Join us for an evening of conversation between authors Julia Alvarez and Jill McCorkle and learn about their latest novels, recently released in paperback - great for book groups!
Antonia, the protagonist of Alvarez's Afterlife, has just retired from teaching at a small liberal arts college in Vermont when her beloved husband suddenly dies and then her sister disappears… Her life upended, Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep.
“Resonant . . . The novel, set in 2019, poses questions about American immigration and mental-health policies, and it is a moving exploration of the ways we inadvertently fail the people we love."
—The New Yorker
Alvarez has written many acclaimed novels, including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Saving the World. She is also a prize-winning poet, children's author, and essayist. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. Alvarez is writer-in-residence emerita at Middlebury College, where she occasionally teaches workshops in creative writing.
In McCorkle's novel, Hieroglyphics, Lil and Frank married young, having bonded over how they both lost a parent when they were children. Now retired to the town where Frank grew up, they are faced - in different ways - with how they want to remember and record the past. McCorkle examines what it means to be a parent, and to be a child trying to know your parents.
“Hieroglyphics is a novel that tugs at the deepest places of the human soul—a beautiful, heart-piercing meditation on life and death and the marks we leave on this world.”
—Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle
An award-winning author, McCorkle, has published eight novels and four collections of short stories. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and The Atlantic. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
To join the online event, please email virtual55@norwichbookstore.com. The link will be sent automatically. (Be sure to check your email filters.)
Our virtual gatherings are usually limited to 100 participants, first come, first admitted, but we have expanded that due to popular demand for this event!
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020
A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms.
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020
A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms.
“Hieroglyphics is a novel that tugs at the deepest places of the human soul—a beautiful, heart-piercing meditation on life and death and the marks we leave on this world.
“Hieroglyphics is a novel that tugs at the deepest places of the human soul—a beautiful, heart-piercing meditation on life and death and the marks we leave on this world.