Monday January 28 ~ noon

Terese Svoboda, author of the Graywolf Prize-winning Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan.

As a child Svoboda thought of her uncle as Superman, with “Black Clark Kent glasses and grapefruit-sized biceps.” At nearly eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach. When he asks his niece to write a book about his time in Japan at a military prison and begins recording his war stories on audio tapes, Svoboda reluctantly agrees to listen. With the news of Abu Ghraib, her invincible uncle falls into a terrible depression --- and the tapes abruptly end with his suicide. Intrigued by her uncle’s implications of foul play at the prison, Svoboda launches her own investigation, traveling to Japan, digging through buried files at the National Archives, and contacting the few remaining vets who served with her uncle.

Svoboda is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Cannibal and Tin God. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the NY Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Bomb, Columbia Review, Yale Review and Paris Review. She lives in New York.

For more on her work: http://www.readerville.com/WebX?98@207.kXOGavi1qPb.0@authors/svoboda_terese.html