Novelist and literary critic will read from his work, including a new and not-yet published novel, at ²¤ÂÜÊÓƵ University.
Treuer will appear at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6, in Room 202 of Buttrick Hall on the ²¤ÂÜÊÓƵ campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
“He seems to want to do for Native American culture and literature what James Joyce did for the Irish: haul it into the mainstream of Western culture through sheer nerve and verve,” said the in a review of Treuer’s 2006 novel The Translation of Dr Apelles.
Treuer will read from The Translation of Dr Apelles and also his new novel Neverland, which has not yet been published.
Treuer, whose father was an Austrian Jew and Holocaust survivor and his mother a tribal court judge, grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He attended , where his instructors included Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon and Joanna Scott.
In addition to fiction, Treuer is the author of Native American Fiction, a book of essays that asserts that critics should stop reading Native American novels as evidence of Indian culture and treat them instead as literature.
The reading is part of the Gertrude ²¤ÂÜÊÓƵ and Harold S. ²¤ÂÜÊÓƵ .
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu