From Literary Criticism to Creative Fiction: Joseph Allen Boone's Furnace Creek, a Novel

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In this online presentation, Joseph Allen Boone, a 2014–15 SHC fellow, will not only read excerpts from his recently published novel Furnace Creek, which is a contemporary queer retelling of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, but discuss the arc of his career and how his pursuits as a scholar of the novel and gender have culminated in this book. Furnace Creek is the winner of the National Indie Excellence Awards for LGBT+ fiction and winner of the Next Generation Award for first fiction. "Endearing and knowing," writes Colm Toibin; "a natural novelist," opines Michael Cunningham. Publisher's Weekly applauds its "exquisite prose and emotional urgency."

About the Author

Joseph Allen Boone is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southern California and the author of three scholarly books, the latest being The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2014). At the Stanford Humanities Center (2014–15), he began research on a new project, "The Melville Effect," which he has just finished under the auspices of an NEH fellowship. Boone is also the recipient of the Guggenheim, the ACLS, the National Center for the Humanities, and Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute fellowships and residencies at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and Valparaiso.

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