Events

John Banville, hailed by The Economist as “Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist,” won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea. A prodigious author, Banville has written more than twenty books, including mysteries under the pen name Benjamin Black. The Sunday Telegraph says, “With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov.” His other works include The Book of Evidence, which The New York Times Book Review calls “a disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell,” Eclipse, Shroud, The Untouchable, and many others; his Benjamin Black titles include Christine Falls and The Silver Swan. Banville will read from his eagerly anticipated new novel, The Infinities, a wholly unexpected lively, comical, and irreverent multi-generational family saga.   Abraham Verghese, an Ethopian-born South Asian physician, is the author of two highly acclaimed memoirs, My Own Country, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book, of which Kaye Gibbons says, “It supersedes any memoir I’ve ever read...a wonderful examination of what it means to be alive.” His newest work, Cutting for Stone, marks his transition from memoir to the novel, in a sprawling family epic set mostly in Ethiopia. Verghese is “something of a magician as a novelist,” writes USA Today, adding that “Cutting for Stone is an underdog and a winner. Shades of Slumdog Millionaire.” Simon Schama calls it “beautiful and deeply affecting.” Verghese is currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.   General admission tickets: $5, on sale February 8, 2010 Free rush tickets for student and senior 65+ available at the door starting at 6:45 p.m. Click here for tickets and details.