Brazos Bookstore and Inprint Present an Evening with Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist Orhan Pamuk on Nov. 16
Brazos Bookstore and Inprint present Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk to give a reading and signing in Houston on Monday, November 16 at 7 pm at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets include a signed copy of Pamuk's new book, The Museum of Innocence, and are available at Brazos Bookstore.
Houston, Texas (Vocus/PRWEB ) November 5, 2009 -- Brazos Bookstore and Inprint present an evening with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who has made his native Istanbul into one of the great cities of the imagination. Pamuk reads Monday, November 16, 7 pm (doors open at 6:15) at Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby. Tickets are $30 general admission, available online at Brazos Bookstore. Each ticket includes a pre-signed first edition copy of Pamuk’s latest book, The Museum of Innocence (presented to attendees at the door on the evening of the reading). For more information, visit brazosbookstore.com or call 713-523-0701.
In 2006, announcing the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Secretary of the Swedish Academy said of Pamuk, “You have made your native city an indispensable literary territory, equal to Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin or Proust's Paris – a place where readers from all corners of the world can live another life, just as credible as their own.” Pamuk’s new novel, The Museum of Innocence, is an ambitious work that took him almost ten years to write. According to the author, the story is concerned with obsessive passion and the great question, what is love, really? Set in Istanbul from 1975 to the present day, the novel charts upper-class Kemal’s adoration of his distant (and poor) relation, the beautiful Füsun.
Like his beloved Istanbul, Pamuk is a writer who stands at a crossroads—between East and West, modernity and tradition, the individual and the nation state. Born in 1952 into a family of engineers, Pamuk was destined to become an engineer of the imagination. As an adolescent, he was interested in painting and architecture, but became a full-time writer in his early twenties. A published novelist since the 1970s, Pamuk did not receive real international recognition until the 1990s. In the last fifteen years, however, readers around the world have come to savor Pamuk’s evocation of his extraordinary native city and its particular brand of melancholy known as hüzün. Pico Iyer writes in the New York Times, “Pamuk is taking the world we thought we knew and making it fresh and alive.”
Pamuk lived in the United States for three years in the 1980s, first at the University of Iowa, and then at Columbia University, where he wrote The Black Book. His other major works include Snow and My Name is Red. Of Pamuk’s novel Snow, John Updike wrote presciently in The New Yorker, “A major work... conscience-ridden and carefully wrought, tonic in its scope, candor, and humor.... with suspense at every dimpled vortex.... Pamuk is Turkey’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize."
The reading will be followed by an onstage interview led by novelist and poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a professor in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. This event is presented by Inprint, as a special event of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, and Brazos Bookstore. The Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series receives generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation Inc. and Weatherford International, and is also supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. The Series receives in-kind support from the Alley Theatre, Continental Airlines, Hines, and KUHF 88.7 FM, as well as support from the Texas Commission on the Arts and The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. Brazos Bookstore is Houston’s leading independent bookstore and since 1974 has aimed to serve the city by providing an intelligent selection of books with an emphasis on literary fiction and local interests.
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