Tim O'Brien to give reading Alkek Library

By Brett Fails
University News Service
October 19, 2009

Author Tim O'Brien will give a reading and book signing at Texas State University-San Marcos on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 3:30 p.m. in the Alkek Library. All events are free and open to the public.

The reading will be on the 7th floor of the library, in the Wittliff Collection. The event is co-sponsored by the Therese Kayser Lindsey Series and Texas State Department of English.

Tim O'Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time magazine as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights and The Nuclear Age.

His two most recent books, Tomcat in Love and July, July, were national bestsellers. This summer, his essay, "Telling Tales," on the craft of fiction appeared in The Atlantic fiction issue.

O'Brien's short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, Playboy, Granta, Gentleman's Quarterly, The New Yorker and in several editions of The O. In 1987 he received the National Magazine Award for his story "The Things They Carried," which was also selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.

For more information contact Michael Noll at (512) 568-6637 or via email at mn19@txstate.edu.