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Reading and Signing by Jonathan Lee, in Conversation with Leslie Parry
March 14, 2016 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
On March 14 at 6 pm, author Jonathan Lee will join us at Open Books West Loop for a discussion with author Leslie Parry, to promote his new novel, High Dive. Jonathan and Leslie will chat about setting novels in history, craft, and more.
Jonathan Lee is a a 34-year-old British writer. His novels are Who Is Mr Satoshi?, Joy, and High Dive. Jonathan lives in New York, where he works as the senior editor at Catapult and as a contributing editor to Guernica. Before this he was an editor at the literary journal A Public Space. He is a regular contributor to The Paris Review Daily.
Leslie Parry is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in VQR, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Church of Marvels is her first novel. She currently lives in Chicago.
In September 1984, a bomb was planted at the Grand Hotel in the seaside town of Brighton, England, set to explode in twenty-four days when the British prime minister and her entire cabinet would be staying there. High Dive not only takes us inside this audacious assassination attempt—a decisive act of violence on the world stage—but also imagines its way into a group of unforgettable characters. Nimbly weaving together fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, the story switches among the perspectives of Dan, a young IRA explosives expert; Moose, a former star athlete gone to seed, who is now the deputy hotel manager; and Freya, his teenage daughter, trying to decide what comes after high school. Over the course of a mere four weeks, as the prime minister’s arrival draws closer, each of their lives will be transformed forever.
JONATHAN LEE is a British writer whose recent fiction has appeared in Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, among other magazines. High Dive is his first novel to be published in the United States. He lives in Brooklyn, where he is a contributing editor for Guernica and a regular contributor to The Paris Review Daily.