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Critically Acclaimed Novelist Comes to Texas A&M University

Texas native and author, Rene Steinke, will be coming to the TAMU campus to read from her novel, Friendswood. Steinke is the director of the MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University and author of two other novels: The Fires and Holy Skirts, which was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award.  
 
 
 
 


Friendswood, set in a small town in Texas, follows four characters trying to find a sense of home against the backdrop of a long-ago industrial accident still destroying lives and the new incident of a sexual assault at a high school party. The characters--Lee, a grief-stricken mother, Hal, a middle-aged former football star and recovering alcoholic, Dex, a teenage boy estranged from his father, and Willa, a teenaged girl consumed with poetry and visions--each struggle to understand what it means to live a moral life and how to weather the heartbreak of trying.

"Steink'es sensitive exploration of tangled human connections reminds us that love and friendship will go a long way toward seeing us through our trials"
-Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"To a brilliant degree the novel amounts to an anatomy of conscience, a forensic examination of rationalization and the springs of integrity, and all the while it is a fully inhabited tale of one little town."
-Katherine A. Power, Minneapolis Star Tribune




Wednesday
October 8, 2014
LAAH 453
4:00 P.M.

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