Adam Levin G’04, author of the breakthrough novel “The Instructions” (McSweeney’s, 2010), will present the final installment of the fall 2012 Raymond Carver Reading Series on Wednesday, Dec. 5, at 5:30 p.m. in Gifford Auditorium. The reading will be preceded by a question-and-answer session from 3:45-4:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU’s paid lots.
Levin began his critically acclaimed “The Instructions” while a student in the Creative Writing Program in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Christopher Borrelli from The Chicago Tribune hailed the novel as “bold, fast, funny and ambitious—not unlike its author.” Writing for Rolling Stone, Julia Holmes declared the novel “evocative of David Foster Wallace … full of death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth.”
According to the publisher, “Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and 900 pages later, with the events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age 10: a lover, a fighter, a scholar and a truly spectacular talker. Expelled from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.
“The Instructions” is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Combining the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace, Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy—a novel that is muscular and exuberant, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic and unforgettable.”
The novel was a finalist for the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and winner of both the 2011 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the inaugural Indie Booksellers Choice Award. Levin is also the author of a new collection of short stories, “Hot Pink” (McSweeney’s, 2012). His short stories have won the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest, as well as the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize. Levin’s fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Tin House, Esquire and New England Review. Levin lives in Chicago, where he teaches creative writing at the School of the Art Institute.
