Thursday, October 26, 2006

Writer/contact: Jordana Rich, 706/542-2659, jerich@uga.edu

Author Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop to read at UGA

Athens, Ga. – Author Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop will read from her work on Tuesday, Nov. 28, at 4 p.m. in room 261 of Park Hall on the University of Georgia campus.  The event is sponsored by UGA’s Creative Writing Program and is free and open to the public.

Winthrop (right) is the author of the novel Fireworks (Knopf, 2006), the narrative of Hollis Clayton, a 39-year-old writer confronting a troubled marriage and the death of a son.

Praise for this debut novel includes a New York Times book review by Heidi Julavits who says the novel is “[a]s full of hilarious missteps as it is poignantly sad. Winthrop proves to be a bitingly intelligent writer.”  Author Andrew Solomon calls Fireworks “a lovely, touching novel: intelligent, wry, at once lush and spare, perfectly modulated, with a sense of humor so dry you could scrape yourself on it….”  Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Art of Burning Bridge, says, “Hollis keeps me on the edge of my seat. He’s not like any character I’ve met: he navigates the narrowest channel between delusion and self-awareness. Elizabeth Winthrop has made him just barely able to function in a world that bewilders him and is bewildered by him, and she does this always along the boundary between the quotidian and the extraordinary, between an ordinariness of perception that any reader should be able to connect with and the most surprising nuttiness. He breaks my heart.”

Born and raised in New York City, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001.  In 2004, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, and she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship for the 2004-2005 academic year.  She lives in Savannah.

For more information and photo, visit www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70440.

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