Author Fred Setterberg

August 19, 2012

Meet Fred Setterberg, author of Lunch Bucket Paradise on Sunday, August 19 at 2pm at the Livermore Public Library Civic Center, 1188 S. Livermore Avenue. There is no charge for this event.  Books will be available for sale and signing.

It’s 1950, and the great suburban experiment has begun.  A new house with three small bedrooms, a garage where you can spend all Saturday tuning up the Chevy or Ford, the promise of a sycamore blooming someday out front by the edge of the postage-stamp, golf-course green lawn.  But over the next twenty years, life will change for the narrator’s blue-collar family as tract homes proliferate, wages soar and then collapse, the inner cities burn, and another war begins in a faraway place called Viet Nam.  Join author Fred Setterberg as he revisits the American Dream and discusses his book Lunch Bucket Paradise.

Fred Setterberg is the author of Lunch Bucket Paradise and The Roads Taken, the coauthor with Lonny Shavelson of Under the Dragon and Toxic Nation, and the editor of Travelers’ Tales America. His essays, stories, and journalism have appeared in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, The Nation, The Utne Reader, The Chicago Reader, The Boston Phoenix, and scores of other national and regional magazines. Fred earned his B.A. in English at the University of California at Berkeley and his M.A. in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.  He is a former staff writer for the East Bay Express and has been a visiting writer with the Chautauqua Writers Center. Fred’s writing has won an NEA fellowship; the Faulkner-Wisdom Essay Prize; fiction awards from Solstice Literary Magazine, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte; the national arts writing prize from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies; feature-writing awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association; and a citation from Project Censor for one of the year’s best “under-reported” stories for his coverage of U.S. military policy in Central America in Mother Jones. He lives in Oakland, California.

The Friends of the Livermore Library have generously underwritten this program as part of the Friends Authors and Arts Series.