University of Denver students welcomed American fiction writer Eli Gottlieb last week in Sturm Hall when he came to the University of Denver to share with his readers and friends the scraps from his soon to be published fiction A Man From America.

The main character of the new novel is the American Phillip, who lives in Italy with his wife Camilla. The author calls them “the two creatures of habit.” They live separate lives, and are each unhappy in their own way with the “stale collaboration called marriage.” Both of them are too embarrassed to admit the loneliness they experience together.

“I like the name A Man From America,” Gottlieb said. “It is straightforward and mysterious. I like that.”

Gottlieb currently lives in Rome, and is the author of The Boy Who Went Away, a novel that won Britain’s McKitterick Prize for being the best first novel. Gottlieb’s book was selected as an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review and praised by The Los Angeles Times as “an excellent novel…moving” when it was first published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in January 1997.

Gottlieb has been a senior editor at Elle magazine, a translator of Italian literature and essays and a reviewer and essayist in many major American journals and magazines.

The Creative Writing Program of the University of Denver sponsored the event.

The Creative Writing Department at DU is planning to host a reading by novelist Rikki Ducornet on Oct. 30. Contact Brian Kiteley at bkiteley@du.edu for information.