Writers At Work: Deb Olin Unferth

Author: Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York. Her new novel is Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War.

Event: Deb Olin Unferth will discuss her career, her works, and answer audience questions. This event is part of the Writers At Work speaker series organized by Kansas City novelist Whitney Terrell and sponsored by The Kansas City Public Library, the Philosophy Department at the University Of Missouri - Kansas City and the Writers at Work Round Table.

Time/Location: This event is Wednesday, March 2, 6:30 p.m. at Kansas City Public Library, Central Branch, Helzberg Auditorium, 14 W. 10th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64105.

Admission: Complimentary and open to the public. Reservations requested, please call the Kansas City Public Library at (816) 701-3407.

A limited number of preautographed copies of Unferth's books will be available for purchase at this event from Rainy Day Books.

Book List

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Hardcover)

By Deb Olin Unferth

$24.00

ISBN-13: 9780805093230
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Henry Holt and Co., 2/2011

Other Editions of this Title

Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas. Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.

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