Ann Packer (1)

Join two acclaimed fiction writers, Ann Packer and Rebecca Makkai as they discuss Ann's long-awaited new novel, The Children’s Crusade. Following the lives of one California family over the course of five decades, The Children’s Crusade maps how a troubled marriage impacts the adult children attempts to create successful families—and identities—of their own. Packer is the bestselling author of Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among other prizes and honors. She lives in San Carlos, CA. Rebecca Makkai is the author of the acclaimed novels The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. Her work has frequently appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's,McSweeney's, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Iowa Review, and has aired on "This American Life." She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters. Her forthcoming novel Music for Wartime will publish this summer. Women & Children First will be hosting a reading of Rebecca’s new novel in August.

Location: Street: 5233 N. Clark St. City: Chicago, Province: Illinois Postal Code: 60640-2122 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

Credit: Elena Seibert

Launch: Ann Packer in conversation with Anthony Marra

Tuesday, April 7, 7:30 p.m.

The Children's Crusade From the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier comes a masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family over the course of five decades. Ann Packer has an incredible eye for detail and is genius at evoking an era with such faithfulness. In addition, you will identify with and deeply care for her characters in her most deeply affecting book yet. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he might create there, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade, they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and under-satisfied at a time when women chafed at the conventions confining them. And Penny will sacrifice anything – her marriage, her children – to become an artist. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and troubles force a reckoning with their history and set off a struggle over the future. Ann Packer is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction and two bestselling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among many other prizes and honors.

Anthony Marra is the winner of a Whiting Award, Pushcart Prize, and the Narrative Prize. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena won the National Book Critics Circle's inaugural John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, as well as the inaugural Carla Furstenberg Cohen Fiction Award. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where he is the Jones Lecturer in Fiction.

Location: Street: 1010 El Camino Real City: Menlo Park, Province: California Postal Code: 94025-4349 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

"These are some of the finest, if not the finest, personal essays I have ever read. With exacting and exquisite prose, Douglas Bauer achieves the truly remarkable here: he plumbs the heart of his midwestern family with brave and naked fairness, rendering his own mortality with a steadfastly clear-eyed and life-loving attention to all that is essential, our shared human frailty and resilience and those tangled but lasting ties that bind. What Happens Next? Matters of Life and Death is a masterful, soul-nourishing work, and I simply cannot recommend it highly enough." Andre Dubus III, author, Townie: A Memoir "A routine medical procedure is the starting point of this beautiful and original book of essays in which Douglas Bauer threads the story of his physical self in and out of the remembered and reconstructed past. The result is a gorgeous meditation on history, mortality, and love." Ann Packer, author, Swim Back to Me Douglas Bauer is the author of several books, including Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home, The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and three novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans. His edited works include Death by pad thai and Other Unforgettable Meals and Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows. Named the Public Library Foundation of Iowa’s Outstanding Writer in 2003, he has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He lives in Boston and teaches literature at Bennington College.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

Spoken Interludes in Los Angeles:

Ann Packer
Critically-acclaimed, bestselling writer Ann Packer reads from her new book, Swim Back to Me.

Bruce Wagner
Critically-acclaimed, bestselling writer Bruce Wagner reads from his new novel, Dead Stars.

Michael Kearns
Critically-acclaimed actor/writer/director/activist Michael Kearns reads from his new book, The Truth is Bad Enough.

Supper Buffet 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Spoken Interludes 7:30 – 8:30 pm (writers read from their work with a Q&A)
Book signing 8:30 – 9:00 pm

$25.00 at the door

Books sold by Book Soup

From http://spokeninterludes.com/index.html
"Spoken Interludes is a critically acclaimed literary salon where award-winning, best-selling, and up-coming writers read their own work. DeLauné Michel created Spoken Interludes in 1996, when the choices for literary events were pretty much limited to poetry readings or signings in bookstores. Since that time, this literary institution in New York and Los Angeles has been covered extensively by publications ranging from The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, GQ Magazine and has been heard on National Public Radio.

The salon begins with the audience arriving from 6:00 to 7:30 for an exquisite buffet dinner. The readings follow from 7:30 until 8:30, and feature writers such as: John Burnham Schwartz, Karen Russell, David Denby, Arthur Phillips, Michael Korda, Frank Bruni, Arianna Huffington, Michael Connelly, Jay McInerney, Jennifer Egan, AJ Jacobs, Kathryn Harrison, Ann Packer and Robert K. Massie. The evening winds down with book signing and chatting with the authors. DeLaune Michel

Since its debut, Spoken Interludes has provided a place where people come together, enjoy great food, and hear stories like their own reflected in the voices of others. See a list of upcoming events. " (MDGentleReader)… (més)

“As audacious, imaginative and poignant as any of Packer’s previous work...Packer can compress a lifetime of hope and sorrow in a short story, and in a brief paragraph can suggest the unspoken language of marriage and family.” The Miami Herald

“A tour de force...With this collection, Ann Packer takes her place among today’s best authors of literary fiction.” The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Ann Packer is the author of two best-selling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, the latter of which received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Real Simple. Also the author of Mendocino and other stories, she lives in northern California with her family.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

Spoken Interludes in Los Angeles:

Ann Packer
Critically-acclaimed, bestselling writer Ann Packer reads from her new book, Swim Back to Me.

Bruce Wagner
Critically-acclaimed, bestselling writer Bruce Wagner reads from his new novel, Dead Stars.

Michael Kearns
Critically-acclaimed actor/writer/director/activist Michael Kearns reads from his new book, The Truth is Bad Enough.

Supper Buffet 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Spoken Interludes 7:30 – 8:30 pm (writers read from their work with a Q&A)
Book signing 8:30 – 9:00 pm

$25.00 at the door

Books sold by Book Soup

From http://spokeninterludes.com/index.html
"Spoken Interludes is a critically acclaimed literary salon where award-winning, best-selling, and up-coming writers read their own work. DeLauné Michel created Spoken Interludes in 1996, when the choices for literary events were pretty much limited to poetry readings or signings in bookstores. Since that time, this literary institution in New York and Los Angeles has been covered extensively by publications ranging from The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, GQ Magazine and has been heard on National Public Radio.

The salon begins with the audience arriving from 6:00 to 7:30 for an exquisite buffet dinner. The readings follow from 7:30 until 8:30, and feature writers such as: John Burnham Schwartz, Karen Russell, David Denby, Arthur Phillips, Michael Korda, Frank Bruni, Arianna Huffington, Michael Connelly, Jay McInerney, Jennifer Egan, AJ Jacobs, Kathryn Harrison, Ann Packer and Robert K. Massie. The evening winds down with book signing and chatting with the authors. DeLaune Michel

Since its debut, Spoken Interludes has provided a place where people come together, enjoy great food, and hear stories like their own reflected in the voices of others. See a list of upcoming events. " (MDGentleReader)… (més)