An Evening with Peter Behrens
Tuesday, March 6th 2012 at 7:30pm
at Irish Arts Center
553 West 51st Street
An unforgettable saga of love, loss, and exhilarating change spanning half a century in the lives of a restless family. O'Briens is a tale that pours straight from the heart of a splendid, tragic, ambitious clan. Picking up a generation later from Peter Behrens' award-winning The Law of Dreams —a harrowing tale of potato famine Ireland and immigration — we now meet Joe O'Brien, a fiercely compelling character who exchanges isolation and poverty in the Canadian wilds for a share in the dazzling possibilities and consuming sorrows of the twentieth century. When Joe meets Iseult Wilkins we begin the story of a marriage and a family moving through history — from the first flying machines, through two world wars, to the election of JFK — told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.
Presented in association with the Irish Arts Center and Consulate General of Canada.
Peter Behrens is the author of The Law of Dreams and Night Driving, a collection of short stories. His short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic and Tin House. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, among other honors.
Praise for O'Briens:
"epic, a piece of rough beauty itself" —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"unforgettable" — Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com
"...pitch-perfect. Behrens is capable of dazzling shifts from exterior to interior." —National Post
"Behrens is a natural storyteller and his scope is vast." —Vancouver Sun