Author Daniel Torday

The Chestnut Hill Book Festival and Speaker Series presents a meet and greet and wine and cheese night on Thursday, June 4 at 7:00 p.m. with two award-winning novelists, Daniel Torday and Ken Kalfus, at the Bombay Room of the Chestnut Hill Hotel, 8200 Germantown Ave. These two distinguished authors will read from their current novels and sign books. The event is free and open to the public.

Daniel Torday, the director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College and editor at The Kenyon Review, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for his novella, "The Sensualist." Torday’s short stories and essays have also appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, The New York Times and The Kenyon Review.

Torday will read from his latest work, "The Last Flight of Poxl West," which explores the reconciliation of the true nature of family and loss through the derring-do of a Czechoslovakian war hero.

In a New York Times book review, Teddy Wayne praises Torday's work: “Expertly crafted…lyrical prose, superb Rothian sentences that glide over the page as smoothly as a Spitfire across a cloudless sky…an utterly accomplished novel. Daniel Torday is a writer, one with real talent and heart.”

Ken Kalfus, born in New York, has lived in Paris, Dublin, Belgrade, and Moscow. He currently dwells in Philadelphia, and his books have been translated into more than ten foreign languages. Kalfus has written for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, and he was a celebrated finalist for the 2006 National Book Award with his novel, "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country."

Kalfus will delve into his novel, "Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories," in which he riffs on current events with the story of an international banker accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

According to a review on Booklist, "Kalfus ... showcases a dazzling versatility of style and imagination... devotees and newcomers alike will be richly rewarded by the author's impressive display here of rhetorical inventiveness and ingenious ideas."