On Tuesday, October 15, 7:00 p.m., the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County will host Kenyon Review editor and acclaimed short story writer David Lynn, who will lead the KnoxReads book discussion of T.C. Boyle’s “The Relive Box.”
Knox Reads! is a community-reading event celebrating the work of one chosen author each fall. T.C. Boyle, recipient of the 2019 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, will visit Gambier on November 8th, 2019 to give the keynote address at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.
“The Relive Box” is an extraordinary collection of short stories–Boyle is by turns surreal, hilarious, and brilliant. The New York Times review states that “Boyle is a great storyteller. He writes with the fluidity and grace of a master. His stories rock and move. People turn into five-foot roosters, they nearly drown in freezing floods, they board planes bound for Europe to meet nonexistent bankers. One gets the impression that Boyle simply glances around and sees stories everywhere his eyes alight. A guy scraping the grease off a grill in a burrito shop becomes a hilarious Barthelme-worthy moral tale about excess, complete with meta-winks and aliens, true aliens, with their lizard skin, razor teeth and eyeballs like ashtrays.”
Boyle’s characters struggle– often hilariously– with complex, moral questions and it is a delight to watch as these stories unfold.
Boyle is the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, including, most recently, “Outside Looking In.” He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth-Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English. His work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy.
He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997).
Boyle currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
Lynn has been the editor of the Kenyon Review, an international journal of literature, culture and the arts, since 1994. As an author, he received a 2016 O. Henry Award for “Divergence.” His latest collection, “Children of God: New & Selected Stories,” has been published this year by Braddock Avenue Books.
Lynn is also the author of the novel “Wrestling with Gabriel,” an earlier collection of stories, “Fortune Telling,” and “The Hero’s Tale: Narrators in the Early Modern Novel,” a critical study. His stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals in America, England, India, and Australia. Other awards include the Glimmer Train Short Story Prize 2015, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award Finalist, and the Ohioana Library Association Award for Editorial Excellence.
Lynn lives in Gambier, Ohio with his wife, Wendy Singer, a distinguished historian of India. He is also a Professor of English at Kenyon College.
Copies of the book are available at any library location. Refreshments will be served.
For more information call the main library at 740-392-2665, visit www.knox.net or email communityrelations@knox.com.