Allen Kurzweil

discusses

Whipping Boy:
The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jan
29
Thursday
January 29, 2015
8:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store welcomes prize-winning novelist ALLEN KURZWEIL for a discussion of his latest book, Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully.

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles author Allen Kurzweil’s search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world’s largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California.

While hunting down his tormentor, Kurzweil encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux royal swindlers, a crime investigator “with paper in his blood,” and a  monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil’s riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the “parallel lives” of a victim and his abuser.

A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menace into an unlikely muse, Whipping Boy is much more than a tale of karmic retribution; it is a poignant meditation on loss, memory, and mourning, a surreal odyssey born out of suffering, nourished by rancor, tempered by wit, and resolved, unexpectedly, in a breathtaking act of personal courage.

Allen Kurzweil
Allen Kurzweil

Allen Kurzweil

Allen Kurzweil is the author of two novels for adults (A Case of Curiosities and The Grand Complication); two chapter books for children (Leon and the Spitting Image and Leon and the Champion Chip); and the investigative memoir Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully. His novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have received numerous international prizes. In the United States, Kurzweil has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Public Library Center for Scholars & Writers. Now a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, he serves on the boards of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and the Providence Athenaeum. 

Photo Credit: Ferrante Ferranti

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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FAQ:

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General Info
(617) 661-1515
info@harvard.com

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