Kevin Moffett will read from his longlisted National Book Award debut novel, Only Son, and will be joined in conversation with Matthew Vollmer. Starting in early 1980s Florida with a nine-year-old boy who loses his father and traveling through time twenty-five years later to witness the boy as a man with a son of his own (and lingering questions about the father he barely knew), Only Son is, according to NPR, "[A] suburban Buddha of a book, […] composed of a series of short vignettes that are so simple, subtle and occasionally destabilizing, they almost resemble zen koans — though no koan has ever, like Only Son, also had me tearing up or giggling enough to alarm passersby." Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, also praises Only Son as "a great glorious siren song of desperation and double helixes—at once a love story and an elegy, a ballad of skate parks and snake nests, the swamp and the desert, bullies and borderlands. It’s a chronicle of imperfect attempts to the people standing right in front of us, living in our bones and marrow—and offering them the grace of seeing them differently. This book gripped me and didn’t let me go."
Kevin Moffett is the author of two short story collections, as well as The Silent History, a narrative app for mobile devices. His work has been awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.
Matthew Vollmer is the author of two short-story collections—Future Missionaries of America and Gateway to Paradise—as well as two collections of essays—inscriptions for headstones and Permanent Exhibit. He was the editor of A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which collects invocations from over 60 acclaimed and emerging authors, and served as co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in venues such as Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Tin House, Oxford American, The Sun, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and Best American Essays. Vollmer’s book-length essay All Of Us Together In The End was published by Hub City Press in 2023. He teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech.
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