Joseph Suglia reads from Years of Rage

Joseph Suglia reads from Years of Rage
Saturday, May 14th, 8:00 PM
 
Joseph Suglia earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in 2002. He now teaches at several universities in Chicago. Besides H?lderlin and Blanchot on Self-Sacrifice, a book-length study of the theme of martyrdom in modern literature, his writing and literary criticism has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies, including diacritics, Germanic Notes and Reviews, German Life and Letters, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Focus on German Studies, Literature and the Law, and The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. Suglia also regularly contributes to the online magazine, YouthQuake.
 
YEARS OF RAGE was considered by many presses to be ?too intense? and ?too controversial? for publication. No one denied its literary merit, but many were afraid of the book because it forced readers to identify with the young killer who serves as its main character and narrator.
 
Inspired by the Columbine High Massacre, Years of Rage takes place inside of the head of a schoolboy who is bent on murdering his classmates. We, as readers, see what he sees. We think what he thinks. We feel what he feels. We enter a nightmarish world in which it is impossible to separate objective reality from the phantoms of the mind, a world where there are no limits, a world where desire gears toward destruction, a world where love merges with violence.
 
There is a great deal more going on in his new book Years of Rage than merely a response to school shootings. Suglia wanted to write a novel about a self that is ?universally rejected.? The horizons of high school, according to the logic of Years of Rage, are the horizons of the universe. ?Columbine? served as the perfect occasion for writing about this relationship between the self and the world.
 
Check out www.yearsofrage.com