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February 26, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Book Reviewer Michael Gorra to
Present Second "Sundays at Two" Lecture at Smith

NORTHAMPTON, MA-Michael Gorra, Smith College professor of English and prolific book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the London Review of Books and other publications, will be the second speaker in this year's "Sundays at Two" series sponsored by Smith College and the Friends of Forbes Library.


Gorra will offer "The Confessions of a Book Reviewer" at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 3, in Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.


Gorra is the author of "After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie" and "The English Novel at Mid-Century." His work-in-progress uses a recent year he spent in Germany as the inspiration for a book that is both a travel narrative and a reflection on the travel narrative as a literary form.
Among the authors whose work Gorra has reviewed in the past several years are A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Raban, Alice Munro, John Updike and Arundhati Roy. His work as a book reviewer will be recognized by the National Book Critics Circle on March 11 when he receives the group's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing at the NBCC annual awards ceremony.


"After Empire" has been called "a major addition to the growing area of post colonial studies, [in which] he provides incisive, well-informed analyses of the fiction of Paul Scott, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie in relation to phases of the decolonization of India."


A member of the faculty at Smith since 1985, Gorra is an Amherst College graduate and received a Ph.D. at Stanford University.


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