Join us for an exciting joint event featuring Tulane University professors/authors Zachary Lazar and Peter Cooley (former Poet Laureate of Louisiana) reading and signing their great new books.
In Guggenheim Fellow and John Updike Award winner Zachary Lazar's powerful new novel, a journalist befriends an inmate at Angola Penitentiary. As he attempts to unravel the truth behind the man's supposed crime, he is also confronted with his own past, and re-examines American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
“I am stunned by the daring, meticulous, and unsentimental intelligence of this riveting book . . . Vengeance is a masterwork, the most important American book I've read this year, and the most moving and mesmerizing.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
“More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation. . . . Vengeance reminds me of what is possible through deft, imaginative, ‘real’ storytelling.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
Zachary Lazar is the author of three previous books, including the novel Sway, chosen as a Best Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, and Newsday, and the memoir Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2009. Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and, most recently, the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence." He lives in New Orleans.
WORLD WITHOUT FINISHING continues Peter Cooley’s search for the “ordinary miraculous,” the subject of his books for four decades. In those liminal spaces where Cooley voyages, the otherworldly is a haunting presence, whether in a painting by Rembrandt, the voices of the dead in a Louisiana cemetery for lepers or a mayfly his imagination conjures for its single day on earth. The gods—and God—are near at hand and far from us in the mysterious riddling of Cooley’s new poems.
“Peter Cooley knows the notes to the sacred songs. World Without Finishing reveals once again how close to their luminescence he interprets those songs in language such that his poems read like psalms from the constellations. Here we find wisdom in each cadenced utterance, in each spirited chord.”—Major Jackson
“Reverent and penitent, these poems are devotional in the best sense, celebrating the fruits of the earth while desiring also the ascetic’s hunger.”—David St. John
Peter Cooley was born and educated in the Midwest and has lived over half of his life in New Orleans, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. The former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, he received the Marble Faun Award in Poetry from the Faulkner Society and an Atlas Grant from the state of Louisiana. He has published nine previous books, eight of them from Carnegie Mellon. Married and the father of three children, he has published poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic and a number of anthologies.
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“Tense and evocative . . . Despite its powerful social critique, Vengeance is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority.” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
World Without Finishing continues Peter Cooley’s search for the “ordinary miraculous,” the subject of his books for four decades. In those liminal spaces where Cooley voyages, the otherworldly is a haunting presence, whether in a painting by Rembrandt, the voices of the dead in a Louisiana cemetery for lepers or a mayfly his imagination conjures for its single day on earth.