What: Idiot Boys – A reading and signing by Bradley Butterfield
Date: Aug 10, 2016
Time: 6-8pm
Cost: free
Bradley Butterfield is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he teaches a wide variety of courses on Western literature and philosophy from the Enlightenment to the present. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and an MA in European Studies from the Claremont Graduate School, and has published several essays on Critical Theory and 20th-century fiction, but his primary obsession for the last several years has been the writing of his childhood memoir, Idiot Boys. He is presently working on its sequel.
In telling the story of his own accidental “coming of age,” English professor Bradley Butterfield tells the stories of a whole cast of lovable, if fallible, characters from his childhood and of the Denver he grew up in from the dawn of disco to the Reagan era. Idiot Boys is a relentlessly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and ultimately philosophical look at the particular idiocy of boys and the universal stupidity of man. Each chapter, or “Exhibit,” represents a rough archetype of idiot boy behavior and a stage in young Butterfield’s quixotic quest to figure himself out and become the hero of his own movie. Butterfield’s narration meanders between every phase of his youth, from pre-school to his first semester in college, but there turns out to be a method in this seeming madness as it builds to a gut-wrenching climax involving repressed memories surrounding his mother’s death and the inevitable dissolution of those childhood friendships he thought would last forever.
http://
Doors and mingling at 6pm
Light music at 6:30
Reading at 7pm
Signing to follow
