Wednesday, March 15, 2006

4/18: David Amsden and Tom Bissell

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series welcomes David Amsden and Tom Bissell on Tuesday, April 18 at 7:00 p.m. as the first readers in the series:

David Amsden is the author of the novel Important Things That Don’t Matter. His fiction and nonfiction appear regularly in Slate, Salon, The Believer, Details, and New York, where he is a contributing editor. He is currently working on a personal and repertorial account of kids in their teens and twenties, to be published in 2007.

Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and then as a book editor for W. W. Norton and Henry Holt. He has been a full-time writer since 2001. His first book, Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative about Uzbekistan, was published in 2003, and was followed shortly thereafter by a volume of fake DVD commentaries entitled Speak, Commentary (written with Jeff Alexander). His short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg appeared in 2005. His book The Father of All Things, a nonfiction account of his journey to Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War, will be published in early 2007.