Chaucer’s Book Talk – Greg Orfalea

Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street) hosts Gregory Orfalea for a book talk and signing of the novel Wonder + Shame

   Frank Matter, seasoned by failure, has a great notion:  organize a baseball team of Syrian refugees in a hostile refugee camp.  An historian disillusioned with his country during the presidential campaign of 2016, Frank learns that his family’s ancestral village has just been destroyed in a chemical weapons attack.  He journeys to Syria to rescue a deaf cousin with whom he had been in love as a young man.   Known as “the Seamstress of Damascus,” cousin Dayzi escapes with Frank from her predator-clients on both sides of the war, and together they flee to the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world (half a million).  There Frank purports to teach orphans the American game of baseball.  Everyone and everything resist it.- Synopsis provided by the author.

Gregory Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the author or editor of eleven books, including Journey to the Sun:  Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California (Scribner) and the just-released novel Wonder + Shame. He has taught writing and literature at the Claremont Colleges, Westmont College, Santa Barbara City College, and his alma mater, Georgetown University, among others.  His collection of memoirs, Angeleno Days, was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize and won the Arab American Book Award.  – Courtesy of Gregory Orfalea