Steve Tomasula Reading & Presentation, September 25, 2013
On Wednesday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m. experimental multimedia artist and novelist Steve Tomasula gave a reading from his new short story collection Once Human and his most recent novel IN & OZ and a presentation of his multimedia work TOC.
Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds—from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports—Tomasula’s writing has been called a ‘reinvention of the novel,’ combining an ‘attention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.’ His writing often crosses visual, as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know, and how these representations shape our lives.
About IN & OZ and TOC
“Utilizing a breadth of innovative techniques, Tomasula has produced a unique, thought-provoking allegory about the role of art, artists, and artifice in the modern world” – The Iowa Review on IN & OZ
“TOC is an entrancing digital novel that explores temporality’s elusiveness and how, ultimately, the more we think about time, the less we really know about it. Reminiscent of Borges, Calvino, and Ballard, TOC functions less through plot than thesis, less through character than idea. Steve Tomasula’s latest is nothing short of brilliant.” – Lance Olsen
Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution; TOC: A New-Media Novel (FC2/University of Alabama Press); and most recently, IN&OZ (University of Chicago Press). His short fiction has been published widely, and most recently in McSweeney’s, The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, American Letters & Commentary, Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work in any genre. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame.