Credit: Jeff Cottenden
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PREMIER EVENT: Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Tom Barbash Thursday, April 2, 7:30 p.m. Menlo-Atherton High School Center for Performing Arts, 555 Middlefield Rd., Atherton Join us for a very special evening with Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the English-speaking world. We’ll be celebrating the release of The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade, following international bestsellers Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. We were lucky enough to receive some Advanced Reader Copies of the novel, and we have to say that we love the book, and so much of our enjoyment of it stemmed from the less you know the better. Meaning, we don't want to give anything away here. Not yet. Not until you've had a chance to read it yourself. All the publisher will say about the book is that it is "sometimes savage, often intensely moving," and is about "lost memories, love, revenge and war." We can tell you that this new novel is like nothing he has ever written. It is an adventure fable that integrates a familiar ancient British civilization tale with a fantastical element. And all of the familiar trademarks of Ishiguro are present: his expert prose, his characters' search for meaning, an exploration of the limitations of memory, and Ishiguro's incredibly vast imagination. Called an original and remarkable genius by the New York Times, Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, both of which were adapted into highly acclaimed films. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations, was ranked 32nd on the New York Times list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945," was awarded the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Prize, and received an OBE for Services to Literary and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Orde des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, Ishiguro moved to Britain at the age of 5. Tom Barbash is the author of the award-winning novel The Last Good Chance and the non-fiction book On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal, which was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. |