On December 3rd, join us for a conversation on David Øybo’s novel Julebord: The Holiday Party, with the author and panelists Dr. Alexander Lasareff-Mironoff and Hana Mironoff! The panel will explore Øybo’s page-turning literary whodunnit about a holiday murder in the far north of Norway. In addition to discussing rural hospitals, surfing, and how to survive a Julebord in Scandinavia, they’ll also the medical topics explored in the book, specifically FGM and PAS, and how shortcuts in thinking can sometimes fool us.
On December 23, 2019, a body washes up on the shores of Godshus, where a fjord meets the North Sea. Should chief investigator James Wiley Redding of the Norwegian Police suspect that any of the doctors employed at the area’s small rural hospital? Inspired in part by Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), the book’s experimental approach allows readers to choose their own reading path through correlated events — as experienced by the six doctors who have wound up at this remote location, across timelines spanning from 1960 through Julebord. And as the race is on for Investigator Redding to solve the crime, it becomes clear that in today’s small global village we are all linked in some way — whether we want to be or not. The first book in Øybo’s Correlations Trilogy, Julebord has been a finalist of the Canadian Book Club Awards and has been acclaimed as a “gleefully unorthodox and absorbing crime story” (Kirkus Reviews).
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
When not busy either with his family, or working nights as an internal medicine doctor in hospitals on islands, David Øybo is trying to finish the two remaining stories of the Correlations Trilogy. He lives in New York City. Should there ever be enough time and space, he would get one more cat besides Maša, his Russian Blue.
Dr. Alexander Lasareff-Mironoff is a retired Experimental Social Psychologist with degrees from Harvard University and the University of Arkansas. He has conducted studies in the mental processes involved in pro- and anti-social behaviors, control motivation, cultural worldviews and social dilemmas. He has taught Psychology at the university level and developed coursework in the field of Management Development for several major U.S. corporations while actively pursuing his lifelong interest in language, literature, and translation. His articles, short stories, op-eds and literary translations have appeared in both national and regional publications. He has also co-authored plays with his wife, Hana, one of which, Much Ado About Willie, was selected by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2015 for a staged public reading.
Hana Mironoff: After emigrating to the U.S. from Czechoslovakia, Hana completed a BA in Economics at the University of Houston. While studying, she worked as an English/Russian translator for NASA’s Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). In addition to translating flight documentation, she was part of the team that compiled a bilingual glossary of space terminology for the mission. Her translating work continued at Fluor Engineers during design and construction of major gas processing plants in Siberia. She subsequently pursued a career in accounting, but soon began attending MFA-level courses in creative writing and playwriting at the University of Arkansas. Hana is a founding member of the Arkansas Playwrights’ Workshop (APW) and her plays have been performed at various venues, including theatres in New York, Northwest Arkansas, Montgomery, AL and Jackson, MS. Aside from creating original plays, she has adapted works from Russian and Czech literature, such as the Russian Symbolist novel, A Petty Demon by F. Sologub and the Czech plays of Karel and Josef Čapek. She has also adapted several short stories by Eudora Welty, H.H. Munro (Saki) and others for the stage.