CHESTERTOWN, MD—National Book Award
winner Tim O’Brien will read from his acclaimed works of fiction on Thursday,
October 18 at Washington College. The reading will be held at 4 p.m. in Decker
Theatre, the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, and is free and open to the public.
O’Brien’s
successful literary career spans decades; in 1979 his novel Going After Cacciato was named the
National Book Award winner in fiction, and in 1994 his In the Lake of the Woods was Time
magazine’s pick for best novel of the year.
Perhaps
his most celebrated work is The Things
They Carried (1990), a mélange of fiction and memoir on the Vietnam War. It
was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle
Award, and was the winner of one of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. In a Washington Times review of the 20th
anniversary reissue of the book, John Greenya wrote, “Many people think [The Things They Carried] is the best
work of fiction ever written about Vietnam. Some even think it is the best work
of fiction ever written about war. Both are right.”
The
American Academy of Arts and Letters presented O’Brien the Katherine Anne
Porter Award for a distinguished lifetime body of work in 2010. His short
fiction has been published in The New
Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and many editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and his
books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He currently lives,
teaches, and writes in central Texas.
The
October 18 reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series and the
Douglas Cater Society of Junior Fellows. This will be a second visit to
Washington College for O’Brien, who in 2003 was the featured speaker for Sophie
Kerr Weekend.
The
Gibson Center for the Arts is located on the main College campus, 300
Washington Avenue, Chestertown.
