Norman Rush Reads for the Bard College Program in Written Arts (09, 22, 15)

The National Book Award winner and author of Whites, Mating, and Mortals, reads from his novel Subtle Bodies at Bard College, September 22, 2015. Subtle Bodies seems like one of the few novels written for grown up people. Rushs characters want to fall in love, to laugh and enjoy themselves. Their quirks, opinions, compulsions, and the cruel or considerate ways in which they treat their rivals and allies are all aspects of the personalities that keep us engrossedalong with the clarity and precision of Rushs sentences, the freshness of his observations, and our awareness that we are reading something quite rare: a remarkably nonjudgmental novel about people who are perpetually and often harshly judging themselves and one another. Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books