March 16, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass -- Poet and novelist Rikki Ducornet will read from her forthcoming novel, Gazelle, at 5 p.m. on Monday, April 14, in the Babbott Room of the Octagon at Amherst College. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College English Department, the Creative Writing Center and the F. Scott Turow Fund, is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.
Ducornet's writing alludes to influences as various as the Kabala, Kafka, the wonder cabinets of Peter the Great, Lewis Carroll and Angela Carter; of each new book, her fans might expect nothing except a liberated imagination. The London Times, for example, called her 1995 novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, "both incoherent and astonishing, a complex fantasia redolent of Swift and Borges, but stranger than both." And Robert Chatain observed, in The Chicago Tribune, "It's startling and refreshing to encounter a writer whose work insists so relentlessly upon the magic of making tales." Ducornet's other novels include The Stain (1984), The Fountains of Neptune (1997), The Jade Cabinet (1997) and Entering Fire (1999).
The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. See the Center's Website, www.amherst.edu/~cwc, for more information.
###