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Terrence HoltUnited States

Terrence Holt taught literature and writing at Rutgers Uni-versity and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. His background in the humanities includes MFA (creative writing—fiction) and PhD degrees (nineteenth-century British literature) in English, both from Cornell. His published work over the past several years, both critical and narrative, has been concerned with questions of how narrative conditions our perceptions. His main focus in on how we confront our mortal condition, or fail to, and the roles narrative serves in that vexed recognition.Many of his short stories have appeared in different forms in literary journals and prize anthologies, including the Kenyon Re-view, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope, Bookforum, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. A contributing editor for Men’s Health, Holt teaches and practices medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The Author

Bibliography

In the Valley of the Kings (W.W. Norton, 2009)

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In the Valley of the Kings (W.W. Norton, 2009)

Beyond the Hippocratic Oath

Praised for his "beautifully crafted and stran-gely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Ter-rence Holt had been operating under the lite-rary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. With the release of this debut collection, Holt’s work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius—fiction, philosophy, theo-logy—unafraid of axing into our iced hearts"

(William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review). Whether chro-nicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father’s beating heart in a jar, Holt’s sto-ries oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" (Los Angeles Times)

Sunday October 14th 2012 / Power House Arena bookstore

Reviews

“In the Valley of the Kings does what all great story collections should: it challenges the mind while opening the spirit. Each of these short pieces sets a haunting scenario outside the ordi-nary realm—men traveling in space, or excavating the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings, or living through an apocalypse. The characters are all faced with mysteries to solve, but it is Ter-rence Holt’s careful exploration of the loneliness and obsession these men harbor that elevates this book, in all its uniqueness and beauty. Long after a reader finishes these stories, they will be puzzling and thinking and dreaming of the worlds Terrence Holt has created.”

Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

“Terrence Holt’s prose is deeply original, evocative, transfor-ming. I have never seen anything quite like it before. Though what I’m praising is not words, nor is it narrative, but something that is a compound of language, story, feeling, and knowledge—and something else. Something beyond his learning as a phy-sician, at once metaphysical and physical, mysterious and ter-rifying, but not indulgent. Even undecipherable. He is amazing.”

Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award for This Time

“Like the tales of Poe and Hawthorne, these stories are claus-tral, eerie, and entirely exhilarating.”

Michael Gorra, Smith College