At the reception, Mosley will give an informal talk about the book and make time for discussion. A book table will be set up for signings.
“Jennie Knies, our head librarian, kindly offered to hold the event in the library, and I think it is an ideal venue for this event,” said Mosley, who retired from the campus’ English department in 2017.
In “Resuming Maurice’s” essays, Mosley injects elements of personal narrative into his appreciations of a diverse group of authors whose backgrounds range from English, Welsh and American, to Belgian, Danish, Mexican and Kenyan. Playing off of the growing academic subdiscipline of celebrity studies, the book’s unifying theme is celebrity and its discontents.
The “Maurice” in the title refers to Maurice Maeterlinck, the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian poet, playwright and essayist whose 1907 work, “The Intelligence of Flowers,” Mosley had previously translated from its original French.
“His literary celebrity stirred my interest, and I chose to write the main essay in the book on it,” Mosley said. “‘Resuming’ has a double meaning: a recapping of his fame, and my own attempt to restart something of a reputation that had long grown faded.”
Instead of a narrowly focused scholarly audience, Mosley decided to write the collection for the "common reader.”