Fountain Reading: Seminary Co-Op

On April 15, 2015, I read from Fountain at the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore in Chicago. You can listen to a recording of the reading (and following questions) here:

The Chicago Maroon wrote a fun article about the event. A couple of quotes follow:

At the event, John Wilkinson, Associate Chair for Creative Writing and Poetics in the English department, spoke briefly about his experience teaching Hughes in his core class on creative writing. Hughes’s unique anti-realist style made an early impression on Wilkinson. “It is unusual for an undergraduate to present for their first creative writing class something that has nothing to do with his or her family or miserable or ecstatic love life or any other autobiographical stuff,” Wilkinson said. “This unusual student seemed engaged by what fiction alone might make possible in the way of thinking.”

“I’ve always written a little as a thing to do outside of science and other things … But at one point I decided I needed to write a novella because I had written short stories and somehow I accidently promised my dad I would write a novella,” Hughes said. “Once it was done I think it was better than other stuff I had written and that’s why I wanted to get it published.”

Calendar

I added an events calendar to my website. You can access it by pressing the button on the left labeled “” or by going to totehugh.es/calendar. I have three book-related events coming up:

  • A signing at AWP (150409)
  • A reading at Miami University (150413)
  • A reading in Chicago (150415)

Come support me if you can!

Fountain Reviews

So far, Fountain has three non-Amazon reviews. I present some excerpts.

Tia at Nerds Of A Feather writes:

Fountain has that wonderfully bizarre but ingenious feel that leaves you on the edge of your seat grasping for more. Within the first ten pages I laughed out loud at least five times, not because Fountain is a comedy, but because it is so absurdly witty.

Taylor at the Midwest Book Review (MBR) Bookwatch writes:

Erudite, complex, deftly constructed, and a fully engaged and engaging read from beginning to end, Fountain is a compelling and highly entertaining read—a seminal work of original literature that will linger in the mind long after it is finished and set back upon the shelf.

Publisher’s Weekly writes:

This is an intelligent, perceptive novel, but it leaves the reader adrift.

Maybe that last part is a subtle pun on what happens in the last pages of the book. It probably isn’t.