Novelist and anthropologist John Colman Wood, author of The Names of Things, gives a talk at the Downtown Eugene Public Library on Thursday, June 7, 6:00 p.m. Admission is free.

The Names of Things is a journey into the meaning of love and rituals of grief. The novel weaves together the threads of an anthropologist’s journey into the African desert to live among camel-herding nomads, his observations of their culture’s death rituals, his own grief for his wife, and his struggle “to find the names of things for which no words exist.”

John Colman Wood teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has twice won the Ethnographic Fiction Prize of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. He is also the author of the nonfiction story When Men Are Women: Manhood Among Gabra Nomads of East Africa.

For more information, contact the Eugene Public Library at 541-682-5450 or www.eugene-or.gov/library.

Co-sponsored by Eugene Public Library, Friends of Eugene Public Library, and Eugene Public Library Foundation.