FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"Amy and Isabelle" author to read at Bates

LEWISTON, Maine -- Elizabeth Strout, short story writer and author of the acclaimed novel "Amy and Isabelle" (Random House, 1999), will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18, in Chase Hall Lounge on the Bates College campus. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

The New York Times called the novel "one of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place."

The "familiar world" is the fictional New England mill town of Shirley Falls. Strout's story focuses on a mother and teen-age daughter, and how their conflicts and missteps intertwine and intersect with other large and small dramas in the town.

The New Yorker described "Amy and Isabelle" as "an excellent novel about enduring the banalities of ordinary life Ð the challenges, as one character puts it, of eating the elephant one bite at a time."

A 1977 graduate of Bates College, Strout lives in New York City and has had stories published in literary magazines, Redbook and Seventeen. Her latest short story, "Winter Concert," appears in the October/November issue of Ms. Magazine.

Strout's reading is sponsored by the Bates College Department of English.