Fiction: Mathew Eck & Paula McClain

Feb 3 2008 - 7:00pm
Feb 3 2008 - 9:00pm

Matthew Eck enlisted in the army in 1992 and served in Somalia and Haiti. After leaving the service, he earned a BA in English Literature from Wichita State University and then an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He  lives in Kansas City, Missouri.  He reads from his novel: The Farther Shore

"Matthew Eck is a natural novelist and a war novelist by accident. His book is ghostly, lyrical and strange in the style of the young Tim O’ Brien, but with a difference: Eck's Somalia is even more bewildering than O’Brien's Vietnam and his wandering soldiers are even further from home, like Beckett characters stranded in coastal Africa. This is the first novel that I've read to capture today's postmodern political warfare, waged in inexplicable locales for even more inexplicable reasons and with rules of engagement that make no sense.”—Walter Kirn,

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Paula McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. Since then, she has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation, and a recipient of fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of two books of poetry, Less of Her and Stumble, Gorgeous, and a memoir, Like Family : Growing Up In Other People's Houses (Little, Brown 2003). She teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College, and at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland. Her new novel is A Ticket to Ride (Ecco, 2008).
 
"In this beautifully written book about the bad decisions we make on the way to growing up, Paula McLain creates a teenage heroine whose struggle to define herself is both heartbreaking and redemptive. A Ticket to Ride is deeply felt and engrossing--an immense pleasure to read."  --Leah Stewart, author of The Myth of You and Me