N.C. Events: The Lee Bros. & More

Matt and Ted Lee aren’t just a southern sensation; they’re a national one, thanks to regular appearances in Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, GQ, The New York Times, and Martha Stewart Living and on the Food Network too. Their latest book, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor, offers possibilities for “the easy, weeknight meal” and promise to be “super approachable for the non-cook,” according to a recent article in the Charleston City Paper down in their own hometown. Today (Thursday, November 5), they’re coming to our neck of the woods with an appearance at 7 p.m. at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop — surely one of the highlights of upcoming events on the book-lover’s calendar (and the foodie’sn calendar too; I’ll admit I’m hungry just thinking about it). The new cookbook was just published earlier this week, and Durham marks the first Southern stop on a tour that runs through mid-December. Needless to say, a great Christmas present (hint, hint).

I’ve already mentioned Roy Williams‘ new memoir, Hard Work, and his tour continues with a stop at the Bull’s Head this afternoon and then elsewhere over the next couple of weeks. Additionally, the Bull’s Head will host author Art Chanskey on Saturday, November 7, with another book on UNC’s basketball program: Light Blue Reign: How a City Slicker, a Quiet Kansan, and a Mountain Man Built College Basketball’s Longest-Lasting Dynasty.

• Annette Dunlap, Frank: The Story of Frances Folsom Cleveland, America’s Youngest First Lady, on Friday, November 6 at the Fayetteville Barnes & Noble
• Mary Akers, Women Up On Blocks: Stories, and Clifford Garstang, In an Uncharted Country, on Friday, November 6, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village and again on Saturday, November 7, at Shakespeare and Company Books in Kernersville
• And short story writers Anne Barnhill, What You Long For, and Maureen Sherbondy, The Slow Vanishing, on Sunday, November 8, at McIntyre’s Books.

For a more comprehensive listing of author events and links to individual bookstore’s websites, check out the MetroBooks Calendar here.

N.C. Events: Mysteries Through Monday

Mysteries take the mainstage at Triangle-area bookstores this weekend, with two appearances by The Deadly Divas, “nice woman who write about murder.” Marcia Talley, newly elected president of Sisters in Crime, leads the group’s outing with her new book, Without a Grave, and she’s joined by Elizabeth Lynn Casey, author of Sew Deadly; Denise Swanson, author of Murder of a Royal Pain; Heather Webber, author of Weeding Out Murder (and of the Lucy Valentine romance series); and Sara Rosett, author of Magnolias, Moonlight and Murder. The group has just begun their swing through North Carolina, and here’s where you can catch them over the next few days:

Friday, October 23

• 10:30 a.m., Coffee with the Divas, The Cary Library, Cary
• 2 p.m., Tea at the Eva Perry Library, Apex
• 7 p.m., The Regulator Bookshop, Durham

Saturday, October 24

• 11 a.m., McIntyre’s at Fearrington Village, Pittsboro
• 2 p.m., West Regional Library, Cary

Sunday, October 25

• 3 p.m., Friendly Center Barnes & Noble, Greensboro

Additionally, don’t miss another bright new name on the mystery scene, Derek Nikitas, with his second novel The Long Division. A graduate of UNC-Wilmington’s MFA program, he’ll be appearing at Wilmington’s Pomegranate Books on Monday, October 26, at 7 p.m.

N.C. Events: New Stories From Jill McCorkle

A.S. Byatt may be the big-name literary celebrity in the Triangle this week, but it’s a homegrown talent that’s really cause for celebration. Algonquin Books has recently published Jill McCorkle’s first short story collection in eight years, Going Away Shoes, and she’s once again proven herself a master of the form. I’ve long been a follower and a fan of McCorkle’s work, and while her novels are undoubtedly impressive, I’ll admit that I take the most joy out of her richly textured, densely packed shorter work — it’s simply a marvel how much life she’s able to pack into such a short amount of space. Even the briefest of the stories here, “View-master” (barely five pages), marks the intersection of several complete lives, and another  of my favorites, “Intervention,” seamlessly weaves past and present — the weight of a lifetime of relationships — into the story of a single momentous evening, one that marks both a turning point and a reaffirmation. That story is also one of the most highly lauded in this collection, having appeared in Ploughshares before being selected both for the Best American Short Stories anthology and for New Stories from the South, and a second story, “Magic Words,” has recently been selected for the upcoming Best American Short Stories.

After reading “Intervention” myself a couple of years back, I had the opportunity to encounter it again when McCorkle read it aloud one evening — and it was just as fascinating that second go-around, maybe even more so since I knew where the story was going and could focus on the small moves that she made to get us there, the layering of information, the small asides that seemed extraneous on the first read but ultimately integral, indispensable. Let that be encouragement for others to check out the new collection and to catch one of the author’s upcoming events: Thursday, October 15, at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines and again on Saturday, October 17, at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village.

N.C. Events: A Kidd and Her Kid

Topping this weekend’s list of big literary events in the Triangle are two visits by bestselling novelist Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor. The elder Kidd is, of course, the author of The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees, and she teams with her daughter her for the new memoir Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, which follows the women to Greece and France on journeys of discovery and bonding. Reviews for the book haven’t been very positive; the Christian Science Monitor, for example, called it an “unrelentingly saccharine book”. But reviews will likely matter little for fans, who’ve already helped the book land firmly on the New York Times bestseller list. And we’ll anticipate big crowds at the Kidds’ two events in the area: Saturday, October 3, at 7 p.m. at the Durham County Library (hosted by the Regulator Bookshop) and Sunday, October 4, at 3 p.m. in Jones Auditorium at Meredith College in Raleigh (hosted by Quail Ridge Books). Note that admission to the QRB event is $5 or free with a purchase of the new book.

Also of note over the next few days:

• Tonight (Thursday, October 1) at 7 p.m., Quail Ridge Books will host a town hall meeting “Remembering Updike” with Dr. Howard Harper, UNC-CH Dept of English, Dr. Victor Strandberg, Duke Dept of English, and Wesley Kort, Duke Dept of Religion.
• On Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., McIntyre’s Books will host the final event of the 2009 Community Read program, in this case celebrating the life and work of George Moses Horton, the famous “slave poet” whose collection The Hope of Liberty (1829) marked the first book by a black author in the South. Saturday’s speakers includes Marjorie Hudson on Horton’s history in Chatham County and Barbara Perry on the subsequent history of African-Americans in Chatham County during the 19th and 20th centuries. Horton’s poetry will be presented by Ruth Horton, Carl Thompson, Esther Coleman, Chris Heintzman, Aleicia Fisher, Ariel Alston, Alston Neville, Ebony Terry, and Essence Terry.
• And look forward next week to a visit from Sarah Vowell, at Quail Ridge Books on Thursday, October 8, with the paperback publication of The Wordy Shipmates.

“This Day In Civil Rights History”

Last week, The Rap Sheet published my reflections on Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing as part of its regular Friday blog series, and editor J. Kingston Pierce was kind enough to schedule that essay on September 25, the anniversary of the day the Little Rock Nine finally entered Central High School in 1957, the same year the book itself was published.

While I wish I could say I had such dates on instant recall in my mind, the truth is that I don’t and I just happened to come across the anniversary when I was flipping through a new book I’d like to recommend here: This Day In Civil Rights History by Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard. As the title promises, the book offers daily mini-essays on major historical events. Just for a quick sampling: April 16, 1963 was the day that Martin Luther King Jr. released his famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” and  June 21, 1964 was the day that civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner was murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Milestone dates, of course, and well known, but the book also offers less obvious choices, such as November 9, 1968, when James Brown first performed his song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” There are 366 essays in all, when you take into account leap-year, and not incidentally, February 29 was the day in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind — as the book emphasizes, “the first African American not only win an Oscar but also to attend the ceremony as a guest instead of a servant.”

While most of the events commemorated here fall during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s — what we traditionally think of as the Civil Rights Era — the book importantly stretches outside of that narrowest of definitions. On September 20, for example, you’ll learn that Maryland passed the nation’s first miscegenation laws on that date in 1664 — and that Alabama was the last state to hang on to such laws, right up into the 21st century. And the span of that entry is important, because the book stresses that civil rights news and issues persist up to to very recent history, whether the Confederate flag controversy in 1998 (October 14) or the reopening of the Emmett Till murder case in 2004 (May 10).

As for today, September 30, it’s an important anniversary as well, with an entry looking back to 1962:

On this day in civil rights history, a deal was struck between segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow the enrollment at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) of its first African American student, James Meredith….

Needless to say, This Day In Civil Rights History is a rich and fascinating book — enough to keep you reading it (dare I say it?) all year round.