Join the American Writers Museum and the Chicago Public Library on Tuesday, October 22nd, in welcoming National Book Award-winning novelist Tim O’Brien, presenting his first new book in almost 20 years.
Join the American Writers Museum and the Chicago Public Library on Tuesday, October 22nd, in welcoming National Book Award-winning novelist Tim O’Brien, presenting his first new book in almost 20 years.
In Dad’s Maybe Book O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato and In The Lake of the Woods, tells stories of soccer games and lullabies, magic tricks and history lessons.
In 2003 as an older father, O’Brien began writing notes to his sons, imagining he would give them advice, tell them about times in his life they wouldn’t know about otherwise, and offer them a glimpse of his own past. For the next fifteen years, he talked to them on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from him when he was gone.
The resulting book is an erudite, vulnerable, honest portrait of a life in letters, the lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons.
O’Brien won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato in 1979. The Things They Carried was a Pulitzer finalist, a New York Times Book of the Century and Chicago Public Library’s fall 2003 One Book, One Chicago selection. In The Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013. He lives and works in central Texas.
O’Brien will be interviewed by Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of American Summer and the national bestseller There Are No Children Here.
This event will take place at the Harold Washington Library Center’s Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State Street, and will begin promptly at 6:30 p.m. Seating is first-come, first-served and no reservations will be accepted in advance. Books will be sold at the event including pre-signed copies and the authors will sign afterwards.
