September 2, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.- Author Sabina Murray, whose most recent book, The Caprices, won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, will read from her work on Monday, Sept. 22 at 8 p.m. at Amherst Books, 8 Main Street in Amherst (413/256-1547). The event, co-sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
The Caprices, a collection of short stories based on the Pacific Campaign, "turns the bombed-out and broken setting of World War II into a theater for humankind, where both weakness and grace are writ at large," wrote The Washington Post. "Think of war as the hostile pebble thrown into the peaceful pond," Murray said in an interview. "I'm writing about the ripples." She succeeds brilliantly, according to novelist Claire Messud, who praised the book's "fierce intensity" in The New York Times Book Review: "Dark and unflinching, these brimming, sometimes jagged stories endure powerfully in the reader's memory as they reach across continents and time with precision and-in the heart of darkness-a measure of grace."
Raised in Australia and the Philippines, Murray is a former Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of the novel, Slow Burn, and the screenplay for Beautiful Country, a film to be released in 2004. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review and other magazines.
The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. See the center's website at www.amherst.edu/~cwc for more information.
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