The powerHouse Arena invites you to
a reading and discussion

Love and Fatigue in America

by Roger King

featuring the author in conversation Matt Bialer

Thursday, June 14, 7-9 pm

The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
rsvp: rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

Love and Fatigue in America, Roger King's latest novel, is about an Englishman's decade-long journey through his adopted country in the company of a mystifying illness and a charismatic dog. Poet Matt Bialer joins him.

About Love and Fatigue in America:

When he receives an unexpected invitation from an unfamiliar American university, the unnamed narrator of Love and Fatigue in America embraces it as a triumphant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with ME disease—chronic fatigue syndrome—he moves restlessly from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor, in a decade-long search for a love and a life suited to his new condition. The journey is simultaneously brave, absurd, and instructive.

Finding himself prostrate on beds and couches from Los Alamos to Albany, he hears the intimate stories offered by those he encounters—their histories, hurts and hopes—and from these fragments an unsentimental map emerges of the inner life of a nation. Disability has shifted his interest in America from measuring its opportunities to taking the measure of its humanity. Forced to consider for himself the meaning of a healthy life and how best to nurture it, he incidentally delivers a report on the health of a country.

By turn insightful, comedic, affecting, and profound, Roger King's Love and Fatigue in America briskly compresses an illness, a nation, and an era through masterly blending of literary forms. In a work that defies categorization, and never loses its pace or poise, the debilitated narrator is, ironically, the most lively and fully awake figure in the book.

About the Author:

Roger King grew up in London. He is author of four previous novels: Horizontal Hotel, Written on a Stranger's Map, Sea Level, and A Girl From Zanzibar. He has worked extensively in Africa and Asia, and has held university posts in both international development and creative writing. Since 1991, he has suffered from ME disease, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. He lives in Leverett, Massachusetts. Visit him at www.rogerking.org.

About Matt Bialer:

Matt Bialer's poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, H_NGM_N, Forklift Ohio, Blip, Catch Up, Le Zaporogue, G(o)BBeT, and others. His first collection of poetry RADIUS was published by Les Editions du Zaporogue in 2011. In June 2012, Black Coffee Press will publish a collection of 4 long poems entitled ALREADY HERE and a chapbook entitled ARK. Another collection entitled TELL THEM WHAT I SAW is forthcoming from PS Publishing in the UK in 2013. In addition, Matt's black and white street photographs are in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, and The New York Public Library. A book of his New York photographs entitled MORE THAN YOU KNOW was published in 2011 by Les Editions du Zaporogue. Matt is also an accomplished watercolor landscape painter with work in several "Best of" painting books.

Tweet