Reader’s Circle on Zoom
Wednesday, March 16, 2022, 1:00 -2:30 p.m.
Yesterday’s Weather by Anne Enright
First publication of a new collection of the Booker Prize-winner’s stories including those from her most recent hardback ‘Taking Pictures’.
In Yesterday’s Weather, Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright presents a series of deeply moving stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright’s characters are haunted by the ghosts of the lives they might have led – lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out. A woman’s one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another’s is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. This collection includes some of Enright’s best loved stories as well as her latest works. These are sharp, vivid tales of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.
See Anne Enright share her thoughts on writing in a segment from Irish Writers in America.
Reader’s Circle meets monthly to discuss popular works of fiction and short stories.
To register or request a Zoom link, send your request to dobref@wlsmail.org and indicate title of program, date, and your name and email.
Town and Gown Literary Discussion Group on Zoom
Thursday, March 24, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo
A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States.
In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She is the incumbent United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She is also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to serve three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv.
Read more about Joy Harjo at the National Women’s History Museum site.
The Town and Gown Literary Discussion Group meets to discuss contemporary and classic plays essays, short stories, poems and novels. It is co-sponsored by Mercy College School of Liberal Arts, Department of Literature and Language, and the Dobbs Ferry Public Library.
To register or request a Zoom link, send your request to dobref@wlsmail.org and indicate title of program, date, and your name and email.