Brock Clarke, The Price of a Haircut

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When: Tuesday, April 10, 7:00pm

Where: The Odyssey Bookshop

In conversation with Jeff Parker.

This new collection of stories is bursting with absurdist plot twists and laced with trenchant wit. The title story delivers a cringingly biting dissection of racial attitudes in contemporary America, and you’ll also find subjects covered like PTSD, the fate of child actors, and, most especially, marital discord in stories like “Considering Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife” and “The Misunderstandings.”

It’s a distinctly Clarkean world, in which readers find themselves reflected back with the distortion of funhouse mirrors—and swept up on a wild ride of heart-wrenching insight and self-discovery.

Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently a collection of short stories, The Price of the Haircut. His novels include The Happiest People in the World, Exley (which was a Kirkus Book of the Year, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and a longlist finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (which was a national bestseller, and American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, a #1 Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices in Fiction selection, and a New York Times Book ReviewEditor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.

Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Clarke lives in Portland, Maine and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in The University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program.

Jeff Parker has written several books including the nonfiction book Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the

Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and many others. With Pasha Malla, he co-“wrote” the collection of found sports poetry Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion (Featherproof) and with Annie Liontas he edited A Manner of Being(University of Massachusetts Press), a book of essays by writers on their mentors. With Mikhail Iossel he edited two collections of writing by contemporary Russian writers, Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House) and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive). With Alina Ryabovolova and Mariya Gusev he translated the novel Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin from the Russian. He is the Director and co-founder of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Event date:

Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - 7:00pm

Event address:

Odyssey Bookshop

9 College st.

South Hadley, MA 01075