• The Red Arrow

    by William Brewer
    Price $27.00
    Hardcover
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    The Red Arrow
May 18, 2022

William Brewer

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes WILLIAM BREWER—poet and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University—for a discussion of his debu novel The Red Arrow. He will be joined in conversation by author and essayist ANDREW MARTIN.

Details

When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: Plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife—a successful AI designer—and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity.

Desperate for relief, the young writer undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed: Joy suffuses every moment. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context, and feels his life shift, refract, and crack open to reveal his past and future alike.

Moving swiftly from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from a Brooklyn art studio to a high-speed train racing across the Italian countryside, The Red Arrow wades into the shadowy depths of the human psyche only to emerge, as if speeding through a mile-long tunnel, into a world that is so bright and wondrous, it almost feels completely new.

About Author(s)

William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind, a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New YorkerThe Nation, and The Best American Poetry series. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. He lives in Oakland.

Andrew Martin’s first novel Early Work was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, the New York Review of BooksHarper’s, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He lives in New York with his partner, Laura, and their dog, Bonnie.