Author Tom Paine will continue this fall’s Author Series as its penultimate reader when he visits campus on Nov. 18.

Paine, a finalist for the National Magazine Award, is a widely published fiction writer with numerous awards to his credit.
His short story collection “Scar Vegas” was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Published by Harcourt, this collection was a Pen/Hemingway Award finalist, a Village Voice “Writer on the Verge” pick, an Esquire “Hot List” book and a Barnes and Noble “Discover New Writers” pick.

Paine’s publishing credits include The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, Zoetrope, The Boston Review, The New England Review, and Story.  His fiction also has appeared in the award anthologies for The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize (twice), Best New Stories from the South, American Fiction X: Best Stories from Unpublished Writers and The KGB Bar Reader.

In a review of this short story collection, New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted, “Yet what impresses the reader about Mr. Paine’s stories is not so much their ideology as their extraordinary variety and narrative verve. In each of them, the author immediately establishes an extreme situation that rivets your attention, whether it is the plight of Melanie Applebee, an out-of-work brokerage executive who suddenly finds herself a derelict in ‘A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market First Breaking 6,000,’ or the twin brothers in ‘Ceausescu’s Cat,’ who struggle with their feeling of being invisible in totalitarian Romania.”

Writing in the Austin Chronicle, critic Mark Wilson found unusual narrative breadth and excitement in “Scar Vegas”: “However he wants to classify his work, one thing is for certain: Tom Paine has delivered an exciting debut. One of the most impressive things about Paine’s book is the variety of voices he inhabits, as well as the many locales in which he situates his stories — from Romania to the Virgin Islands to North Carolina. In the hilarious ‘Unapproved Minutes of the Carthage, Vermont, Zoning Board of Adjustment,’ he enters the head of the supposedly unbiased secretary who recounts the events of a heated town meeting, and in the stunning ‘The Battle of Khafji’ a soldier witnesses the brutality of the Gulf War, which he terms ‘Operation Video Game’ due to its high-tech methods of warfare.”

His novel “The Pearl of Kuwait,” also published by Harcourt, was featured on NPR, reviewed nationally and recently optioned.
Paine, will read from his work at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18, in the Stearns Cinema Room. His reading is free and open to the public.