Home > LECTURES & LITERATURE > A Conversation with Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz and Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic

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A Conversation with Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz and Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic

Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library

October 4, 2011

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Known for her gritty realism, Anne Enright shot to international fame when her fourth novel, The Gathering, about a large Irish family assembling for the funeral of a wayward brother, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and was named the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year. Liesl Schillinger writes in the New York Times Book Review: “Reckless intelligence, savage humor, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright’s fiction is jet dark—but how it glitters. Her prose often ravishes and sometimes repels: reading her can be like staring into the lustrous surface of a lake, trying to discern the dangers lurking beneath.” Enright’s new novel, The Forgotten Waltz, explores the mysteries of lust and desire—and the devastation wreaked upon two marriages in the wake of such forbidden attraction.

Julie Otsuka’s stunning and stark debut novel When the Emperor Was Divine—about a Japanese American family’s evacuation from their Berkeley home to an internment camp during World War II—won several prizes, including the American Library Association Alex Award. In his New York Times review, Samuel Freedman marvels, “To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird.” Otsuka’s new novel, The Buddha in the Attic, follows a group of Japanese women brought to San Francisco in the early 1900s as mail-order brides, their backbreaking drudgery as migrant workers, and—with the arrival of war—the painful prospect of their internment.