Reading: David Borofka: The End of Good Intentions

Annie Bloom's Books welcomes California author and Lewis & Clark alum David Borofka for a reading from his new novel, The End of Good Intentions.

About The End of Good Intentions:

Set between the mid-1970s and today, the novel moves back and forth through the turbulence of recent American history, charting the course of characters such as Michael Wayte, the pre-ministerial student who becomes the owner of a foothill bar; Leah Green, the Jewish student who finds herself a stranger in a strange Christian environment; Walter Book, the gay English professor, who doesn't know he's gay; and Eivar Mortenson, whose actions at the beginning of the novel become the catalyst for all that is to come. In The End of Good Intentions, David Borofka examines the gap between desire and emptiness, conviction and extremism, those who believe absolutely in the certitude of their perspective and those who live on the outer margins of doubt and uncertainty.

David Borofka, an award-winning author, explores the relationship of spirituality with sexuality, religion with the deceptions of piety. Elizabeth Gaffney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, observes, "Moments of giddy redemption leaven the woes of Mr. Borofka’s characters, but the real miracle is the deftness, subtlety and humor with which he makes their many bedeviled lives cohere in a single vision of well-earned affirmation." His collection, Hints of His Mortality, won the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His novel, The Island, was published by MacMurray & Beck. His most recent collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, was published in March 2022, as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series and was acknowledged with an American Fiction Award for the short story from American Book Fest. A new collection of stories The Bliss of Your Attention, will once again be published by Johns Hopkins in the spring of 2025.