Jack Gardner reads from his novel Uptown

Sat 1/28  2pm-3pm
Jack Gardner reads from his novel Uptown


Which is worse? The lies we tell each other or the lies we tell ourselves? This is the provocative theme of Uptown, Jack Gardner’s satiric portrait of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Although Charlotte is the second largest banking center in the U.S., after New York, and will be the site of the Democratic presidential convention next summer, it has a curiously low profile on the national scene. And yet, as Uptown vividly demonstrates, Charlotte is an ambitious New South city, envious of Atlanta, and wanting nothing more than to simply be noticed. “The city has long had a bit of an inferiority complex,” Gardner says, “which makes it a fascinating study. Uptown is the first work of fiction to seriously take Charlotte as its subject. And certainly the first with a gay protagonist.”

Julie Rold, award-winning playwright and author of Foreign Lands, Familiar Places, has praised Uptown as “a remarkable debut novel, impressive both in its scope and its ambition. The novel is entertaining, funny, moving, sensitive, wonderfully written—all the things we want the best fiction to be—but its most wonderful achievement is its humanity.”

Jack Gardner is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill. He has worked as a social worker and a U.S. Senate aide. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Event date: 
Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 2:00pm
Event address: 
752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Next to Foster's Market, Kitchen & Flying Burrito
27514 Chapel Hill
us