We've just confirmed the addition of two novelists for next January's Seminar, HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Elizabeth Gaffney is a former editor under George Plimpton at Paris Review, a translator of German literature, and the author of Metropolis, a post-Civil War story of love and crime set among New York City's immigrant communities. The stereopticon image above of immigrant men working as streetlayers came out of her research for this book. Visit Gaffney's author page on our site for links and more information.

Peter Ho Davies is a Guggenheim Fellow, a faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Welsh Girl, a novel set in and around a POW camp built by the British during WWII in the remote mountains of northern Wales.

We will continue to add more writers for next January's Seminar. You can find the up-to-date roster here, with links to information about each author. Tickets are still available for the event, however we do expect to sell out early. Register for the event here.

I think writing about history is not unlike writing science fiction or certain other genre novels that are outside the present time and reality in that they actually sometimes serve as more effective metaphors for what's going on in the present world. I am very interested in that. And the way that you can talk about a world that has a lot of structural similarities to the present but is very different— in some ways be more honest, be more probing, or simply because of the distance from people's contemporary reality, push into certain corners that otherwise might be uncomfortable.

—Elizabeth Gaffney, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum.