CANCELED M.F.A. Reading Series: Laura van den Berg Reads from Her Celebrated New Novel, The Third Hotel, Feb. 26
February 12, 2019
Contact: Office of Government and Public Affairs
Phone: 410.837.5739
NOTE: This event has been CANCELED. If it is rescheduled, it will be promoted again.
Laura van den Berg, author of two short story collections and two novels, most recently The Third Hotel, and a winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, will offer a reading and booksigning event on Tuesday, Feb. 26, as the University of Baltimore's M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts Reading Series kicks off its Spring 2019 series. The event, beginning at 7 p.m., will take place in the Bogomolny Room in the UB Student Center, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave. It is free and open to the public.
In the critically lauded The Third Hotel, a widow in Havana, Cuba tries to come to terms with her husband's death—and the truth about their marriage—in this surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery.
"The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds can open within worlds. There’s Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg," says Randy Rosenthal of the Washington Post.
"There’s no denying [van den Berg's] skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory.... Read [The Third Hotel] as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents," says J. Robert Lennon of The New York Times Book Review.
Van den Berg's honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Born and raised in Florida, she currently lives in Cambridge, Mass., where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.
This event is sponsored by the Hearst Visiting Scholars Fund.
Learn more about the University of Baltimore's M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.