Novelist and literary critic David Treuer will read from his work, including a new and not-yet published novel, at Vanderbilt University.
Treuer will appear at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6, in Room 202 of Buttrick Hall on the Vanderbilt campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
“He seems to want to do for Native American culture and literature what James Joyce did for the Irish: haul it into the mainstream of Western culture through sheer nerve and verve,” said the Washington Post in a review of Treuer’s 2006 novel The Translation of Dr Apelles.
Treuer will read from The Translation of Dr Apelles and also his new novel Neverland, which has not yet been published.
Treuer, whose father was an Austrian Jew and Holocaust survivor and his mother a tribal court judge, grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He attended Princeton University, where his instructors included Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon and Joanna Scott.
In addition to fiction, Treuer is the author of Native American Fiction, a book of essays that asserts that critics should stop reading Native American novels as evidence of Indian culture and treat them instead as literature.
The reading is part of the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program at Vanderbilt.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu