Jacob Bacharach Signs THE BEND OF THE WORLD During CRAWLAFTERDARK, 4/25

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust announces a book signing and reading by local author Jacob Bacharach, whose novel The Bend of the World (Liveright/Norton), will be released on Monday, April 14, 2014. The book signing takes place Friday, April 25, 2014, during the Trust's Gallery Crawl after hours event CrawlAfterDark, which extends hours for certain Cultural District venues participating in the Gallery Crawl to promote the District as a late-night destination.

The Bend of the World is a madcap coming-of-age novel in which no one quite comes of age and everything you know is not a lie, it's just, well, tangential to the truth. James Wolcott says the novel is, "A comedy of bad manners, darting wisecracks, deadpan chagrin, and drug-hazed pratfalls."

In the most audacious literary debut to come out of the Steel City since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, we meet Peter Morrison, twenty-nine and comfortably adrift in a state of not-quite-adulthood, less concerned about the general direction of his life than with his suspicion that all his closest relationships are the products of inertia. He spends his days clocking into Global Solutions (a firm whose purpose remains unnervingly ambiguous) and his weekends listening to the half-imagined rants of his childhood best friend, Johnny. An addict and conspiracy theorist, Johnny believes Pittsburgh is a "nexus of intense magical convergence" and is playing host to a cabal of dubious politicians, evil corporate schemes, ancient occult rites, and otherwise inexplicable phenomena, such as the fact that people really do keep seeing UFOs hovering over the city.

In The Bend of the World Philip K. Dick meets Michael Chabon, and Jacob Bacharach creates an appropriately hilarious, bizarre, and keenly observed portrait of life on the edge of thirty in the adolescent years of twenty-first-century America.

Jacob Bacharach is a Pittsburgh-based novelist and arts administrator. He grew up in Greensburg, PA, and Uniontown, PA, and attended Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, where he earned his BA in English literature and creative writing. He also holds an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. He currently works for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, where he is the operations manager for the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts. Bacharach's genre-crossing writing blends literary and science fiction with conspiracy theory, absurdity, and dark humor to create what Booklist has called "a trippy exercise in ontology." The Bend of the World is his first novel. He lives in Lawrenceville, a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA.

For more information and a complete description of the novel, visit wwnorton.com.

For more information about Gallery Crawl and CrawlAfterDark, visit TrustArts.org/Crawl.

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has overseen one of Pittsburgh's most historic transformations: turning a seedy red-light district into a magnet destination for arts lovers, residents, visitors, and business owners. Founded in 1984, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is a non-profit arts organization whose mission is the cultural and economic revitalization of a 14-block arts and entertainment/residential neighborhood called the Cultural District. The District is one of the country's largest land masses "curated" by a single nonprofit arts organization. A major catalytic force in the city, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is a unique model of how public-private partnerships can reinvent a city with authenticity, innovation and creativity. Using the arts as an economic catalyst, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has holistically created a world-renowned Cultural District that is revitalizing the city, improving the regional economy and enhancing Pittsburgh's quality of life. Thanks to the support of foundations, corporations, government agencies and thousands of private citizens, the Cultural Trust stands as a national model of urban redevelopment through the arts.

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