CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD 2009

A Reading by Deb Olin Unferth
recorded November 6, 2009

Terry Oggel: Good evening. I’m Terry Oggel, Chair of the English Department. Welcome to the eighth annual First Novelist Award and the second annual VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. This year we gather to recognize the novel Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth. It’s a tale of quests and escapes that has been called tricky, odd, unnerving, and hilarious. You don’t want to take this vacation yourself perhaps, but it’s fun and touching to read about it. The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is given annually to celebrate a rising new talent in the literary world who has successfully published a first novel during the previous calendar year. This year’s award, we received more than 130 titles for consideration. In addition to Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the short story collection Minor Robberies, also published by McSweeney’s Books. In an interview with Tao Lin, Unferth said that she does not write out of boredom or for money. Nor does she write out of happiness. Instead, she says, she writes for pleasure, and it is certainly our pleasure tonight to have her read for us from Vacation, a novel about unexpected journeys. Please join me in a warm welcome for the 2009 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize winner, Deb Unferth.

Deb Olin Unferth: Hi, thank you so much for the wonderful welcome. It’s really been fantastic to be here and to meet all of you, and it’s a great honor for me to be here tonight. So I’m just gonna read a twenty-minute excerpt from Vacation. The book is about a Brooklyn man who leaves his wife and doesn’t show up for work one day, and he goes off in search of a man named Gray. He believes that Gray destroyed his marriage. He follows him to a hotel in Syracuse and, at this point in the novel, he’s just received an email from Gray saying that he is actually in Central America, in Nicaragua, on vacation. So here Myers is the next morning and he is calling his boss, who is the regional manager.

[Unferth, Deb Olin, Vacation, McSweeney’s, 2008.]