Emerging Writers Series: Brian Hart
Jan 24 2010 3:00 pm
Jan 24 2010 4:30 pm
Brazos Bookstore's Emerging Writers Series opens in 2010 with Brian Hart, a young writer with Texas connections whose novel, Then Came the Evening, has been acquiring praise at a rate faster than the word "emerging" indicates. Publishers Weekly deems the book "a brilliant depiction of family"; novelist Jim Crace (Quarantine) calls it "an edgy, affecting debut"; and the acclaimed Colm Tóibín (Brooklyn) says of Hart's novel: "There is a deep feeling in the book for the gnarled landscape itself, its stark beauty, but even greater emotion surrounds the characters that inhabit it. Their efforts to live together and love each other are depicted with a grace and understanding which is rare and memorable.”
Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding on the road.
Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he’s never known. Iona, Bandy’s ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. Warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all. With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw I daho landscape, Then Came the Ev ening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex.
Brian Hart was born in Idaho in 1976. He has worked as a squirrel trapper, dishwasher, line cook, janitor, house framer, welder, commercial fisherman, camp crew for the US Forest Service, drywall hanger, roofer, and hotel desk clerk. He has lived in Colorado, Oregon, California, Montana, Alaska, and Las Vegas where he was a journeyman in the Las Vegas Carpenter’s Union. In 2008 he received an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. He has been a fellow at Yaddo and also at the MacDowell Colony. In 2005 he won the Keene Prize for Literature, the largest student-writing prize in the world. Then Came the Evening is his first novel.
Please join us for an evening with Brian Hart.
Location:
- Street:
- Brazos Bookstore
- Additional:
- 2421 Bissonnet St
- City:
- Houston ,
- Province:
- Texas
- Postal Code:
- 77005-1451
- Country:
- United States
