, The Slap uses the iconic scene of a suburban Australian barbecue to examine identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society ... This book is sure to challenge readers and provoke debate." – Committee for the Commonwealth Prize. Dutch novelist TOMMY WIERINGA visits with his most recent novel, Joe Speedboat (Grove/Black Cat, translated by Sam Garrett). One of his two earlier novels received Holland's Halewijn Prize. Joe Speedboat is a vivid variation on the coming-of-age novel, the story of what happens to a slumbering small town when a highly charged young man arrives, seemingly out of nowhere. "A sparkling bildungsroman ... that recalls The World According to Garp." – NRC Handelsblad (Holland). This should be a very special evening. Please join us. Special thanks to PEN, Grove Atlantic, and Penguin Books for their part in making this visit possible. This evening is free-of-charge. The Bellevue Regional Library is at 1111 - 110th Avenue NE in downtown Bellevue. Call (425) 450-1765. These two authors also read at an event at Elliott Bay on April 23, hosted by SHERMAN ALEXIE.
PLEASE NOTE: We regret that SOFI OKSANEN who was scheduled to appear at this event has had to cancel due to cancelled flights out of Europe.
Start: 7:00 pm
Making this welcome Seattle return—six months after appearing at Central Library with his staggering editorial project, A New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus is here with a remarkable new book on a seminal musician of who too little has been written, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs). Greil Marcus traces the arc of Morrison's work—tying a symmetrically nice thread together when Morrison's 1968 recording, Astral Weeks, was re-released in 2009 as a live album, when it became the first Van Morrison album ever to hit the top of the charts. This is in vivid contrast to the quiet reception Astral Weeks received forty years earlier. Van Morrison is a musician, and an artist, who has largely worked outside many of the strictures of his time, and the music business. He gets due attention here in the hands of one of our most astute, perceptive musical and cultural critics. Greil Marcus' many other books include The Shape of Things to Come, The Old Weird America, Like a Rolling Stone, Mystery Train, and Lipstick Traces. It will be fun having him here in our new joint.
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