Author Reading and Talkback with Stephen Clingman of University Massachusetts at Amherst
“Birthmark: Divided Vision & the Coming of Perspective”
Stern Lounge Austin 217
Professor STEPHEN CLINGMAN will read from Birthmark (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), a memoir of divided vision in the divided world of apartheid South Africa. When Stephen was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned. Clingman takes the fact of that mark — its appearance, disappearance, and return — as a guiding motif of memory. In a beguiling narrative set on three continents, this is a story that is personal, painful, comic, and ultimately uplifting: a book not so much of the coming of age but the coming of perspective.
Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. He is also the author of Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, which won the Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction.
Copies of Birthmark will be available for purchase and may be personalized at this open to the public event. Contact Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center to order your copy in advance.
For more information, contact: Cathy Schlund-Vials at cathy.schlund-vials@uconn.edu