FCCB Hosts Lively Author Series
First Congregational Church of Berkeley hosts an exciting author series in cooperation with Berkeley Arts & Letters. Melissa Mytinger, formerly of Cody’s Books, is the primary organizer for the series along with folks at several of the Bay Area’s independent bookstores.
Audio files of past events are available on this page.
Wednesday May 5, 2010
Parrot and Olivier in America
7:30 p.m. · Loper Chapel
In his 11th novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey reimagines Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to and through Jacksonian America, and the result is extraordinary. Inspired by reading Democracy in America and finding Tocqueville worrying about the same things Carey himself worried about’particularly how you can have a real culture in a capitalist democratic society—Parrot and Olivier is part re-imagination of history, part love letter from Carey to his adopted country, and wholly a brilliant new novel from the man novelist Edmund White calls &ldqou;one of the best writers in English.”
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. His first work, The Fat Man in History— short story collection—was published in 1974. He went on to write twenty other published works, including War Crimes, Illywhacker, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, My Life as a Fake, Wrong About Japan, and His Illegal Self. Carey received the Man Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. Oscar and Lucinda was made into a major motion picture starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in 1997. In 1990, Carey moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector and began teaching at NYU. He would go on to teach at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. He joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing in 1993, where he continues to teach.
This is Peter Carey's only Bay Area appearance.