On April 21, novelist Mary Gordon read from the manuscript of her nearly-completed novel about the Spanish Civil War at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Lively discussion followed, about the complex politics of the war, the nature of political idealism, Orwell’s simplification of the role of the anarchists in that conflict, Simone Weil, and the way fiction can treat matters of ethics, conscience, and politics.
Mary Gordon most recent published work is The Liar’s Wife, a collection of four novellas (Pantheon, 2014). She is the author of six novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received numerous other honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader′s Digest Writers′ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
Her reading was sponsored by ALSCW, The Committee on Social thought, and the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.