Lectures at Margaret Mitchell House
The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House offers a variety of lectures throughout the year showcasing award-winning authors who share insight into their latest publication. Admission for all lectures is $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers, and FREE to Annual Fund donors, unless otherwise noted. For more information or to purchase tickets, please call 404.814.4150. The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House
Told in turns in the first person by Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee just released from a UK detention center, and Sarah, a British journalist whose fate is braided with Little Bee’s through tragedy, the novel follows these two women as they struggle to save each other and themselves. Little Bee tries to make a life for herself in a totally alien land, while Sarah must come to terms with her personal and professional choices. United by their past and by love for Sarah's young son Charlie, Little Bee and Sarah become indispensable to each other. But their bond will face the ultimate test when the system catches up with Little Bee, and each woman must make a devastating decision.
In 1937 Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Two sisters are forced to leave their cosmopolitan lives in Shanghai for a new start in Los Angeles. Suspenseful, provocative, and intelligent, Shanghai Girls is both a story about the adventures of two particular sisters and a story that reminds us all of the intense love, tension, and struggle inherent in every family. Lisa See is the New York Times-bestselling author of Peony in Love, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), The Interior, and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year.
An enduring mystery of Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, following the death of his wife of thirty-four years and up to his own death in1910. Despite many biographies, it is unclear how his experiences in those final years affected him, personally and professionally. It was believed Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges. Suspecting there was more to the story, Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, went in search of Isabel Lyon, the one woman who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twain’s life and writings. Following sixteen years of research, Mark Twain’s Other Woman reveals Lyon’s daily journals, the only detailed record of Twain’s last years that were overlooked by Twain’s previous biographers. Raised in Southern California, Trombley attended Pepperdine University where she earned her B.A. and M.A., and the University of Southern California, where she earned a Ph.D. in English literature. She is the author of Mark Twain in the Company of Women and is the president of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where she lives with her husband and son. APRIL 2010 Scholars of the Salem witch trials have long asked why the accusers chose to ruin so many lives. In The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, author Katherine Howe,asks another question - what if the women really were witches? In the novel, Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin finds the name “Deliverance Dane” on a scrap of paper inside an old Bible. The discovery launches her on a quest that includes visions of a woman condemned in 1690s Salem for practicing “physick” - herbal healing - and her own efforts to save her injured boyfriend through an ancient and mystical cure. Before time runs out, she must locate the actual physick book of Deliverance Dane. As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story fall into place, Goodwin begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past than she imagined. Katherine Howe is completing a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies at Boston University. Two of her ancestors were tried as witches in 1692. Elizabeth Proctor survived the ordeal; Elizabeth Howe did not. The idea for The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane developed while Howe was studying for her exams, walking her dog through the woods between Marblehead and Salem, Massachusetts. She lives in Marblehead with her husband. Like Zelda Fitzgerald before her, Norris Church Mailer has led a life as colorful and eventful as her husband’s. Crowned Little Miss Little Rock at age three, and dating Bill Clinton in her early twenties, Norris has gone from one adventure to the next, along the way learning a number of universal truths about love, marriage, family, friendship, and, of course, writing. In a winning narrative voice that evokes her native Arkansas, Norris recounts the stories of a bright, talented girl who knew her life would one day be as surprising and memorable as an afternoon at the circus.
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Chris Cleave
Lisa See
Laura Skandera Trombley
Katherine Howe
