Ryan Mcilvain

ELDERS (Hogarth)

Join us for LA author and Stegner Fellow Ryan McIlvain's debut novel about foreign Mormon missions. “A nuanced meditation on faith and commitment that has all the intensity of a stage play.  Elders is a powerful and deeply moving debut from a gifted young writer.” —T.C. Boyle, author of San Miguel “I’ve always wanted to read a novel about Mormon missions abroad, and McIlvain is the ideal writer to write it.  The framework he provides is layered and fascinating, and inside it, the complex human drama plays out beautifully—these are memorable characters, and McIlvain shows them to us with compassion and honesty both.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake RYAN MCILVAIN grew up in the Mormon Church and resigned his membership in his mid-twenties. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals, including The Paris Review, The Chattahoochee Review and the Potomac Review. McIlvain received honorable mentions in the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Nonrequired Reading. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2009 to 2011, he currently lives with his wife in Los Angeles. Photograph by Brinn Willis THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MARCH 13, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780307955692