855 El Camino Real #74
Palo Alto, California

Wednesday, April 30 at 7:00 PM
Meet Andrew Altschul when he reads from and discusses his spectacular debut novel, Lady Lazarus, the sprawling tale of Calliope Bird Morath the daughter of legendary punk-rock star—whose horrific suicide devastates the world.

The novel is narrated by both Calliope and her obsessive biographer, who follows her from her silent childhood to her first tortured, manic public statements about her father; from her highly publicized publication of a book of poetry to her mysterious disappearance; from her reappearance as the mute leader of a cult-like brigade known as The Muse to her spectacular showdown with the biographer.
A disturbing and razor-sharp meditation on twenty-first-century celebrity culture, Lady Lazarus is also a funny and moving story about the age-old question of the nature of the self.

Bio:
Andrew Foster Altschul is a Jones Lecturer and former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in Fence, Swink, Story Quarterly, One Story and other journals, as well as the anthologies Best New American Voices 2006 and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. He lives in San Francisco.

Official Website: http://www.booksinc.net

Added by Books Inc. Palo Alto on March 18, 2008