Zachary Lazar to read for Writing Program Reading Series Oct. 3

Novelist Zachary Lazar, author of Sway (2008) and Aaron Approximately (1998), will read from his work at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, for Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

The talk — part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Danforth Campus. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or email David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Sway interweaves three dramatic and emblematic stories of the 1960s: the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the rise of Charles Manson and his followers. Connecting these stories is the figure of Bobby Beausoleil, a California boy who appeared in an Anger film and later joined the Manson “family.”

“With its motifs of homosexuality, Satan worship, drug addiction, promiscuity, nihilism and general decadence, Zachary Lazar’s superb second novel … reads like your parents’ nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock ‘n’ roll,” notes the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times describes the book as “a powerful prism in which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late ’60s.”

Lazar grew up in Colorado and graduated from Brown University in 1990. He has been a Fellow at The Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received the James Michener/Copernicus Society Prize from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he earned his MFA degree in 1993. He currently teaches at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY.