Meet a novelist over dinner!  James Terry (https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/james_terry) will be coming to Penn in March.  All who sign up will receive his short novella (The Return by James Terry) to read in the next few weeks to then participate with a lively book chat over with the author -- who will fly in for this special event -- along with a gourmet dinner!  

The novella is written by a rising novelist named James Terry, who currently resides in Liverpool, England.  In addition to activism and student life, 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.

Synopsis of The Return: A Novella

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.  Among other things, 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.

 TUESDAY, MARCH 19TH in the Sky Lounge of Harrison College House (Presentation and Q & A over dinner) 

PLEASE CONTACT:  Professor Deven Patel (devenp@upenn.edu) for a copy of the book.