Archive - January 19, 2010

Reviewer Tony D’Souza’s first novel, Whiteman, received the Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Prize for Fiction, and is loosely based on his Peace Corps service in an Ivory Coast headed for civil war. His second novel, The Konkans, is loosely based on his mother’s Peace Corps service in India from 1969 to 1970 where she met and married his father. Tony has contributed fiction and essays to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Outside, Granta, McSweeney’s, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Fantasy, and is the recipient of two NEA Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and gold and silver medals from the Florida Book Awards. He lives in Sarasota, FL, with his wife Jessyka and two young children, Gwen, 15 months, and Rohan, 5 months. The D’Souzas will be spending the next few months traveling in India. Here, Tony reviews Vello Vikerkaar’s Inherit the Family: Marrying Into Eastern Europe. The author . . .

Visiting author Dr. P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) will start a monthlong lecture series on four classic American novels at 6pm this evening at the American Memorial Park Theater. The series will kick off with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Participants will spend three 90-minute sessions exploring this novel before moving on to the next title. Other books to be discussed over the course of the program include The Old Man and the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, and The Things They Carried. Kluge will examine these books on three levels-what they say, how they say it, and how their themes relate to contemporary life in the Commonwealth. Ample time will be reserved for questions and answers. The program is sponsored by the NMI Council for the Humanities under a “We the People” grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kluge is . . .