Novels Keep Getting More Novel: Jason Mott's "Hell of a Book" CANCELLED

Jason Mott's 2021 National Book Award winning novel, Hell of A Book, will  be our lens through which to see and talk about what a story is and how  telling a story- and therefore-how reading a story will have changed  especially in the last 100 years since James Joyce's Ulysses was  published.  We will look at Mott's inventive style, his role as author  in writing about the subjects of race, place, family, and love, along  with the sometimes-messy boundaries between truth and fiction, history  and imagination and the invented self-vs. the externally perceived  identity.  Mott's novel challenges the traditions of what it means to be  an author, what it means to be a character, and what a plot is.  Hell of a Book gives us the wonderful opportunity to talk about what it means to be a  reader and how literature gives and demands that we change as readers.

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Location:  Private Residence

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Presenter:   Mimi Fenton taught literature at Western Carolina University and served  as the Dean of the Graduate School and Research.  A scholar of early  modern literature, she specializes in the work of John Milton.  She has  won multiple teaching awards and was a Fulbright Scholar in Budapest,  Hungary in 2018.