Simon Van Booy, award-winning and best-selling author “Night Came with Many Stars,” “The Secret Lives of People in Love” that was short-listed for the Vilcek Prize, and other books, will discuss his new book, “The Presence of Absence,” during a Crowdcast session hosted by Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on Thursday, Dec. 1, 6 p.m.
As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to tell: a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.
“Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” the young writer says at the beginning of “The Presence of Absence” as he lay on a hospital bed. As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born. It begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.”
Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty – even gratitude – in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, “The Presence of Absence” is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores one’s strongest emotions.
Simon Van Booy is not only a master storyteller but a writer whose fiction is rich with philosophical insights into things both mapped and undiscovered. “The Presence of Absence” parts the darkness to reveal what has been just out of sight all along.
The online lecture is free to watch on www.crowdcast.io/e/vanbooy. Registration is advised to receive an email reminder.
For more information, call (626) 449-5320 or visit www.vromansbookstore.com/Simon-Van-Booy-presents-The-Presence-of-Absence.
