Wednesday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m.
Karen Joy Fowler and Gail Tsukiyama, introduced by Jane Hamilton
WCF presents award-winning author Jane Hamilton (Map of the World, Laura Rider's Masterpiece), who will host a reading and conversation with Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) and Gail Tsukiyama (A Hundred Flowers). Don't miss this memorable evening featuring three stellar writers together!
In Gail Tsukiyama's A Hundred Flowers it's China, 1957-the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao has declared a new openness in society, but one July morning 5-year-old Tao watches helplessly as his father is dragged away to a labor camp for writing a letter criticizing the Communist Party. Tao's mother must struggle to hold her small family together despite her husband's absence, and other members of the household must face their own guilty secrets and strive to find peace in a world where the old sense of order is falling. Tsukiyama brings us a powerfully moving story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with grace and courage.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, is classic Karen Joy Fowler: subversive, visionary, wise, morally complex, and wickedly witty. But with its arresting premise, drawn from American animal behavior experiments dating back to the 1930's, it offers a startlingly original take on the dysfunctional American family, while raising intriguing questions about the limits of science and the rights of animals, as well as the intricacies of memory and forgetting, the power of language and storytelling, and the nature of human and animal consciousness.
Thursday, September 26, 7:30 pm, WCF presents Edwidge Danticat,
Claire of the Sea Light at First Free Church, 5255 N. Ashland
Set in a seaside village in Haiti, Danticat's fifth work of fiction Claire of the Sea
Light is both dazzling and intricate. Centering on seven-year-old Claire, the tale looks back to the people she's lost in her short life, even as her future hangs in suspense. Nozias, her fisherman father, struggles to raise Claire alone after her mother's death, but he thinks she would fare better in the home of a wealthy businesswoman. What will Claire's fate be? Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but now lives in the United States. She is a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and the winner of the Story Prize, the Pushcart Short Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also a National Book Award nominee.
Admission requires purchase of Claire of the Sea Light from Women & Children First. (Note: The Women's Voices Fund will provide a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot afford to buy the book.) For more info or book orders, call
773-769-9299 or visit www.womenandchildrenfirst.com .
