Join us at our Brooklyn Branch for a conversation with Stefan Merrill Block, author of his debut memoir "Homeschooled."
Register:
https://attend.cuyahogalibrary.org/event/15306389
Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, "The Story of Forgetting," was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, The Ovid Prize from the Romanian Writer's Union, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. "The Story of Forgetting" was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre and The Center for Fiction. Stefan's novels have been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He lives in upstate New York.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, "Homeschooled" is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s insatiable love.
Merrill Block was 9 when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.
Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Merrill Block vanished into that unseen space and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
📕 Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.
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