Alan Isler to visit Bucknell
Posted: November 03, 2006
LEWISBURG, Pa. — Internationally acclaimed author Alan Isler will visit Bucknell University Thursday, Nov. 16. He will speak informally and read from his latest work-in-progress at 7 p.m. in Bucknell Hall.
The reading will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Copies of Isler's books will be available for purchase and signing by the author.
Isler was born in London in 1934 and came to America as a young man. He taught English literature at the City University of New York for 25 years.
Author of five novels
The author of five novels, Isler is the 1994 National Jewish Book Award winner for his first novel, The Prince of West End Avenue. Described as "a delightful and poignant comedy of manners set in the seemingly improbable locale of a Jewish old age home on Manhattan's Upper West Side" by USA Today, the work also was a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
"Mr. Isler," noted the New York Times, "displays a sharp and original wit, with touches of black humor." His narrators, wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, "are often anti-heroes in the tradition of I.B. Singer or Philip Roth: painfully self-aware, meditating on their shortcomings without the resolve to do much about it." Of his more recent work, Clerical Errors, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that "few things escape unscathed save one's faith in a good read."
Other works, many of which have been translated into German, French, Dutch, Russian, and Japanese, include Kraven Images, The Bacon Fancier: Four Tales, Clerical Errors: A Novel, and The Living Proof.
The event, which is free to the public, is sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Bucknell's religion department.
Posted Nov. 3, 2006
