April 1, 2002 Colin Harrison SELINSGROVE, (Pa.) --- Colin Harrison is set to cap off the 20th season of the Susquehanna University Writers' Institute's Visiting Writers Series with a reading Tuesday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the Studio Theater of the Degenstein Campus Center. A deputy editor for Harper's Magazine and the author of four novels, Harrison has been described as "a creamy stylist and crack storyteller" in a Salon magazine review by Peter Kurth. "Mr. Harrison is a writer of serious talent…Afterburn is full of memorable sequences…the author conjures vivid milieus (a Shanghai construction site, a hidden Long Island Cottage, a Big Apple parking garage) and populates them with eccentrics worthy of Balzac or Dickens…Afterburn mesmerizes and convinces," Tom Nolan wrote in The Wall Street Journal of Harrison's most recent novel. Similar praise comes from an Entertainment Weekly review. Tom DeHaven writes: "Both Koontz's and Perry's work could have been helped enormously by the kind of rigorous authenticity that Colin Harrison brings to every page of Afterburn." "[Harrison] spares no detail of sex or violence, imbuing every phrase with a visceral punch and a sardonic tone," Miranda Schwartz wrote in the Chicago Tribune about Manhattan Nocturne, Harrison's third novel. The book, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was described by People magazine as "a white-knuckle ride" and by the Detroit Free Press as "a brooding, erotic mystery thriller." The reading is partially sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For more information, please contact Gary Fincke, director of the Writers' Institute, at (570) 372-4164. Contact: Kelly Bugden 570-372-4119 #kmb/2257#