October book launch to benefit Library Foundation

Author, professor and Aga Kahn Fiction Prize winner Lamar Herrin will read from his new novel, Pure Products, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 4 in the Tompkins County Public Library’s BorgWarner Community Room. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase with a donation going to the Tompkins County Public Library Foundation.

Published by Cayuga Lake Books, Pure Products is set in a West Virginia town on a river so polluted by the local chemical factory that a group of workers conspire to blow it up.

Herrin’s many works of fiction include Fractures, an ecology-themed novel set in upstate New York, The Lies Boys Tell, a novel excerpted in The New Yorker, and Romancing Spain, a memoir of courting his wife 50 years ago.

Herrin has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Paris Review Prize for his first novel, The Rio Loja Ringmaster. For many years, the author headed the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in Ithaca. where he and his family have lived since 1970.

For more information, please contact Edward Hower at edwardhoward@gmail.com.