Event

Meet a working novelist over dinner!

James Terry at Penn for his book The Return discussion on Friday, March 15th and presentation on Tuesday, March 19th, 2024.

Synopsis of The Return:
Bernard Aoust, Professor of Film Studies at Berkeley, is obsessed with a long lost silent French film from 1923 and its obscure director, Michel Defoix. A Frenchman by birth, and an ideological child of the May ’68 student protests in Paris, Aoust is banking on a new monograph about the film to salvage his flagging career. A series of unusual occurrences intrigue and trouble him as he tries to write his book.  When the lost film suddenly appears on YouTube, Aoust suffers an existential crisis. The Return is a literary tragicomedy in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The book explores what we, as individuals and as a society, lose when long-established art forms and means of communication – like watching movies in cinemas with other people –  die out and are replaced by new ones..

Book discussion: Friday, March 15 @ 6pm in M20 Harrison College House. Dinner will be served.

Presentation: Tuesday, March 19 @ 8pm in the Sky Lounge of Harrison College House. Dinner will be served.

Please contact Prof. Deven Patel (devenp@upenn.edu) for a copy of The Return.

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The events, free and to the public, are sponsored by Penn Cinema & Media Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, Creative Writing, Harrison College House, and CHAS - College Houses & Academic Services.