West Virginian Novelist Marie Manilla Visits UC Clermont to Share Award-Winning Work

West Virginian novelist Marie Manilla is the award-winning author of three collections: Shrapnel (River City, Aug. 2012), Still Life With Plums: Short Stories (West Virginia U.P., 2010) and, soon to be published, The Patron Saint of Ugly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2014).

Manilla will be on UC Clermont’s campus on Nov. 28 from 2-3:30 p.m. to read from her work in  Snyder Room 142 at 4200 Clermont College Dr. in Batavia. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and there will be a signing after the event.
 
Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Marshall University and West Virginia University. Her stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Calyx Journal, Kestrel, The Portland Review, Echo Ink Review, and other journals. Her collection of stories, Still Life with Plums, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award and ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year. She has lived in both Houston, Texas, and Huntington, West Virginia, the settings for Shrapnel.
 

Praise for the author:

Marie Manilla’s Shrapnel is a Fathers and Sons for our time. It’s a novel about generational, political, and geographical differences and what it takes to bridge them. It’s a novel about the past and the past’s refusal to remain safely buried. And it’s a novel about journeys—its protagonist’s, certainly, but all of ours—toward discovery, humility, and wonder. Perhaps Shrapnel’s greatest pleasure is the way it’s told—vividly and with evocative portraits of people and places—and with wisdom—and with gentle and welcome humor.    —Mark Brazaitis, author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, An American Affair, and The Incurables

From the opening pages, where we find Bing Butler selling off the remnants of his life at a yard sale, Shrapnel takes us on a journey through the reshaping of the American family and American community. Texan, veteran, working man, husband – the life that Bing Butler had imagined for himself has exploded, and he will have to assemble a new one from the shards, far across the country in West Virginia, a place known only through jokes and stereotypes. This crotchety Candide will be led astray and will experience terrible, ordinary betrayals on his way to a future he’d not imagined. This is a sensitively wrought first novel with characters you’ll long remember. —Val Neiman, Author of Blood Clay