Contact: Teresa S. Thomas
412-268-3580

For immediate release:
January 21, 2002

Chuck Kinder, Pittsburgh Novelist and English Professor, Presents at Carnegie Mellon's Adamson Visiting Writers Series, Feb. 19, 2002

PITTSBURGH—Chuck Kinder, Pittsburgh novelist and English professor, will present his somewhat controversial work at Carnegie Mellon's Adamson Visiting Writers Series on Tuesday, Feb. 19, at 8 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall on the university campus.

Kinder's first two books are "Snakehunter" (1973) and "The Silver Ghost" (1978). By his own account, Kinder then spent nearly 25 years writing and re-writing the manuscript for his new book, "Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). "Honeymooners" is a thinly disguised set of tales about his own and fellow author Raymond Carver's fast-living escapades in the San Francisco Bay area literary world of the early 1970s. Although "Honeymooners" is now 358 pages long, Kinder said it once "stood at 2,611 pages," and "I was nowhere near the end."

Controversy over "Honeymooners" typically arises on two fronts. Comments of reviewer Jay McInerney of The New York Times exemplify the first issue: "either ["Honyemooners" is] an old-fashioned roman a clef," a true story in which real people are given fictitious names, or "a postmodern experiment in the blurring of fact and fiction." The second point of contention concerns whether the book is "mostly tiresome, locker-room, testosterone-overload talk, stunningly unimaginative and uninteresting," as reviewer Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post said, or whether it is "a hilarious, archly ironic and thoroughly original tale of the literary lowlife," as Michael Rogers of Newsweek wrote.

Kinder is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh where he has taught since 1980. He lectures for the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writer's Series and gives literary readings at Pittsburgh area writers' forums.

For more information, contact Carnegie Mellon's English Department at 412-268-3850. The Pauline B. Adamson Fund generously underwrites the Adamson Visiting Writers Series.

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