Arts-Entertainment
Award-winning author Lance Richardson visits Elk River Books, at 122 S. 2nd St. in Livingston, on Thursday, November 13th, to discuss his book, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, the first biography of this prolific novelist, naturalist, human rights advocate and Zen rõshi. Matthiessen’s close friend, author and grizzly bear advocate, Doug Peacock, will join Richardson. The free event begins at 7 pm and will be followed by a book signing.
Matthiessen was a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, for Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard. In his youth, he co-founded The Paris Review and worked undercover for the CIA. Later, he pursued such perilous expeditions as floating through the Amazon, living with a New Guinea tribe and swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. “Underlying all Matthiessen’s disparate pursuits was the same existential search—to find a cure for ‘deep restlessness.'”
“In True Nature, Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen’s life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation.”
True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidity, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century, notes author of Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane.
Richardson’s first book, House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a yearlong residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will live-stream at YouTube.com/ElkRiverBooks. For more information, send an email to info@elkriverbooks.com or call (406) 333-2330.