/ 45 An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France

Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net

Chris AdrianUnited States

Chris Adrian was born in Washington D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he attended Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a pediatric fellow at UCSF. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.

The Author

Bibliography

The Great Night: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)A Better Angel: Stories (Picador, 2009 ; 2nd ed. Granta Books, 2012)The Children’s Hospital (Grove Press, 2007)Gob’s Grief: A Novel (Broadway, 2001)

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© Gus Eliot

A Better Angel: Stories (Picador, 2009 ; 2nd ed. Granta Books, 2012)

In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering--illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spi-rit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne’er-do-well pedia-trician returns home to take care of his dying

father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappoin-ted heavenly agent. With A Better Angel’s cast of living and dead characters, at once otherworldly and painfully human, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

The Press

"The author of Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital returns with a sublime collection of nine stories whose wide assortment of characters, many of them children, fugue around death, are plagued by remembrance of things past and are possessed by violence. In Stab, a young protagonist whose twin died, joins a little girl in a killing spree of neighborhood animals, eventually setting their sights on larger prey. A woman who tries to com-mit suicide in The Sum of Our Parts wanders hospital halls as an astral projection, witnessing the unexpressed desires of her friends in pathology. And a Juno-esque teen, a hospital regular with short-gut syndrome, writes an animal book of sublimated child-ward life: bunnies with high colonic ruin, cats with leuke-mic indecisiveness and monkeys with chronic kidney doom. The story Why Antichrist? gives us two teenagers who have each lost parents, one to 9/11 (which looms large in the collection); the devil is soon literally between the teens. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process."

Publishers Weekly

"As he did in The Children’s Hospital (2006), Adrian again toes a unique line between fiction writer and prophet. If that stagge-ring novel was a diamond in the rough, these short stories can be seen as the chips and shards left by a craftsman working to uncover the full range of his prodigious skill. He returns to the themes (sickness, childhood, and revelation) that have served him so well thus far in his career—no surprise for a man who is, in addition to being a writer, a divinity student and a pediatrician. Physical and mental maladies stand in for larger ailments of the soul, and religious trappings—angels and demons, visions and possession—are beatific and horrific at the same time, impos-sible to untangle one from the other. Each work in this collec-tion helps solidify Adrian’s position as one of the most exciting, inventive writers working today. The moment you feel as if you’ve discovered the meaning in his words, it slips between your fin-gers and leaves you unsettled, unmoored, and unmistakably impressed."

Ian Chipman, Booklist

Idea of Healing and Medicine Poetically and Broadly: From Doctors to Mental Health to Self-Healing in a Non-Medical Way

Sunday October 14th 2012 / Power House Arena

/ 46 An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France

Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net

The Great Night: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Acclaimed as a “gifted, coura-geous writer” (The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trap-ped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.

Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humo-rous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

The Children’s Hospital (Grove Press, 2007)

Hailed by the San Fran-cisco Chronicle as “one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory . . . Cle-verly conceived and executed brilliantly,” The Children’s Hospital is the story of a hos-pital preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water, and a

young medical student who finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Jemma Claflin is a third-year medical student at the unnamed hospital that is the only thing to survive after an apocalyptic storm. Inside the hospital, beds are filled with children with the most rare and complicated childhood di-seases—a sort of new-age Noah’s Ark, a hos-pital filled with two of each kind of sickness. As Jemma and her fellow doctors attempt to make sense of what has happened to the world, and try to find the meaning of their futures, Jemma becomes a Moses figure, empowered with the mysterious ability to heal the sick by way of a green fire that shoots from her belly. Simulta-neously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children’s Hos-pital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.

Gob’s Grief: A Novel (Broadway, 2001)

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, agree to together forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their depar-ture for the war, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo is

forced to leave his brother behind. Tomo falls in as a bugler with the Ninth Ohio Volunteers and briefly revels in camp life; but when he is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo–indeed, all the Civil War dead–back to life. Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.