Decatur Book Festival: Tom Perrotta, "The Leftovers"

Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers, will be speaking Saturday at the Decatur Book Festival. The Leftovers is one of the fall's big anticipated novels and its post-apocalypse theme has gathered a positive review from author Stephen King, who praises the novel for its depiction of "how easily faith can slide into fanaticism."

With an endorsement from Stephen King it would be hard to miss a Hollywood aspect to The Leftovers. Variety recently announced that the author is developing an hour-long drama series with HBO based on the novel.

Perrotta discussed the book's ideas in a recent New York Times article, excepted here. Mr. Perrotta will be appearing on the First Baptist Church Sanctuary Stage at 3 p.m. on Saturday. For more information visit the Festival website.

"I used to describe myself as a comic novelist but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years. I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle ... People are forced to ask, what does this mean? And if it’s meaningless and random and unknowable, then how are we supposed to live?” ...

“I kept bumping up against the Rapture scenario. And I got in that ‘What if?’ mode. What if this happened, what would it be like three or four years in? I immediately thought, you know what, we probably would have forgotten about the Rapture. Because three or four years is an eternity in this culture.” ...

“I’ve been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade ... when I started The Abstinence Teacher, I wanted to write about the culture wars, but at some deep level I must also have wanted to immerse myself in religion and test my thinking against it.” ...

"My book is like the agnostic’s apocalypse. Even though I like using the word ‘Rapture’ because it makes it clear what happened, I also want to disconnect it from its religious context. I was interested in borrowing this scenario to think about collective trauma and grief and the speed of history.” ...

“I have led a fairly charmed life, but I’m 50 years old. You know, you just watch people leave the world, and you get this sense of living among absences. So I think it was a kind of a midlife book ...There I was reading about the Rapture, and I started to think, 'I know that feeling. I know that feeling of being left behind.' We’re always being left behind, we’re always living in a world where there are these spaces where people we knew and loved used to be.”