Pitt Book Center to Host Book Discussion and Signing With Author of "Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama"

PITTSBURGH-Author Marianne Novy, University of Pittsburgh professor of English and women's studies, will discuss her book "Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama" (University of Michigan Press, 2005, 2007) during a Pitt Book Center book signing from noon to 2 p.m. March 27, 4000 Fifth Ave., Oakland. The event is free and open to the public.

"Reading Adoption," recently released in paperback, draws on Novy's scholarship in the areas of Shakespeare, women novelists, and drama. The book explores the ways literature represents adoption, especially how novels portray the connections linking adoptees, their adoptive parents, and their birth parents. Novy includes readings of classic and contemporary works in the book and a memoir of her evolving understanding of herself as an adoptee.

This new book follows Novy's previous collection, "Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture" (University of Michigan Press, 2001), which was the first book on adoption in literature to be published in the United States. It was named an Outstanding Academic Title by "Choice."

Novy also is author of "Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare" (University of North Carolina Press, 1984) and "Engaging With Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists" (University of Georgia Press, 1994). She has edited four anthologies.

Last year, Novy organized the International Conference on Adoption and Culture in Pittsburgh and is working to establish a Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies.

As a professor, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on adoption and literature, among the first such courses to be taught in the United States. She will teach a new graduate course, Adoption and Culture, in Pitt's 2008 fall term.

Praise for "Reading Adoption":

"Marianne Novy's book represents personal criticism at its best. At once a close, historicizing analysis of a wide range of fictions about adoption and a sensitive account of what it is like to read from the position of the adoptee, "Reading Adoption" brilliantly illuminates a subject hidden for centuries in plain view."

-Margaret Homans, Yale University

"Profound and touching, deeply smart, the perfect blend of academic/intellectual and heartfelt humanity."

-A. M. Homes, author of "In a Country of Mothers" and "The Mistress's Daughter"

For more information, contact Pamela Jackson at 412-648-1452 or 412-648-2238.

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