Author Patrick Ryan — whose debut novel, Send Me, was published earlier this year — will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, for The Writing Program Reading Series.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. For more information, call 935-7130.
“Patrick Ryan’s Send Me is either a closely connected collection of stories or a novel of semi-discrete episodes, revolving around the two-generation dissolution of a never-well-banded family,” said Marshall Klimasewiski, writer-in-residence in The Writing Program.
“The book’s form matches and shapes the material beautifully, and like Anderson or Faulkner before him, Ryan is expert at using the gaps between chapters/stories and the triangulation of the different characters’ perspectives to create a whole narrative that feels much more sweeping and emotionally intricate than 310 pages should allow. It’s a terrific debut.”
Ryan’s short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, One Story, Ontario Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nebraska Review and other journals.
The story “Getting Heavy With Fate” received the 2005 Smart Family Foundation Award for Fiction. Ryan also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.