Verlyn Klinkenborg reads at Real Art Ways
Insightful observations on humans
from a reptile’s point of view

Hartford, CT: May 16, 2006 – Real Art Ways presents author Verlyn Klinkenborg reading from his new novel Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile on Thursday, June 8 from 6-8pm, with plenty of time for conversation with the writer. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor St. in Hartford. The event is free and open to the public. For more information visit www.realartways.org.

"A dazzling riff on human beings and their weird ways ‘written’ by an 18th century tortoise” – starred Kirkus review

As a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes poetic, witty and engagingly honest essays about rural life, the environment, nature, and man’s interconnected relationship to each.

In Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Klinkenborg looks at the full scope of the natural environment through the eyes of a female tortoise named Timothy, who was an actual resident of English curate Gilbert White’s garden in England in the 1780’s. (Timothy’s shell now resides in a London museum.)

White, author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), often wrote of the tortoise who lived in his garden, but Klinkenborg takes Timothy and fully imagines her voice and her baneful cleverness and transforms her into an unsentimental, yet sensitive, observer of human kind. As Klinkenborg imagines her, she becomes a social critic and astute anthropologist whose observations are as likely to make you laugh out loud as they are to make you seriously ponder the generally held idea that human beings are superior to other animals.

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