-
Add a gift card to your order!
Askold Melnyczuk and Gene Kwak
Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes ASKOLD MELNYCZUK—author of Excerpt from Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature and founding editor of AGNI—and acclaimed writer GENE KWAK for a discussion of their books The Man Who Would Not Bow & Other Stories and Go Home, Ricky!: A Novel. They will be joined in conversation by NINA MACLAUGHLIN, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung.
About The Man Who Would Not Bow
In the eight stories comprising The Man Who Would Not Bow the cast of characters includes a journalist in a Middle Eastern war zone, an unemployed actor struggling with elder care, members of a commune planning to kidnap a priest, a torturer's mother and, finally, Nikolai Gogol wrestling with his angels and demons.
About Go Home, Ricky!
After seven years on the semi-pro wrestling circuit, Ricky Twohatchet, a.k.a. Richard Powell, needs one last match before he gets called up to the big leagues. Unlike some wrestlers who only play the stereotype, Ricky believes he comes by his persona honestly—he’s half white and half Native American—even if he’s never met his father. But the night of the match in Omaha, Nebraska, something askew in their intricate choreography sets him on a course for disaster. He finishes with a neck injury that leaves him in a restrictive brace and a video already going viral: him spewing profanities at his ex-partner, Johnny America. Injury aside, he’s out of the league.
Without a routine or identity, Ricky spirals downward, finally setting off to learn about his father, and what he finds will explode everything he knows about who he is—as a man, a friend, a son, a partner, and a wrestler. Go Home, Ricky! is a sometimes-witty, sometimes-heart-wrenching, but always gripping look into the complexities of identity.
