Author Talk & Signing with Michael Clune

Storyline Bookshop is thrilled to welcome Michael Clune for a discussion of Pan in conversation with Stephanie Ranallo. Michael will be signing books following the discussion.

About the author:

Michael W. Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment,Writing Against Time, and  American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s, Salon, and Granta, to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker Nord Center, and others. He is currently Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

About the book:

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds
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Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.