Outdooring - writer to audience; audience to writer

Benjamin Markovits |&| Hisham Matar read from their unreleased novels
Saturday August 20, 2005
from 7.30pm (bar open from 6.30pm)
Venue: oh! art (Oxford House)
Derbyshire Street
London E2 6HG
Door: £5/£4 (concs) Box Office: 0207 739 9001

Benjamin Markovits was born in California, and raised mostly in Texas, London and Berlin. He studied English literature at Yale University and briefly played professional basketball for a second division team in Germany, before coming to England to do a Masters in Romantic Literature and concentrate on his own writing. Since then, he has worked as a high school teacher in New York and an editor in London at the New Left Review, between freelance stints as a sports journalist, book reviewer and essayist: for, among others, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Observer. His first novel, The Syme Papers, came out in 2004. Either Side of Winter, a set of linked portraits that capture Manhattan through its four seasons, is his second.

Synopsis:
In Fall we see the tentative beginnings of an unlikely romance - between a schoolteacher and a wealthy, drifting former graduate. In Winter we hear the story of her colleague, whose brief fling produced, as he now learns, seventeen years too late, a daughter. Then the daughter's best friend, her love affair with a teacher and the story of her dying father take us through Spring and Summer. This is a moving and elegiac picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community and a need to be loved. Touched by wry humour, its achievement is to capture Manhattan in microcosm through a series of remarkable, moving and tender portraits.

‘Markovits has an exquisite sympathy for his characters and writes beautiful, dryly humorous prose.’ Independent

Reading alongside Benjamin will be new author Hisham Matar. Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham has lived in Tripoli, Cairo and, recently, Paris. However, London has been his base since 1988. He has contributed essays and reviews to the Arab daily newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, and has had some poems published in Soundings. In 2002, for his poems, he was a finalist in East Anglia's Best New Talent Awards. He has also acted on stage, worked as an architect, stonemason and university lecturer. No One in the World is his first novel.

News: No One in the World has been published by Penguin/Viking as In the Country of Men - available now on Amazon.

Synopsis:
In Libya during the late 1970s Qaddafi's regime has taken hold, known less as a revolutionary liberator and more as a cold-blooded dictatorship. It is against this backdrop that No One In The World is set. Principally a coming of age story, it is told by Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy who lives in a suburban estate with his mother and father. His father, a merchant, is often away on business. During these periods his mother drinks heavily and tells Suleiman stories about how she was married against her will to his father.

When the family's neighbour, a professor, is taken by the secret police, the boy soon pieces together that the student-led revolt is closer to home than he was led to believe by his parents. When his father is taken into custody, the boy and his mother fall into despair. Later, the professor is publicly executed on TV. The father is returned, a tortured man, broken and bruised by the secret police. It is only then that he finds love with his wife. Broken by religion and state, they are equalised and begin to share an intimacy that excludes their son.

In an Arab country governed by stifling religious traditions and an oppressive dictatorship, this is the story of a family coming face to face with its own powerlessness in the world.

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August 20, 2005

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