N.C. Events: David Wroblewski, Larry Tise & Fred Chappell

This weekend’s big visitor to Triangle area bookstores is David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which earned so many raves reviews last June (the Washington Post called it the “book of the year” when the year was only half over) and is earning a new batch of readers now that it’s out in paperback. Wroblewski will appear Friday evening, November 13, at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books and then again on Saturday at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village.

But while that visiting star may be burning the brightest, don’t let it eclipse two other local lights.

Larry Tise, the Wilbur and Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University, visits Manteo Booksellers on Saturday to discuss his new book, Conquering the Sky: The Secret Flights of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Released just last month, the book explores a series of test flight from 1908 (five years after that First Flight) which prepared the flying machine for the military market — and truly began earning the invention worldwide fame.

Then early next week, Fred Chappell offers up his second new collection of the year. Following on the success of Shadow Box: Poems — an intricate and enjoyable collection —  Chappell will read from Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories at four locations over four days, a whirlwind mini-tour: Tuesday, November 17, at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill; Wednesday, November 18, at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop; Thursday, November 19, at Quail Ridge Books; and Friday, November 20. Basically, no excuse to miss this short story master looking back over a long and distinguished career.

For links to each of the bookstores and a more comprehensive listing of upcoming events, check out the full MetroBooks Calendar here.

Marianne Gingher On “Long Story Short”

Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers offers a concise, comprehensive, and compulsively readable collection of short-short stories. Concise on two counts: In total, the stories number less than 200 pages, and the longest of the stories is less than 1,700 words (the shortest is a mere 95). Comprehensive: The authors featured here make up a who’s who of writers with ties to the Old North State, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Will Blythe, Wendy Brenner, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Angela Davis-Gardner, Sarah Dessen, Pamela Duncan, Pam Durban, Clyde Edgerton, Philip Gerard, Gail Godwin, Randall Kenan, John Kessel, Michael Malone, Doug Marlette, Margaret Maron, Jill McCorkle, Lydia Millet, Robert Morgan, Michael Parker, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, June Spence, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace, just to sample the list of contributors. And as for compulsively readable: Despite the pile of books I should have read first, as soon as Long Story Short arrived in the mail, I couldn’t resist reading at least one of the stories. Since that one was so short, I tried another. And then a third. And, as with a box of bon-bons, before I knew it….

The anthology, edited by Marianne Gingher (who also contributes a story) and published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a timely one. While Gingher points out in her introduction that short-shorts are as old as Aesop, there seems to be a growing trend toward the popularity of very short fiction in all of its forms: flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, even twitter fiction and hint fiction. While many of the stories in this collection tend toward the traditional, to my mind, the book as a whole offers an array of different storytelling strategies and narrative structures, and they’re short enough that you’re able to re-read them easily to figure out how they work. Pam Durban’s “Island,” for example, struck me as so marvelous when I read it the first time that I turned around and read it again, aloud, to my wife. (And the stories are ripe for discussion too: Tara (a flash fiction writer herself) and I disagreed about whether Durban’s piece was as effective as it could be — where the heart of it was, where it might have been cut further, how it all played out.)

Today (Sunday, September 13), Gingher debuted the new collection on the closing day of the North Carolina Literary Festival, and tonight the book will be the focus of the Chapel Hill Public Library Foundation’s 50th anniversary, but even if you miss those events, there are plenty more opportunities to catch readings by the contributors. (See a full list at the bottom of this post.) In advance of the NCLF, Gingher and I talked about the book via email, and I’m grateful for her time (especially in the midst of all the festival’s busy-ness!) and glad to share our interview here.

N.C. Events: Silva, Gilmer, Chappell, Holmstedt

A quick addition to the calendar here offers another chance for N.C. readers to catch Kirsten Holmstedt talking about her new book, The Girls Come Marching Home: The Saga of Women Returning From the War  in Iraq, the follow-up to her successful Band of Sisters. Holmstedt will be at Pomegranate Books in Wilmington tonight, Thursday, July 30, at 7 p.m.

Also on this weekend’s calendar are two thriller writers — one a local talent, one nationally and internationally known. First up, Durham author Bryan Gilmer reads from his new novel, Felonious Jazz, on Friday evening, July 31, at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop. The book pits a Audi-driving detective against a class-conscious, criminally minded jazz bassist in a string of McMansion murders. The jazz group Sawyer-Goldberg provides some background music for the 7 p.m. reading.

Then on Saturday, Daniel Silva brings The Defector, the ninth novel in his series about Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon, to Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books for a 3 p.m. signing. Note that this is a ticketed event — a signing line ticket available with purchase. 

And looking toward next week: Quail Ridge will also host the first area reading by poet Fred Chappell from his new collection, Shadow Box. That event takes place on Wednesday, August 5, at 7:30 p.m., and watch this space for an interview with Chappell in the wake of that event.

For complete information N.C. readings from the Triangle to the coast, check out the MetroBooks calendar.