April 5, 1999		Fiction Writer Elizabeth Searle Reads at Oberlin College Media Contact: Marci Janas
	READING Tuesday, April 27 8:00 p.m. King Building Room 106 (corner of N. Professor and W. College streets) Free public event For more information, please call the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program at (440) 775-6567		OBERLIN, OH--Elizabeth Searle's debut novel, A Four-Sided Bed (Graywolf Press, 1998), explores gender identity and sexual boundaries through the uninhibited passion of a relationship with multiple partners. The Boston Phoenix writes that Searle's novel "stretches the angles of friendship, the lines of love and the curves of lust. [It is] lyrical, corporeal and deeply demanding." Listeners will be able to explore Searle's fictive world when she reads from A Four-Sided Bed at Oberlin College on April 27. Searle graduated from Oberlin in 1983. A Four-Sided Bed centers on a young married couple whose lives are interrupted--and disrupted--by the past: the unexpected arrival of the husband's first lovers, a man and woman with whom he had an affair when he was a voluntary patient at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. The Bay Area Reporter writes: "Searle makes us understand that sometimes the most honest people do dishonest things; when feelings go fugitive, any of us can find ourselves doing the unimaginable. . .Searle does nothing less than map out the multiplicity of paradoxes we all must navigate." Searle won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 1992 for her story collection My Body to You. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Emerson College and lives in Arlington, Mass. Her reading is sponsored by the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program and the Alumni Association.