PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT. However, we will have a waiting list. To put your name on the waiting list, please visit the NOCCA box office, which opens at 7pm. Unclaimed tickets will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis.

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY PURCHASED TICKETS: Tickets purchased online can be picked up at the door one hour prior to curtain. Tickets are not mailed. Please arrive by 7:30 to claim your tickets. Any tickets not retreived by 7:55pm will be re-sold to patrons on the waiting list.

On Friday, November 6, The NOCCA Institute’s CENTER STAGE series presents an evening with Dave Eggers! Eggers is a literary triple-threat: part author (his debut work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and he co-wrote the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are); part publisher (he’s the founder of multi-media powerhouse McSweeneys); and part teacher (his 826 Valencia project teaches writing and literacy in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and Ann Arbor). Join us at NOCCA as Eggers reads from his latest work, Zeitoun, the story of New Orleanian Abdulrahman Zeitoun and the astounding experiences he had in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Afterward, Eggers will be happy to answer questions, and Maple Street Book Shop will be on hand with books for him to sign.

This one-night-only event takes place Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:00pm in Freda Lupin Memorial Hall on the NOCCA campus, 2800 Chartres Street. A book-signing will follow the reading, with books sold by Maple Street Book Shop.

WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE SAID ABOUT ZEITOUN

“Eggers’s tone is pitch-perfect—suspense blended with just enough information to stoke reader outrage and what is likely to be a typical response: How could this happen in America?... It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction” – New York Times

“A fiercely elegant and simply eloquent tale.... So fierce in its fury, so beautiful in its richly nuanced, compassionate telling of an American tragedy, and finally, so sweetly, stubbornly hopeful.” —  Times-Picayune

“Eggers' sympathy for Zeitoun is as plain and real as his style in telling the man's story. He doesn’t try to dazzle with heartbreaking pirouettes of staggering prose; he simply lets the surreal and tragic facts speak for themselves. And what they say about one man and the city he loves and calls home is unshakably poignant—but not without hope.” — Entertainment Weekly

"Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book." — Chicago Sun-Times

ABOUT CENTER STAGE

CENTER STAGE is an outgrowth of the Institute’s longstanding Artists-in-Residence Program, which brings nearly 150 master artists into NOCCA’s classrooms every year. CENTER STAGE is exciting blend of educational and performance activities, with master classes for students and performances for the general public.