PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR ROBERT OLEN BUTLER TO SPEAK AT NMU

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler will be reading from his new novel, Hell, at the Women’s Federated Clubhouse, 104 W. Ridge St. Marquette, Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 7:30 pm.

Robert Olen Butler is the author of eleven novels, five story collections, and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and National Magazine Awards in 2001 and 2005, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Linda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

His uproarious new novel, Hell, is set in the underworld. Its main character, Hatcher McCord, is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He’s not the only one to suffer this fate—in fact, he’s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn’t. McCord is living with Anne Boleyn in the afterlife but their happiness is, of course, constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). Copies of Hell will be available for purchase at the reading from Snowbound Books.

This event, sponsored by the Department of English and Passages North, is free and open to the public.  For more information contact Rebecca Johns, director of the Visiting Writers’ Program, at 227-1795.