JOHN WESLEY HARDING (Wesley Stace) & JONATHAN COE March 12, 2011

8 PM, Sat. March 12
WESLEY STACE (John Wesley Harding) & JONATHAN COE
Reading/Signing/Live Music
CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER & THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM
Rolling Stone Magazine hailed John Wesley Harding, the first opening act for Bruce Springsteen in 20 years, as "a literate and ironic neo-folkie with enough bile to win over a younger, hipper audience not attuned to folk music." CREEM said "His eloquence can be gut-wrenching," and The Los Angeles Times dubbed him "one of the great rock artists of the 90s." His best known work includes "I'm Wrong About Everything", which was featured on the High Fidelity soundtrack. Under his real name, Wesley Stace, he wrote the international best seller Misfortune and 2007's by George, a multigenerational story about a performing British family and their ventriloquist's dummy. His latest book is Charles Jessold, a twisty tale of music and murder unfolding with Nabokovian precision during Britain’s early twentieth-century folk revival. And, yes, Stace/Harding will have his guitar.

A humane satire and modern-day picaresque, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by fellow Brit Jonathan Coe is a gently comic novel about the paradoxical difficulties of making genuine attachments in a world of communication technology and rampant social networking. A product of the social media boom, the eponymous Sim is, according to Coe, "the sort of person with hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage breaks up." Coe has written biographies of both Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and his novels include The Rotters' Club, Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up! The Rotters' Club was adapted for television and broadcast on BBC Two, Dwarves of Death was filmed as Five Seconds to Spare, and Jeremy Dyson, founder/creator of British cult comic quartet The League of Gentlemen, is adapting What a Carve Up! for Channel 4. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.