Christopher Sorrentino, The Fugitives
FORMER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR FICTION
1:00 pm | Chelsea Depot (125 Jackson St.) See map.
Christopher Sorrentino is the author of five books, including his latest, The Fugitives, and Trance, a National Book Award Finalist for fiction. In The Fugitives, Sorrentino’s lead character retreats from his turbulent Brooklyn life to a quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by a native Ojibwe storyteller who regularly appears at the local library – but who readers soon learn is not all he appears to be. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crim thriller– but also a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American life, a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world that’s connected in almost every way. Sorrentino’s work has been widely anthologized, and has appeared in Esquire, Fence, Granta, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and other publications. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the New School, Fairleigh Dickinson, and at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, where he is a core faculty member.
“Sorrentino’s smartly conceived story is something of a thriller, though more Richard Russo than Robert Ludlum; it’s about ruses and masks and our desire to be something other than our imperfectible selves…Thoughtful but full of action–and a pleasing entertainment, too.” — KIRKUS
