“All I can write about are fat white hypochondriacs,” jokes author and humorist Jack Pendarvis when asked by an interviewer about the characters in his award-winning short stories, exhibiting what Barry Hannah called the “gutbusting, high wit” that characterizes his fiction.
Pendarvis, whom George Saunders called one of the few “truly funny writers in the world,” will present “Musin’s and Thinkin’s,” part of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language series exploring the theme “Comedy.”
The talk will take place on Thursday, Feb.17 at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall on the Hendrix College campus. A book signing and reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Pendarvis’s stories contain social critiques and satire that Kirkus Reviews call “both hilarious and profound.” His writing has been compared to that David Sedaris, T.C. Boyle, and Samuel Beckett; Mark Childress described it by saying, “If Kafka was a really funny guy.”
Pendarvis is known for the characters that occupy his fiction; Publisher’s Weekly described them as “quirky and grotesque, infuriating and hilarious.” They include a young millionaire who pretends to be a detective, a professional mathematician and part-time park ranger who claims to have had an affair with a pop star, and the title character of Pendarvis’s debut novel Awesome, an egotistical giant who goes on a cross-country scavenger hunt to win the affection of the woman he loves.
Pendarvis, a 2006 recipient of the Pushcart Prize, is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure and Your Body is Changing, as well as two novels, Awesome and Shut Up, Ugly. In addition to his contributions to the New York Times and McSweeney’s, Pendarvis is a regular columnist for The Oxford American and The Believer and a contributing editor of the music magazine Paste. He is currently on the faculty at the University of Mississippi, where he has previously served as the Grisham Writer-In-Residence.
This event is sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, which are designed to enhance and enrich the study and teaching of literature and language at Hendrix College. For more information about this and future events, please contact Henryetta Vanaman at 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.