Jonathan Lerner: ALEX UNDERGROUND
Wednesday 7/21 7:30pm Outwrite Bookstore
Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion, idealism and deceit, love, loss and survival.
It’s 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution.
Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong... Meanwhile Alex comes to see that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side. “That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.
Alison Weir: CAPTIVE QUEEN: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine7/22 7pmMargaret Mitchell House
A Tudor specialist, popular British historian Weir has ventured, with great success, into the increasingly expansive world of historical fiction with Innocent Traitor (2007) and The Lady Elizabeth (2008); now she relocates further back in English history, into the twelfth century.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the ruler of a powerful French duchy in her own right; her marriage to King Louis VII of France was annulled when she set eyes on the handsome Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou. Eleanor and he married, he succeeded to the English throne, and Eleanor found herself queen of England. Their tumultuous marriage is the backbone of this novel. Henry was ever lusty, and Eleanor was no shrinking violet herself. Much of the battleground between these two strong-willed individuals was their sons: Henry fought against them; Eleanor fought for them like the she-lion she was.
The history itself is inherently dramatic, augmented here by Weirs usual lush detail, which stimulates rather than detracts from the well-paced narrative.
David Bottoms: The Onion’s Dark Core7/22 Decatur Library, 7:15 pm
David Bottoms, the distinguished Poet Laureate of Georgia and one of America’s finest poets will read from his latest work. The book is The Onion’s Dark Core, and it’s mostly a collection of essays composed by the poet. Edward Hirsch calls it a book that is ”personal, keenly thoughtful” and ”that treats poetry with the seriousness it deserves, as ’the most natural vehicle of the spirit’.” Bottoms has written six other books of poetry and two novels, and he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
“What Bottoms has to say about place in poetry, consequence in poetry, and his own role in the murky matter, not to say sound, of Southern poetry is worth the price of multiple volumes. Bottoms writes something more like meditation than criticism and his book will pleasure long and well the most discriminating as well as the amateur reader.”
— Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004
“David Bottoms has always been one of the seekers and yearners among our poets. In these pages he gives us an indelible sense of why that is so. Rooted in experience, rich with a sense of place, wise and frankly honest, these essays and interviews give an encouraging vision of our poetry as it makes its uncertain way into the 21st century.”
— Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems
