Award-winning author Lance Richardson visits Elk River Books, 122 S. 2nd St., on Thursday, Nov. 13, to discuss his book, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, the first biog-raphy of this prolific novelist, naturalist, human rights advocate and Zen rōshi. Richardson will be joined by Matthiessen’s close friend, author and grizzly bear advocate, Doug Peacock. The free event begins at 7 pm and will be followed by a book signing.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will live-stream at YouTube.com/ElkRiverBooks.
Matthiessen was a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, for Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard. In his youth, he co-founded The Paris Review and worked undercover for the CIA. Later, he pur-sued such perilous expeditions as floating through the Amazon, living with a New Guinea tribe and swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. “Underlying all Matthiessen’s disparate pur-suits was the same existential search—to find a cure for ‘deep restlessness.’”
“In True Nature, Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Mat-thiessen to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen’s life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation.”
Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?, notes, “True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidi-ty, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century.”
Richardson’s first book, House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fel-lowships, including a year-long residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Schol-ars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.
You may also like the following events from Elk River Books:
Also check out other
Arts events in Livingston,
Literary Art events in Livingston,
Sports events in Livingston.
