Stanford Literature professor, Hilton Obenzinger, reading and signing his new book "A**Hole"

“Hilton Obenzinger is an American original. His lost histories are acts of legerdemain and cunning—mixing truth and imagination in ways rarely seen before.” —Paul Auster

A young boy wakes one morning to discover he is sinking into the earth despite the new sneakers his parents promised would save him. A young woman begins reviewing films before they are made. A postal worker named Gary fulfills his occupational cliché and attacks Danny DeVito. A father writes letters to his wayward and far-flung sons. An archeologist finds evidence, perhaps, of the permanence of time as well as earth. A detective accepts a case requiring him to connect Patty Hearst to her other self.

Though the story in A*HOLE is in continual flux, Obenzinger skillfully braids the multiple narrative threads into a novel which is much larger than its physical size, lyrically beautiful, and absorbing through and through. Hilton Obenzinger has created an experimental fiction readers will experience as much as read, in which he swirls together around the vortex created by the pull of his central hole

Graduating from Columbia in 1969, he has taught on the Yurok Indian Reservation, operated a community printing press in San Francisco's Mission District, co-edited a publication devoted to Middle East peace, worked as a commercial writer and instructional designer. He received his doctorate in the Modern Thought and Literature Program at Stanford University in 1997 and currently teaches writing and American literature at Stanford and San Francisco State University.