All Will Be Revealed | Robert Anthony Siegel | Talks at Google
7All Will Be Revealed, A Novel:
A photographer is drawn to a beautiful psychic in a turn-of-the-century novel about love, possession, adventure, and greed. At the close of the nineteenth century, wheelchair-bound Augustus Auerbach s only interest is his extraordinarily lucrative business: the manufacture and marketing of exotic photographs. His outlook is forever altered, however, when one of his models pressures him to attend a seance. It is there that Augustus meets the medium Verena Swann, a beautiful widow who gives voice to the long-dead spirit of his mother. At the time of her first encounter with Augustus, Verena is close to nervous collapse; her spiritual powers have begun to fail her, and now, forced to fake her public trances, she wonders if her ability to converse with the spirits was ever more than self-delusion. Though initially reluctant, Augustus embarks on a series of private sittings with Verena, finding himself increasingly drawn to her as much for personal reasons as for the proof of immortality she offers him.
Robert Anthony Siegel was born in New York City and educated at Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he lives with his wife, the writer Karen E. Bender, and their two children. He has received fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown.
This event took place on June 20, 2008, as a part of the Authors@Google series.