Virginia Pye

reads from

River of Dust

This event includes a book signing

Date

Sep
23
Monday
September 23, 2013
7:00 PM ET

Location

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

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies are pleased to welcome VIRGINIA PYE for a reading of her debut novel River of Dust.

On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers. Grace, his young ingénue wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, where visions of her stolen child and lost husband begin to beckon to her from across the plains. The foreign couple’s savvy and dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again. With their Christian beliefs sorely tested, their concept of fate expanded, and their physical health rapidly deteriorating, the Reverend and Grace may finally discover an understanding between them that is greater than the vast distance they have come.

Virginia Pye
Virginia Pye

Virginia Pye

Virginia Pye’s fourth book of fiction, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, was recently published by Regal House Publishing. 

Her short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction, and one of its stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

Her two post-colonial historical novels set in China also received literary awards. River of Dust, her debut, was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, was named a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch.

A prolific writer, Virginia’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, The Rumpus, the Huffington Post, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Writer’s Digest, as well as in numerous literary magazines.

She is Co-Fiction Editor for Pangyrus, a literary journal based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a board member of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston Chapter. She has also been a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar, an assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and a repeat fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

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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