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February 26, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Book Reviewer Michael Gorra
to
Present Second "Sundays at Two" Lecture at Smith
NORTHAMPTON, MA-Michael Gorra, Smith
College professor of English and prolific book reviewer for The
New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the London Review
of Books and other publications, will be the second speaker in
this year's "Sundays at Two" series sponsored by Smith
College and the Friends of Forbes Library.
Gorra will offer "The Confessions of a Book Reviewer"
at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 3, in Neilson Library Browsing Room
at Smith College. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair
accessible.
Gorra is the author of "After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie"
and "The English Novel at Mid-Century." His work-in-progress
uses a recent year he spent in Germany as the inspiration for
a book that is both a travel narrative and a reflection on the
travel narrative as a literary form.
Among the authors whose work Gorra has reviewed in the past several
years are A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Raban, Alice Munro,
John Updike and Arundhati Roy. His work as a book reviewer will
be recognized by the National Book Critics Circle on March 11
when he receives the group's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence
in Reviewing at the NBCC annual awards ceremony.
"After Empire" has been called "a major addition
to the growing area of post colonial studies, [in which] he provides
incisive, well-informed analyses of the fiction of Paul Scott,
V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie in relation to phases of the
decolonization of India."
A member of the faculty at Smith since 1985, Gorra is an Amherst
College graduate and received a Ph.D. at Stanford University.
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