News
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
October 13, Reading by Author Darrin Doyle
Darrin Doyle, author of Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story
Tuesday, October 13 at 7:00 p.m.
Third-floor Bridge of Wiekamp
Light refreshments and book-signing to follow. (Books will be for sale, and are currently available at IUSB’s book store.)
Darrin Doyle’s Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story is a comic novel about love, memory, obesity, adjectives, top-ten lists, fish, and murder. A black comedy in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces, Revenge follows two middle-agers as they struggle through life.
Doyle’s debut tells the story of Dale Portwit and Mary Ann Tucker, two fragile middle-aged teachers who feel that the peak of life has come and gone. After a failed suicide attempt, Mr. Portwit begins a whirlwind courtship with Mary Ann that leads to wedding bands, a house in the suburbs, and an indulgent love life—but not happiness. Perhaps all that this marriage needs to revitalize itself is a little revenge.
Featuring eccentric topics such as food fetishism and a leg funeral, Doyle’s Revenge is a fresh work of dark comedy. Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, said, “Revenge is the kind of quirky, subversively off-center novel that page by page accumulates what becomes a sustained inner hilarity.” Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, raved, “Darrin Doyle’s startling first novel is dirty and sweet, funny and terrifying. I’ve never read a book that so daringly and empathetically depicts the sometimes messed up, sometimes beautiful things we do in the name of love.” Christine Schutt, National Book Award finalist, declared, “Revenge is a deftly made, raucous tale of love and its attendant hungers and humiliations.”
Darren Doyle’s fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. He has received the Border Tuition Scholarship for the New York Summer Writers’ Institute and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with his wife and two sons.
This event is part of the Creative Writing Program’s “Fiction Reading Series”. For more information, contact Dr. Kelcey Parker, (574) 520-4503;
