AMERICA FANTASTICA with TIM O’BRIEN - San Antonio Book Festival
April 13, 2024

AMERICA FANTASTICA with TIM O’BRIEN

  • 2:15 pm - 3:00 pm
  •    |   Location of Session: Russell Hill Rogers Tent
  • Adult Sessions
  • Start of Signing: 3:15pm
  •    |   Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

About the Event

From National Book Award Winner and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Tim O’Brien, America Fantastica follows Boyd Halverson as he robs a bank, kidnaps a teller, and sets off on a madcap road trip that reflects the mythomania and culture of today’s world. O’Brien takes the stage to discuss his first novel in two decades.

About the Author

Tim O’Brien - The San Antonio Book Festival Photo Credit: Tad O'Brien

Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction for Going After Cacciato. The Things They Carried was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; it received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize in fiction and France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger. In 2005, The Things They Carried appeared on the New York Times poll of “The Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years” and was earlier included among its “Books of the Century”; in 2021, it was named one of the Center Fiction’s “200 Books That Shaped 200 Years of Literature.” In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, was chosen by TIME magazine as the best novel of that year. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. In 2010, O’Brien received the Katherine Anne Porter Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a distinguished body of work. He has also received the Mark Twain Award in literature and lifetime achievement awards from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation and the Pritzker Military Library. O’Brien has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest novel is America Fantastica

Moderator

Mimi Swartz

Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women’s health care in Texas. 

Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.

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