The Middleburg Library Advisory Board is pleased to announce the seventh event in its Local Book and Author Series: A reading and question-and-answer session with the award-winning novelist and short story writer, John Rolfe Gardiner, focusing on his new, acclaimed collection of short stories, North of Ordinary.

The event will take place beginning at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9, at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church Parish House in Middleburg. It is free and open to the public.

“We don’t get any more local than the great John Gardiner,” said MLAB President Kathryn Baran, “He and his wife Joan have lived in Unison for more than 40 years and much of his brilliant fiction writing—including the stories in North of Ordinary—is based on literary observations of life in our rural area of Virginia and the culture west of the Beltway.”

John Gardiner grew up in Northern Virginia during World War II. After college, he served in the Army Security Agency, then worked as a journalist in New York and Washington. His first novel, Great Dream from Heaven (1974), received rave reviews and earned him a membership in the Mark Twain Society.

He has since written five novels and three story collections, and his fiction has appeared in the The New Yorker, American Scholar, O Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories, among many other places. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Writers Grant and a winner of the Lila Wallace Award for Fiction.

John Gardiner “is a writer worth celebrating,” The New York Times Book Review noted. “His understanding of [his] characters, and the society they inhabit, is profound.”

He will be signing copies of North of Ordinary before and after the presentation.

John Gardiner’s website is https://johnrolfegardiner.net