MAPH Alumni Reading on May 13

Published this month by Random House/Delacorte, Anna Jarzab’s “All Unquiet Things” was once a MAPH Thesis:

Winner of a First Novel Contest from Chiasmus Press, Kate Zambreno’s “O Fallen Angel” will be published in March:

Jarzab (MAPH 07) and Zambreno (MAPH 02) will be here May 13 to read their work.

Both novels reached bookstores this year to the fanfare of blushing reviews, and on Thursday their authors will return to the University of Chicago–where both earned master’s degrees–to read.
Anna Jarzab (’07) and Kate Zambreno (’02) will read at 4:30 p.m. in Classics 10, 1010 E. 59th Street, hosted by the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, which some consider an alternative approach to creative writing. The reading is free and open to the public.
The novels, both dark and psychologically complex, are very different.
Jarzab (pronounced as a spoonerism of Czar Jab) developed All Unquiet Things as her MAPH Thesis project under the program’s creative thesis option. The book, which came out this January, is a young adult mystery novel about an unlikely pair of California prep school students that team up to solve a friend’s murder.
Publisher’s Weekly said Jarzab’s “confident, literary prose makes for a tense and immersive thriller.”
Zambreno’s novel, O Fallen Angel, was born into print last month after it won Chiasmus Press’s “Undoing the Novel Contest.” Chiasmus describes it as “an anarchic literary sacrilege…an exorcism of the culture wars and pop-cultural debris.” Zambreno calls it a “triptych of modern-day America” and a “grotesque homage to Mrs. Dalloway.”
Writing in the Chicago Reader, S.L. Wisenberg said, “I found myself mesmerized, mostly by the rhythm and occasional whimsy of the prose. Zambreno breathes life into her characters with language alone.”