MARISHA PESSL
Monday, August 28 at 7:30 p.m.

Appearing as summer starts the slide into fall and the big season of books that brings is New York City-based Marisha Pessl and her extraordinary debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking). "Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce ... Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once—it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age, and identity." - Publishers Weekly. "Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink." - Jonathan Franzen.

« previous | next »