(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Author, editor, and critic Laurie Stone will read from and discuss her new book, “My Life as an Animal, Stories,” at the Hudson Opera House on Saturday, October 22, at 5pm. The reading is free and will be followed by a reception and booksigning.

“My Life as an Animal” features a series of interconnected and comic stories that blur the lines between memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism. Through the book’s impressionistic style it builds a narrative via seemingly unrelated anecdotes and observations. Its tantalizing challenge to readers is that what is being read may be autobiographical but may also be fiction, or fictionalized autobiography. The book is simply called “stories” on the cover and title page. In the end, whether it is “real” or “imagined,” it is gripping, narrative prose.

Laurie Stone is author of “My Life as an Animal, Stories,” the novel “Starting with Serge,” and the essay collection “Laughing in the Dark,” as well as the editor of and contributor to the memoir anthology “Close to the Bone.” A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1974-1999), she has been theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on NPR’s Fresh Air.

In 1996, Stone won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. She has taught at the Paris Writers Workshop, Chapman University, Sarah Lawrence, Fairleigh Dickinson, Ohio State, Arizona State University, and Fordham. She served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and was included in the “Living Writers Series” at Muhlenberg College. She lives in New York City.