Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy will discuss Underworld Lit. He will be joined in conversation by Lauren Berlant.
Presented by The University of Chicago Program in Creative Writing and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.
Note: Zoom link and password will go to the email address attached to registration on the morning of the 19th. RSVP via crwr.eventbrite.com.
About the book: Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
About the author: Srikanth Reddy is the author of the poetry books Underworld Lit, Voyager, and Facts for Visitors and a book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. He is currently a Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
About the interlocutor: Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Berlant is the author or editor of eight books, including Cruel Optimism and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, as well as their most recent book, The Hundreds (with Kathleen Stewart).
Get the book here: https://www.semcoop.com/underworld-lit