Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, closes the 2021/2022 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series with a special evening featuring acclaimed Latinx writers Hernan Diaz and Alejandro Zambra on Monday, May 9, 7:30 pm (doors open at 6:45 pm). The event will be held at the Brockman Hall for Opera, Rice University, Entrance #18. Both authors will give short readings from their new novels Trust and Chilean Poet. After the reading, Diaz and Zambra will join noted Houston novelist Mark Haber for a conversation on-stage, followed by a book sale and signing at which audience members can meet the authors.
General admission tickets for $5 are on sale now at inprinthouston.org. Discounted books are available to Inprint patrons for purchase through Brazos Bookstore. For more information, visit inprinthouston.org or call 713.521.2026.
Portrait of Hernan Diaz by Jason Fulford
Born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, Hernan Diaz is the author of In the Distance, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of a Whiting Award and the Saroyan International Prize. The Pulitzer citation called it “a gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition.” “A page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude, companionship, foreignness, and home,” says The Guardian, “one of the many delights of In the Distance is the way the writing oscillates between the austere and the lyrical, the realistic and the dream-like.” Diaz is also the author of the nonfiction book Borges, between History and Eternity and edits the Spanish academic journal Revista Hispánica Moderna. He has published essays and short stories in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Cabinet, Kenyon Review, Granta, and elsewhere.
Diaz comes to Houston to share his new novel Trust, “a rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself” (Vogue). Named a most anticipated book of 2022 by Goodreads, Vulture, Oprah Daily, and LitHub, Trust is “cleverly constructed and rich in surprises…This splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page” (Sigrid Nunez).
Diaz, who lives in Brooklyn, is the Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University.
Alejandro Zambra – Chilean novelist, short story writer, and poet – has been called “the defining light of today’s Latin American literature” (John Wray). Zambra’s debut novel Bonsai was the winner of Chile’s Literary Critics Award for Best Novel and the film adaptation was presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Also the author of the novels The Private Life of Trees and Ways of Going Home, Zambra was named one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” and included on the distinguished Bogotá39 list.
His short story collection My Documents was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and “conveys with striking honesty what it’s like to be Chilean today” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). About Zambra’s hybrid work Multiple Choice, Valeria Luiselli writes, “When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head.” His essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere.
Zambra comes to Houston to share his new novel Chilean Poet (translated by Megan McDowell), “a tender story about love, family, and the peculiar position of being a stepparent “ (Los Angeles Times).
According to Rivka Galchen, “Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra…He is a modern wonder.” Zambra lives in Mexico City.
The series is presented by Inprint, a Houston-based nonprofit literary arts organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured nearly 400 of the world’s great writers from 37 countries, including winners of 12 Nobel Prizes, 64 Pulitzer Prizes, 57 National Book Awards, 51 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and 16 Booker Prizes, as well as 19 U.S. Poets Laureate. The series and Inprint receive generous support from The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and University of Houston Creative Writing Program.