Above: Author Antoine Wilson looks like a happy person, which makes sense seeing as everybody (see below) totally loved his first novel, The Interloper.
Glass Bookcase Reading Series: Antoine Wilson. Thursday, September 27th, 7 p.m., 6191 Helen C. White HallAs assured and sumptuously written as any first novel I've encountered--Antoine Wilson's prose sings and the story he tells here is both clever and compelling. This is writing at its very best.
-- T.C. Boyle
Antoine Wilson’s novel snuck up on me: deceptively normal prose, a tightening plot, a quickening read, and then before long I was up late all scared and sad and freaked out. Who is this guy? I’m keeping my eye on him and you should too.
-- Daniel Handler, author of
AdverbsThe Interloper is tautly written, suspenseful, and abidingly strange, a first novel that defies expectations in the most delightful way. Antoine Wilson delves into the dark corners of the human psyche and we readily follow, guided by his keen intelligence, wry humor, and razor-sharp prose. At once horrifying and oddly affecting, this book makes for compulsive reading.
-- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of
Madeleine Is SleepingHis novel might be named for altogether different reasons, yet it's author Wilson who has proven to be the true interloper.
Although his pedigree is impressive (Iowa Writer's Workshop, the
Paris Review, Best New American Voices), Wilson has come seemingly out of nowhere to deliver a novel that is confident, well-paced and very, very creepy. Were he to meddle in literary affairs again and again, the world would be the better for it.
-- Tiffany Lee-Youngren,
San Diego Union-Tribune[A] pleasantly creepy debut novel... the pathos, delusion and hope festering within Owen will carry readers through.
--
Publishers WeeklyThe pleasures of this wry debut novel lie not in wondering if things will turn out badly for Owen but in how badly they will go and how unreliable his narrative really is.
--
BooklistWilson’s vivid first-person portrayal of Owen’s slow crescendo into obsession—despite its effect on the world he wants to restore—is disturbingly powerful...Wilson takes his readers down a dark spiraling path with an ever-increasing tempo where past childhood memories and hatred collide with resounding tragedy.
-- Nelly Heitman,
ForeWord MagazineOH, what thrilling dread, falling in with a character as twisted as the narrator of Antoine Wilson's terrific first novel,
The Interloper. It's like leaving a party with a designated driver, only to discover as you swerve down the driveway that your new friend is drunker than you are. Or worse, completely insane.
-- Jess Walter,
LA Times Sunday Book Review
Kevin A. González was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where was also the Carol Houck Smith Fellow in Fiction in 2007-08. He is the author of the chapbook, The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayorga (Mombotombo Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Callaloo, Poetry Northwest, and The Progressive; and his stories have appeared in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, and Best New American Voices 2007 and 2009. Cultural Studies is his first book of poems.
A native of Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill has an M.F.A. from the University of Houston, where he was awarded the 2003 Michener Fellowship for poetry. He has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a Halls Poetry Fellow in 2006-07. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Indiana Review, lyric poetry review, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear . He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
