Wednesday, March 7, 2007  |  4:30 PM

Alexander Library

Teleconference Lecture Hall, 4th Floor

169 College Avenue

Parking: Lots 26 and 30 See Map
Admission: Free and open to the Rutgers community and the general public

The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Lara Tupper is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A former lounge singer, she has performed at sea in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and on land in Thailand, Japan, China and the United Arab Emirates. She now teaches fiction writing at Rutgers University and lives in New York City, where she is a frequent book reviewer for the Believer. A Thousand and One Nights is her first novel. She is a proud member of the Authors Guild and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

For Karla, an Entertainer aboard the MS Sound of Music, the cruise ship life provides a welcome distraction from the insular, Maine town she left behind. Onboard she leads a surreal and shmaltzy existence (musical reviews by night, shuffleboard tournaments by day), interspersed by brief, romantic sojourns in Mediterranean ports of call with her newfound shipmate, Jack. When their ship contracts expire, neither is willing to go back home.

The pair decides instead to join musical forces and become a duo; they secure a series of contracts in the Middle and Far East and their adventures on land begin. Karla's sense of displacement is enhanced on solid ground, in complimentary hotel suites in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Shanghai. She wears slinky dresses and learns as many pop songs as possible, and so begins her uneasy transformation to Lounge Singer Extraordinaire. Aware that she is becoming a disturbing cliché (peripatetic, twenty-something American trying to find herself), Karla tries not to let her anxiety overwhelm her. Jack, meanwhile, drinks more and looks at Karla less.

A Thousand and One Nights is about pursuing the wrong path, knowingly. It’s about bad lyrics and beautiful cocktail waitresses and a Mainer who wants to be a star and won't be. It’s about two people who are very much out of love and unwilling to make it official. It’s a story of covers and false fronts and what it does to a girl singer, over the course of nights and months and years, to fake it so well.

Jim Shepard, Project X, Love and Hydrogen

“A Thousand and One Nights [is] beautifully understated in its emotional intelligence, and wry and clear-eyed and psychologically astute...This is a moving and accomplished first novel.”

Elizabeth Strout, author of Abide with Me and Amy and Isabel
“Wonderful and incisive, A Thousand and One Nights tells us in a new way what it means to be young and American. Tupper casts a keen, intelligent eye on the contemporary world, its multitude of fakeries and deceits, providing us with a witty, poignant, wholly worthwhile read.”

Publishers Weekly

“Cruise ship entertainers fall in and out of love as they take their act from the seas to exotic luxury hotels in Tupper's promising debut...Tupper proves herself a canny observer of the insular world of nomadic entertainers.”

Rachel DeWoskin, author of Foreign Babes in Beijing
"Lara Tupper’s novel is more than the story of one American woman’s journey through love, the world, and her twenties. It’s an exploration of adventure, desire, and thwarted ambition, one that will resonate with anyone who has ever left her comfort zone or time zone. By turns funny and somber, Tupper moves from the theme park cheeriness of cruise ship musicals to the dark bars of Dubai and Shanghai–with sharp sensibilities and a light touch."

Kim Ponders, author of The Art of Uncontrolled Flight
“A clever tale of a young woman’s witty, dissolute, and sometimes desperate tryst with overseas stage-act fame, A Thousand and One Nights shines with the poignant honesty of a pop song singer who can’t quite get her life in key. Tupper has written a delightful first novel.”

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