Anglocat at the Feast: Speaking at the Trollope Society

From The Trollope Society USA:

2015 Annual Dinner
May 18 @ 6:45 pm - 10:00 pm | $150
“I Run After Units”: Returning to Trollope Country

Our Speaker: John Wirenius, Author of Phineas at Bay

The title of the address that our speaker, John Wirenius, has prepared for our Annual Dinner comes from Lady Glencora’s admonition to her husband in Phineas Redux: “We must go after our nature, Plantagenet. Your nature is decimals. I run after units.” Wirenius’s experiences in his early career as a public defender, and in recognizing his own call to the Church, were informed, he says, by Trollope’s compassion for flawed humanity. This empathy extends to characters others would relegate to the category of simple villains, but as Trollope observed in He Knew He Was Right, “The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.” With this view firmly in mind, Wirenius has continued the story of Phineas Finn, his wife Marie, and their friends (and enemies) in Phineas at Bay (2014). Wirenius picks up twenty years after Phineas’s acquittal for murder, deftly weaving a tale that involves a number of favorite characters from the Trollope canon with elements of romance, political intrigue, and labor strife.

The dinner will be held on May 18, 2015 at The Knickerbocker Club, 807 Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street, New York, NY. The reception will begin at 6:45 p.m., with dinner following at 7:15 p.m.

John WireniusJohn Wirenius is a lawyer and will be ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church in May 2015. He is the author of a series of scholarly articles on freedom of speech, legal history, and, most recently, of theology and the intersection of law and religion. His love for Anthony Trollope’s writing dates back to his first year of college, where, as an English major, he stumbled on first the Barsetshire and then the Palliser novels. Phineas at Bay is his second book, and first novel.

I am very honored to be asked to speak at the dinner of the Society, which not only promotes scholarship and discussion of the great Victorian writer's work, but does so with warmth and wit.

If you are interested in attending, you can register here. I can't guarantee the quality of the speaker--but the company will be superb.

By the bye, Amazon rankings fluctuate wildly enough to give an author agony and ecstasy in a short period. I'm currently ranked #35,789 in Books--by tonight I could sink below the 1 million mark. But for now, just for now, mind you, my sales are better than abject.

Something to savor.