Novelist Joseph McElroy will give
a reading at Middlebury on October 5
MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—Joseph McElroy, a writer regularly ranked beside Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, John Barth and William Gaddis, will give a reading Thursday, October 5, at 4:30 p.m. in the Grand Salon of the Château on the Middlebury College campus.
The author of the novels Women and Men, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, The Letter Left to Me and, most recently, The Actress in the House, McElroy is widely considered one of the most original and interesting writers in the United States. Of McElroy's Women and Men the Washington Post Book World said, "Once in a while there is published a book so rich in knowledge, imagination, and feeling that the reader is ravished and humbled, changed, made thankful. Joseph McElroy's mammoth Women and Men is that kind of book, the most important novel to appear in America since Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow." Wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "No serious reader will want to miss Women and Men. By such dreams the world might be saved."
The breadth of McElroy's subject matter is great—from mathematics, neurobiology and physics to the intricacies of contemporary urban life. McElroy is perhaps alone among the postmodernists in writing from what one critic calls a "position of cultural and historical optimism." Says another: "The humanitarian impulse in McElroy's prose does battle with the real world we live in—its technology, its political lies, its serpentine economic realities—and survives."
Joseph McElroy taught for many years at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, the University of Paris and the City University of New York, among others. He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ingram Merrill foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts and has received the award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The reading is free and open to the public.