November 8, 5:00 pm. Note that each ticket includes a copy of John Irving’s Avenue of Mysteries. You can pick up your copy at will call. No books can be mailed. Buy tickets here.
At the Ann & Jerry Moss Theater at the Herb Alpert Educational Village at New Roads School. 3131 Olympic Blvd., Santa Monica 90404.
At long last, a new John Irving novel. John Irving is one of our most celebrated novelists for a reason– he’s a storyteller of such great scope, whose characters hold us for decades. Perhaps he’s our Dickens. The world according to John Irving is one full of humor, tragedy, grace and disappointment, perhaps tinged with a touch of the circus. His narratives are sometimes epic, and his characters are as human and flawed as they are heroic. John Irving’s novels mesh the comic and the tragic, and the glory of love and family, and the cosmic twists that can turn our lives upside down in a matter of a second.
In his new novel, Avenue of Mysteries, Irving explores people who think they see the future. What would we do if we really could predict the future? What would we do, what should we do, if we think we know the fate of someone we love? Can we change the future even if we can predict it? Avenue of Mysteries is a trans-continental family story about dreaming, and our fascination with the past. Epic, it weaves dreams of the past into the present, which determine the future. This is why we love John Irving.
David Ulin is the book editor for the Los Angeles Times. He’s one of our premier literary thinkers here in Los Angeles, and is the author of several notable books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles; The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time; and others. He is also the editor of several anthologies on Los Angeles literature, as well as international noir series.