ArtsLink

Wednesday must be author convention day in Seattle! This location is a bit closer to home for us. Charles Baxter, author of such works as Shadow Play, First Light, and A Relative Stranger will be signing his newly published The Soul Thief this Wednesday at the U-Bookstore.

The Soul Thief details the story of Nathaniel Mason’s first few months as a graduate student in upstate New York, he is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel’s past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. It is Jerome who seems to trigger the events that precipitate Nathaniel’s total breakdown, and Jerome who shows up 30 years later–Nathaniel having finally reconstituted his life–to suggest, with the most staggering consequences, that Nathaniel’s identity may in fact not be his own.

By “illusionary” I mean to say that he was a thief. And what he tried to do was to steal souls, including mine. He appeared to have no identity of his own. From this wound, he bled to death, like Marian Crane, although for him death was not fatal. – Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief

Wednesday, February 20th
U-Bookstore
7pm