|
LOA Live
Join Ian Frazier, Roz Chast, Roy Blount, Jr., and more on May 17
Charles Portis’s novels and stories, with their deadpan style, unforgettable characters, and rollicking plots of pursuit, obsession, absurdity, and intrigue, have a passionate following among readers and fellow writers. “His fiction,” Roy Blount, Jr., has said, “is the funniest I know.” To celebrate publication of LOA’s long-awaited collected edition of the author of True Grit, join Blount, Roz Chast, Ian Frazier, Mary Roach, Paul Theroux, Ed Park, Calvin
Trillin, and other special guests for an all-star tribute to the novelist whose work has been called “one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature.”
Wednesday, May 17
6:00–7:00 PM ET
This online event is free, but you must preregister to attend.
This definitive Library of America collection brings together all of Charles Portis’s novels, including the classic Western True Grit and the hilarious Central American travel saga The Dog of the South, a book that Roy Blount, Jr., said “no one should die without having read.”
“It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too,” writes Casey Cep in her New Yorker review of the volume. “Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country.”
A generous gathering of nonfiction rounds out the edition, showing Portis’s descriptive power as a reporter—particularly in his coverage of the civil rights movement—as well as his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape in “The Forgotten River” and his skills as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection “Combinations of Jacksons.”
Please note: Because of ongoing warehouse and deliverability issues, we are unable to ship orders outside the U.S. and its territories.
Image (from top left): Ian Frazier (Larry D. Moore/Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY 4.0); Roz Chast (Larry D. Moore/Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY 4.0); Roy Blount, Jr., (Joan Griswold/royblountjr.com); Charles Portis (Courtesy of the Estate of Charles M. Portis, LLC); Mary Roach (Jen Siska/maryroach.net); Paul Theroux (Steve McCurry/paultheroux.com); Calvin Trillin (Huangavin/Wikimedia); and Ed Park (annulla/Wikimedia).
|
