City of Asylum Pittsburgh: A Reading with Ismet Prcic
by Olivia Stransky / March 3, 2012 / No comments
- A Reading with Ismet Prcic
- When: Thursday March 22
- 7:00-7:30: Reception with appetizers and beverages
- 7:30-8:30: Reading
- 8:30-9:00: Dessert & informal discussion
- Where: City of Asylum/Pittsburgh
- FREE (Reservation Required!): Email Laura Mustio to place reservations. Please include: # in party, your name and the names of each person in your party. COA/P will confirm.
On March 22nd City of Asylum/Pittsburgh will host a reading by Bosnian writer Ismet Prcic who will read from his novel Shards which was listed as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Shards is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to move forward he must “write everything.” The result is a great rattle bag of memories, confessions, and fictions: Sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet’s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. And as Ismet’s foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man –real or imagined– named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight.
Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and was the recipient of a 2010 NEA Award for fiction. He is also a 2011 Sundance Screenwriting Lab fellow. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife.