FINN Effects: Noted Author Launches National Menu Contest

Calling All Book Clubs: Noted Author Launches National Menu Contest

LUDLOW, Vt., Jan. 9, 2008 -- When book clubs get together, you're sure to find two things: lots of great discussion, and lots of great food.

One noted author has launched a contest that brings the two even closer together. Jon Clinch, author of the widely praised novel Finn, has announced the Finn Book Club Menu Contest. The challenge: develop a menu based on the food mentioned in his acclaimed novel. The prize: a visit to your book club from the author, as well as classroom copies of the book for your local school.

Named as one of 2007's top novels by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Book Sense, and Amazon.com, Finn is by no means a merely food-focused book. Instead, it's the dark, secret history of one of American literature's most notorious characters: Huckleberry Finn's father. Certain foods, however, do receive prominent mention in the book.

"I was inspired to launch the contest by a group I visited at a literary festival," said Clinch. "They served a dinner based on the kind of food that appears in Finn. I thought it was a fantastic idea, and I'm excited about helping it happen again."

Here's how the contest works: Design a menu for your book club to enjoy when you discuss Finn. Use your imagination. Use your frying pan. Use catfish and whiskey and fatback bacon and cornbread and sunfish and baking powder biscuits and ... well, you get the idea. Be inspired. Have fun. And make sure that you don't forget the huckleberries. Entries are due February 15, 2008.

Clinch says the inspiration for the novel came from his childhood fascination with Pap Finn, Huckleberry Finn's cruel and racist father. Mark Twain left the character dead in a room crowded with oddities (a wooden leg, women's underclothing, black masks), and from those seeds Clinch has created the remarkable life story of this brutal and explosive man. The darkly complex character of Finn - violent, alcoholic, racist, goaded by his rancorous relationship with his father The Judge and his equally fractured relationship with his own son Huck - makes him one of the most arresting literary creations to appear in years. And the themes at the heart of Finn are universal: race, paternity, the stain of slavery of a nation and a family, what we take from our parents and give to our sons, and our own limitless power to self-destruct.

Runners-up to the contest will receive a phone visit from the author, and classroom copies of the book. Full contest details are posted at the author's web site, http://www.jonclinch.com, and more information on the book is at http://www.ReadFinn.com.