Events
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Start: 7:00 pm
A special pleasure it is this evening to have Francine du Plessix Gray, long one of this country's most accomplished and esteemed writers, author of numerous works of non-fiction (Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, Them: A Memoir of Parents) and fiction (Lovers and Tyrants) here at Elliott Bay. She visits with a much-anticipated new novel, The Queen's Lover (Penguin Press). Set in the court of Marie Antoinette and featuring her lover, the Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen, this is a compelling tale as the French Revolution is about to unfold. "Now the redoubtable Francine du Plessix Gray has brought the count fully to life ... In The Queen's Lover, Gray offers a rich and exacting portrait of Fersen and his world. Reading it is like stepping through one of Versailles's famed looking glasses into the roistering turmoil of late 1700s France, and seeing it afresh, freed from the endless shellacking of time and myth ... Just as history has lessons for us, so does historical fiction. And few novelists could so effectively show us how to hold firm in roiling times (like our own) as Gray." – Library Journal.
Start: 7:00 pm
Co-presented with the WASHINGTON CENTER FOR THE BOOK AT THE SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY. Twenty-one years after writing Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, a book that has become a contemporary classic of family and place, Terry Tempest Williams has returned to some of the same subject matter, albeit from an even deeper, more graced perspective than before, in her powerful new book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "Each book by ecologist, activist, and writer Williams is an event, so lucid, caring, spirited, and incantatory is her approach to the matrix of nature, place, culture, family, and sense of self ... Williams is transcendent in her piercing, musical, elegiac, and loving reflections on women's lives and wilderness, light and shadow, words expressed and words unspoken and invisible." – Donna Seaman, Booklist. Amen. Free admission is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Seattle Public Library is at 1000 Fourth Avenue (between Madison & Spring). For more information, please see www.spl.org or call (206) 386-4636.
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