MARCH 28

Long gone is the time when American writers looked West for hope. Today, demythologizing the frontier has become almost a craze. Most novelists (especially Cormac McCarthy) have settled for demolishing our legends about cowboys and Indians, but Bradford Morrow, author of Trinity Fields, finds his disillusionment in the modern age at Los Alamos, the town that built the atomic bomb. Morrow’s two main characters, a pair of boys born at Los Alamos in 1944, travel east to New York and west to Vietnam, but—like America itself—they never succeed in escaping the sins of Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Morrow reads from Trinity Fields at 7 p.m. at Chapters, 1512 K St. NW. FREE. (202) 619-7222. (David Plotz)