Launch Party for Brando, My Solitude with Arno Bertina and Laird Hunt, February 28, 2013

Thursday, February 28 at 8:00 p.m. there was a launch party for Brando, My Solitude (Counterpath, 2013) with author Arno Bertina along with translator Laird Hunt. The event featured a bilingual reading and a Q&A.

“As I was becoming a teenager, that is to say a serious person, he was becoming an eccentric, at 70, an inconsistent and flighty person. We missed each other.”

In this tale, conceived as a biographical hypothesis, the author and his grandfather meet posthumously. The resultant exploration of an existence played quietly out across the 20th century, through provincial French childhood, war, colonization and provincial French retirement, comes to us as a composite—some remembered, some researched, some wholly imagined—of careful, longing glances.

Arno Bertina is the author of Le dehors ou la migration des truites (Actes Sud, 2001), Appoggio (Actes Sud, 2003), Anima motrix (Vertical, 2006), and Je suis une aventure (Vertical, 2012). He is also a member of the collective editorial board of the journal Inculte.

Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables, and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and three novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003) and The Exquisite (2006), all from Coffee House Press. A new novel, Ray of the Star, was recently released by Coffee House. He is published in France by Actes Sud, and has novels either published or forthcoming in Japan and Italy. His writings, reviews, and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, he has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace. See www.lairdhunt.net.

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