Description:Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the Seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.

The Virginia Center for Literary Arts Author Series at Handley Regional Library continues with Egyptian novelist and journalist Ahmed Naji.

Naji will read from his work and discuss the ordeal of being imprisoned for “violating public modesty,” as a result of calculated outrage based on an excerpt from his novel Using Life.

VCLA’s Founding Director Sean Murphy and the author will discuss the ways Naji’s experiences have informed his fiction and journalism, and the ways his life has—and has not—changed since becoming a literary and political cause célèbre.

Copies of his book will be available for sale and signing. This is a free event!