Joseph Bathanti Discusses His New Book An Act of Contrition and Other Stories

Join Joseph Bathanti as he discusses his new book, An Act of Contrition and Other Stories, at an in person event on Wednesday, October 11, 2023, at 7 pm.

We want to celebrate Joseph Bathanti on his new book, An Act of Contrition and Other Stories, with an in-person event, Wednesday, October 11, 2023, at 7 pm. The book is available now. We look forward to seeing you at this free event.

Synopsis:

The Act of Contrition, a series of linked stories and one novella, continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti’s earlier award-winning volume of stories, The High Heart. Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, The Act of Contrition celebrates and complicates the operatic glories and tragedies of an offbeat family that fashions from the vault of explosive ancestral secrets its own incendiary mythology. These fourteen unforgettable stories—a mélange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver)—are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.

Author Bio:

Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, is author of nineteen books, most recently, a volume of poems, Light at the Seam, from LSU Press in 2022. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, winner of the Eastover Prize for Fiction, is forthcoming from Eastover Press in July of 2023.

Can’t make the event? Want your own personalized copy?

Contact the store 48 hours before the event to request one.

704-525-9239 or orders@parkroadbooks.com