New Voices in Fiction: Scott Cheshire in Conversation with Claire Messud
When:
Tuesday, Sep 02, 2014 7:00p -
8:00p
Tuesday, Sep 02, 2014 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
http://www.harvard.com/event/scott_cheshire/
Harvard Book Store and Grub Street welcome SCOTT CHESHIRE, interview editor at Tottenville Review, and award-winning author CLAIRE MESSUD for a discussion of Cheshire's debut novel, High as the Horses' Bridles.
It’s 1980 at a crowded amphitheater in Queens, New York and a nervous Josiah Laudermilk, age 12, is about to step to the stage while thousands of believers wait to hear him, the boy preaching prodigy, pour forth. Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, Josiah’s nerves shake away and his words come rushing out, his whole body fills to the brim with the certainty of a strange apocalyptic vision. But is it true prophecy or just a young believer’s imagination running wild? Decades later when Josiah (now Josie) is grown and has long since left the church, he returns to Queens to care for his father who, day by day, is losing his grip on reality. Barreling through the old neighborhood, memories of the past—of his childhood friend Issy, of his first love, of the mother he has yet to properly mourn—overwhelm him at every turn. When he arrives at his family’s old house, he’s completely unprepared for what he finds. How far back must one man journey to heal a broken bond between father and son?
In rhapsodic language steeped in the oral tradition of American evangelism, Scott Cheshire brings us under his spell. Remarkable in scale—moving from 1980 Queens, to sunny present-day California, to a tent revival in nineteenth century rural Kentucky—and shot-through with the power and danger of belief and the love that binds generations, High as the Horses’ Bridles is a bold, heartbreaking debut from a big new American voice.
"Daring and brilliant. . . Cheshire captures the anguish that has always driven people of faith—or no faith—toward the unbridled promise of a time when ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.’ No matter what you believe, fiction writing that delivers us to a moment like that is something of a miracle." —Washington Post
