Authors Cathryn Hankla (Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home) and Marion Winik (The Baltimore Book of the Dead) will discuss their heroines’ journeys of leaving, wandering, and finally returning and discovering with new eyes their places of origin with their ever so curious inhabitants.
Why should you attend?
“Engaging, funny, associative, and smart, Cathryn Hankla’s Lost Places is the best book I know on the subject of home, in that it doesn’t restrict its concerns to floorboards and beams, but opens its doors to animals, the body, God, sex, language, and something even rarer: the intimacy of entering a human mind at work.” —Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door
“From one of the keenest observers of sign and symbols comes a collection of personal, meditative, graceful, philosophical, and puncturing essays that uncover the manifestations of the otherworldly that reside in the ordinary spaces of life. Nothing is as it might seem. These essays show us how to both beware and be attentive. From the trivial to the insurmountable, Cathryn Hankla rummages deep to unpack what is left after emotional and physical losses and relocations. She reaches outward to a vast variety of subjects in order to pull the world inward only to give it all back again.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between and The Body
“You’ll want to read The Baltimore Book of the Dead as slowly as possible because every observation is a marvel, every sentence a heartbreak or a revelation of joy. This book is both brief and miraculous, and it will be finished before you’re ready to let it go. Like life.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
“Feast on Marion Winik’s jewelbox of a book filled with gold nuggets of prose and a fevered passion for life even though much is an homage to death itself. Every sentence is a carefully considered slam dunk…. Breathless, heartbreaking, invigorating.” —Literary Hub
This event is part of the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book. A full schedule of events is available here.