April 10, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, will read from his forthcoming novel, The Catastrophist ($24.95, 276 pp., The Other Press, New York, 2006), at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 3, at Amherst Books (8 Main St., Amherst, Mass.) Sponsored by the Creative Writing Center at Amherst College, the reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
The Catastrophist is “mercilessly witty… surprising and original,” according to William H. Pritchard ’53, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. Before publication, Kirkus Reviews wrote in a starred review, “At its best, this is very nearly an American Lucky Jim: an acerbic comedy of manners with serious issues (responsibility and veracity in both marital and global relationships) at its solid core.”
A professor at Amherst since 1990, Douglas received an A.B. degree from Brown University, an M.A. from Columbia and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is the author of the acclaimed book The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2003). He is the co-author, with his Amherst College colleague Alexander George, of Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Language and Literature (2004), a collection of satires of literary criticism, the educational establishment and American culture. His current book project, Reflections on the Glass Booth, on perpetrator trials, will be published by Princeton University Press. His essays and commentary have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, The TLS and The New Republic and his fiction and humor in Tikkun, The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, among many others.
The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. For more information, please call 413/542-8200.
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