UB brings award-winning novelist Laird Hunt to Buffalo Oct. 10

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The Exhibit X Fiction Series presented by the University at Buffalo Department of English, which brings internationally renowned writers to Buffalo every year, will sponsor a free public reading by award-winning American novelist and translator Laird Hunt at 7 p.m. on Oct. 10 at the Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo.

Hunt’s fictions transcend genres and include work that can be considered experimental, exploratory, noir and speculative. 

He was a 2013 nominee for one of the nation’s most prestigious fiction prizes, the PEN/Faulkner Award and recently received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his haunting 2012 novel “Kind One,” a gothic novel sent in antebellum Kentucky that was described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a “haunting meditation on the crushing legacy of slavery.” It was a finalist for multiple awards and has drawn strong emotional reactions from its readers.

Christina Milletti, PhD, associate professor of English at UB and co-curator of this year’s Exhibition X series, reflects that readers in the 2012-13 series – Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet and Lawrence Norfolk – all won, or were nominated for, major literary awards shortly after their visits to Buffalo.

She says, “Our goal is to bring rising talent in contemporary fiction to Buffalo from both the national and international landscape. We’ve been fortunate to have great success identifying novelists who aren’t afraid to push buttons or boundaries as they tell provocative stories.

“Laird Hunt has been on our radar for a long time. His fiction unerringly mines the state of the human condition and our capacity for violence, solitude and love.

“Each Exhibition X reading has been unique,” she says, “and Hunt’s work is very different from that of next semester’s guests Victor LaValle, Martin Nakell, Rebecca Goodman and Amanda Micholopoulou.  However, each of them, too, has an exquisite impact on an audience.”

In addition to “Kind One,” Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, “The Paris Stories” (2000), and four novels from Coffee House Press: “The Impossibly” (2001), “Indiana, Indiana” (2003), “The Exquisite” (2006) and “Ray of the Star” (2009).

His new book, the Civil War novel “Neverhome,” will be published soon in the United States by Little, Brown.

Hunt translated “Vacant Lot,” an experimental novel by German author Oliver Rohe, and with Anne Laure Tissut, “Brando, My Solitude,” a “biographical hypothesis” by award-winning French author Arno Bertina.

Hunt’s work is published in France by Actes Sud, and he has novels published or forthcoming in Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey. His writings, reviews and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad.

Hunt currently is on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, where he edits the Denver Quarterly. He has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and was a summer 2013 participant in the Lannan Foundation residency program in the high-desert town of Marfa, Texas.