On Friday, December 10, The Brattleboro Literary Festival concludes its 20th anniversary year with a very special Literary Cocktail Hour at 5:00 pm featuring award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki.
Free and open to everyone via Zoom. Please register at http://bit.ly/LitCocktail14
Her new book, The Book of Form and Emptiness, tells the story of thirteen-year-old Benny Oh who, one year after the death of his beloved musician father, begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
The New York Times said of Ozeki's writing "Adept at magical realist fiction, Ozeki ensouls the world. Everything in her universe, down to a windowpane and a widget, has a psyche and a certain amount of agency and can communicate, if only with the few human beings granted the power to understand them. "
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), won the LA Times Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics.
A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She divides her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada and currently teaches creative writing at Smith College.
Ozeki will be in conversation with local writer and Brattleboro Literary Festival committee member, Stephanie Greene.
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