124 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
USA
Literati is thrilled to welcome back Douglas Trevor who will be sharing his new collection of stories The Book of Wonders
About The Book of Wonders:
A lonely female accountant falls for a man who seems to have stepped out of a Greek myth; a scholar uncovers a lost Shakespearean couplet and decides to quit academia; a celebrated author experiments with downloading a story from her brain and uploading it to another. In these and other stories, Douglas Trevor explores situations–both unsettling and comic–in which people lose their bearings, reinvent themselves, and resolve, sometimes haplessly, to make sense of their lives. Characters are kidnapped by teenagers; they are bitten by raccoons. Some of them go on Prozac; while others rely on bowling to persevere. Running through these nine stories is the ghostly, and at times material, presence of books themselves. What does it mean to turn to books for comfort? Or to uncover the ways in which the stories we absorb and revisit not only open up worlds but also close them off? In a variety of moods and settings, The Book of Wonders reminds us not only of the struggle to connect, but also of what the most unlikely of people may realize they share.
“The Book of Wonders is aptly titled. These are richly inventive and deftly executed stories that brim with life–unpredictable, lyric, energetic, ‘storytelling’ at its finest. Doug Trevor is intrigued by the vicissitudes of ‘character’ and his stories touch upon moral, intellectual, spiritual issues that engage us all.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“The Book of Wonders is lovely, and, yes, wondrous. With one foot in contemporary life and another in the land of myth and fable, Douglas Trevor is a unique and memorable conjurer.” – Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
Douglas Trevor is the author of the short story collection THE THIN TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE (winner of the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction), and the novel GIRLS I KNOW (winner of the 2013 Balcones Fiction Prize). His short stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including (most recently) Ploughshares Solos, The Iowa Review, and New Letters. A professor of English literature and creative writing, he is the current Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
