On Wednesday, April 24th, SEW will welcome Doug Bauer, who will share with us his most recent novel published in late 2022, The Beckoning World. He is the author of three previous novels — Dexterity; The Very Air and The Book of Famous Iowans — and three works of non-fiction — Prairie City Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, which won the PEN/New England Award in Non-Fiction. He is also the editor of the anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals.
His numerous essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Book Review, and many other publications. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction.
The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then one day a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream.
But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications.
The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.”
Doug Bauer was born in Wyoming and raised in Prairie City, Iowa, now lives in Cambridge after many years in the South End, and teaches at Bennington College, where he is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program in writing and literature.
“It’s been said that beyond being a story-teller, the novelist is also by default a sociologist, a historian, and a psychologist. And if he is any good, he is a magician, too. Douglas Bauer is all these things in this expansive, insightful portrayal of the life and times of Earl Dunham, a coal-miner turned baseball pitcher turned farmer.”
—Richard Bausch, award winning author of several novels
“The Beckoning World…turns out to be quietly subversive about our relationship to our aspirations – both as a nation and as individuals – as well as the way love – both eros and caritas – just keeps coming for us. Doug Bauer has a wonderful ability to celebrate who we were without losing sight of all those ways in which we fell short of who we hoped we’d become.”
— Jim Shepard, American novelist and short story writer
This event will be virtual and in-person. To connect via Zoom:
· Email info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org and you will receive the ZOOM info.
· FOSEL subscribers will receive the ZOOM link in our Mailchimp newsletter just before the event.