Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, December 7, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

Synopsis: Richard is a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.

Photo by Nina Subin

Jenny Erpenbeck: World-Acclaimed Author and Former Opera Director

This biography is lifted wholesale from the unimpeachable source of all knowledge.

Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.

From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles), she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's “Erwartung,” Bartók's “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” and a world premiere of her own piece, “Cats Have Seven Lives.” As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's “L'Orfeo” in Aachen, “Acis and Galatea” at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Zaide” in Nuremberg/Erlangen.

In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2015 the English translation of her novel The End Of Days (Aller Tage Abend) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son and with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic.

I was only able to find a couple of YouTube videos of Jenny Erpenbeck talking about Go, Went, Gone. This one of a reading and discussion at Harvard University, in my opinion, had the best sound quality. As you will notice, it's an hour and 45 minutes long. She is very soft-spoken and has (of course) a heavy German accent. Enjoy.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, November 2, 2019, 2:00 PM San Leandro Main Library

One Station Away by Olaf Olafsson

Synopsis: The story of a New York neurologist and the three women who change his life: An overlooked pianist who finally receives fraught success after decades of disappointment; an elusive dancer whose untimely death her fiancé is desperate to untangle; a mysterious patient who is comatose after a violent accident. Magnus, a New York neurologist—son to one, lover to another, and doctor to a third—is the thread that binds these women’s stories together as he navigates relationships defined by compromise and misunderstanding, guilt and forgiveness, and, most of all, by an obsessive attempt to communicate—to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved.



Tracking the Elusive Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson

Photo by Annelisa Leinbach

Compared to other authors we have read, there is very little to be found about the man himself on the internet. The biographical information is pretty much limited to his official bio everywhere you look:

Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of three previous novels, The Journey Home, Absolution and Walking Into the Night, and a story collection, Valentines. His books have been published to critical acclaim in more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of the O. Henry Award and the Icelandic Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and has twice been nominated for the IMPAC Award. He is the Executive Vice President of Time Warner and he lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

As I was putting this post together, I found an article in Bookpage where Olafsson talks about One Station Away and a little bit about his personal life. Among the interesting tidbits: His father, Olafur Sigurdsson, was an award-winning Icelandic author. You should probably click on the link and read the whole article as this is the longest discussion of the book by the author that I was able to find in any one article. I did find a slide show in the New York Times about his cozy little New York pied-à-terre.

It is easier to find information about his non-literary career. From the fount of all knowledge, I learned that Olafsson had worked for Sony, founding Sony Computer Entertainment at the time that the PlayStation was under development. He has worked on and off for Time Warner but left after the acquisition by AT&T. I was unable to find any in-depth reviews of One Station Away by any of the large periodicals. There are no interviews posted on YouTube either, so instead, I am posting a brief video of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." If you listen closely, it sounds just like Margaret Bergs.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, October 5, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Synopsis: Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

Introducing Tayari Jones

photo: Nina Subin

Tayari Jones was born November 30, 1970, in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She was an A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University and is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University.

Bibliography
Leaving Atlanta (2002)
The Untelling (2005)
Silver Sparrow (2011)
An American Marriage (2018)

Honors and Awards
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction
Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
United States Artist Fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship[
Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship
Silver Sparrow added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.
Member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers

In February of 2018, Oprah Winfrey announced that her latest book club pick was Jones’ novel, An American Marriage. Winfrey said, “It's one of those books I could not put down. And as soon as I did, I called up the author, and said, 'I've got to talk to you about this story.'"

On June 5th, An American Marriage was announced as the winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.

In the video clip below, Tayari Jones discusses An American Marriage on "CBS This Morning" with Gayle King, who obviously hasn't read the book.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, September 7, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

Scene from Camperforce in Coffeyville, Kansas

Who is Jessica Bruder?

(Sources: Official Biography and Wikipedia): Jessica Bruder was born in Clifton, New Jersey. She graduated from Amherst College in 2000, majoring in English and French, and received a master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2005. She has worked as a Starbucks barista, a snowboarder, an "electric guitar nerd," a music store clerk, a junior camp counselor and a waitress.

She now teaches narrative storytelling at Columbia University. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian. She was a staff reporter at The Oregonian. Her photography appears in Nomadland and her first book, Burning Book, and has been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine. She is currently writing about trust in the age of surveillance.

"For her book Nomadland, she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving — from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award."

In the video below, Jessica Bruder discusses Nomadland with Chris Hedges.

In addition to writing Nomadland, Jessica Bruder was also executive producer on a film about "CamperForce," a documentary about retirees working for Amazon.

Footage from "CamperForce" was also used on segment of John Oliver's HBO news commentary/comedy show, "Last Week Tonight." (warning swears and raunchy humor).

*********************************************************************************

Earthship home under construction

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, August 3, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Harlequin Great Dane

Synopsis: When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. She comes dangerously close to unraveling, but while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Meet Sigrid Nunez

As usual, our biographical sources are the unimpeachable source of all knowledge:

Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975). After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez is currently writer in residence at Boston University and has taught at several other schools including Amherst College, Columbia University, the New School, Princeton University, and Smith College. She lives in Manhattan.

The author's official biography:

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories has been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez’s work has been translated into nine languages and is in the process of being translated into fourteen more.

Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Beginning in fall, 2019, she will be writer in residence at Boston University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Interview:



Theme Music:

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, July 6, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Synopsis: A novel in three sections: 1) the story of a May-December romance; 2) the story of an Iraqi-American detained at Heathrow Airport; and 3) a third section which may or may not tie the two unrelated stories together. 

Meet Lisa Halliday

Though Lisa Halliday is in her early 40's, Asymmetry is her first novel. She is so new that, although Asymmetry rates its own Wikipedia page, Halliday does not have a Wiki page of her own. What biography I was able to construct for her comes from an article in the Guardian about the "new faces of fiction for 2018" (Halliday appears about halfway down on the page) and from the official website for the Whiting Award, as Lisa Halliday received a Whiting Award for Fiction for 2017.

The following long quotation is from the Guardian:

...Lisa Halliday, Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress and went on to found a pest control business, Halliday was a bookish child, who would sit on the steps of the local library waiting for it to open. She graduated from a local school to Harvard, an achievement she attributes to the good fortune of growing up in a town with an outstanding record in public education.

But, though she had always been praised for her writing, she lacked confidence, and says “it was meeting real writers and observing their work ethic and their concerns about their work that made me think I could do this – that all it requires is persistence and perhaps I should give it a go.”

She stayed with the Wylie agency for eight years, working in both their US and UK offices, and punctiliously recording in her journal the wit and wisdom of the authors she encountered along the way, before leaving to embark on own writing career. But only now that she is 41, and living in Milan with the distraction of a small baby, is she is publishing her first novel. ...

Her early attempts at writing her own fiction attracted “encouraging rejections”, one of which described her work as “Babar written by EM Forster” – which she took to mean she had talent but had yet to find a story. It was such useful feedback that she has dropped it into the novel.

Gradually, her work began to find its mark, and she started to publish short stories and author interviews in the Paris Review. When her English husband landed a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, and the couple moved to Milan, the pieces of Asymmetry began to fall into place.

The “lightbulb moment” came when she had the idea of pairing the stories of two young people who happened to be living at the same historical moment, during the Iraq war. At first she tried to force their stories to intersect, but gradually she understood that to do so was a mark of immaturity as a writer. “Sometimes,” as Ezra says, “you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist.”...

 Most of the buzz surrounding Asymmetry arises from Halliday's May-December romance with Philip Roth at the time she worked for the Wylie agency in New York City (Wylie were Roth's agents at the time). Roth is widely assumed to be the model for Ezra Blazer in the novel. She touches briefly on this in the video below, along with other themes of the book.



Desert Island Discs

There really is a show on BBC Radio 4 called "Desert Island Discs." If you click on this link right here, you can go to the website and subscribe to the podcast and browse the archives to find out what eight tracks, one book, and a luxury your favorite celebrities would take to a desert island with them.

Of course, since Ezra Blazer is not a real person, his selections won't be in there, so I looked them all up for you.

• How Are Things in Glocca Morra?
• Somehow
• Dvorak: Cello Concerto
• Fauré: Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Minor
• How About You?
• Debussy: Afternoon of a Faun
• Strauss: Four Last Songs (Im Abendrot)
• Albéniz : Iberia : Book 1 - II El puerto

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Synopsis

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. ‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She becomes the first female diver. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

Meet Jennifer Egan

Egan was born in Chicago in 1962 but grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Lowell High School, she majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, Egan spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award where she earned an MA

Egan came to New York in 1987 and worked a strange array of jobs while learning to write, such as catering at the World Trade Center. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001 and starring Cameron Diaz. She has published one short story collection and four novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

She currently lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. As of February 28, 2018, she is the President of the PEN America Center.

Partial Bibliography

Novels

• The Invisible Circus (1995)
• Look at Me (2001)
• The Keep (2006)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
• Manhattan Beach (2017)

Short fiction

• Emerald City (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996)
• "Black Box" (short story; 2012, US; released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)

There were shorter videos available of Jennifer Egan talking about Manhattan Beach, but this video at the Brooklyn Historical Society is full of detail about all the research she put into writing this book. There are a few time when she points to slides being displayed over head which are not visible from the camera angle, which I admit is kind of frustrating, but I still found this video more informative than the others I watched.



New York City during the World War II Era

As Jennifer Egan mentions in the above video, Manhattan Beach was a beach-side resort community during the period in which the book was set. I found a page with 16 picture postcards from the Manhattan Beach of that era.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Here's a video on how to properly deploy an underwater diving suit. Unfortunately it's kind of long, but it helps reinforce the description from the book.



In the book, Anna's father is a bag-man making connections between the Longshormen's Union and the mob. This was a notorious concern at that time, as explained in this article about the link between those two organizations.

The Cadillac 62 Series, the last model off the production line until after the war.
(Dexter Styles car)

The Bay Area's Own Shipbuilding and Repair World War II History

The San Francisco Bay Area had its own prominent role to play in wartime shipping, and you can find monuments to those days if you care to take a short day trip.. The Mare Island shipyards were featured in the book, and you can find a historic park and museum in Vallejo.

Better known is the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, where you can still sometimes meet women who actually lived the kind of life story as portrayed in the book.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Synopsis: Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

The Deepwater Horizon fire

The Author

Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkeley in 1977. Her family moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was 3 years old, and she grew up there. She was bullied by Black students at the public school she attended, so her mother's employer paid her tuition to a private school, where she was bullied and isolated for being the only Black child in the school. DeLisle forms the model for the fictional town of "Bois Sauvage," which is the setting for both Sing, Unburied, Sing, and her previous novel Salvage the Bones. She moved away from Mississippi to attend Stanford University, where she earned a BA in English in 1999 and an MA in media studies and communication in 2000.

She received a MFA from the University of Michigan and returned to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was so traumatized by what she saw that she was unable to write for three years, during which time she was shopping around her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, and had become so discouraged that she was making plans to enroll in a nursing program when her book was finally published to much critical acclaim. Her second book was a memoir entitled Men We Reaped about 5 young men from DeLisle who died young, including her younger brother who was killed by a drunk driver. This memoir was short-listed for the National Critics Circle Book Award for autobiography.

In 2011, Ward published her second novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award. Sing, Unburied, Sing, published in 2017, also won the National Book Award. In 2017 she also was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

In the short PBS video clip below, Jesmyn Ward answers readers' questions about Sing, Unburied, Sing.




For Further Reading

Parchman Farm

The Marshall Project, named in honor of Justice Thurgood Marshall, is great resource for material criminal justice issues. This link will take you to a photo essay about the prison plantation system, like Parchman Farm, which still exists to this day.

If you want to do a deep dive into criminal justice issues, I recently read a fascinating article about the prison abolition movement in the New York Times. If you have the time, it is really thought provoking.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, April 6, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

One Osage Family of Many Touched by Murder

Lizzie (poisoned)

From Left: Minnie (poisoned), Anna (shot), Mollie (almost poisoned)

Rita (blown up)

Introducing David Grann

Plagiarized from here and here:

David Grann was born on March 10, 1967 to Phyllis E. Grann and Victor Grann of Westport, Connecticut. Phyllis is the former CEO of Putnam Penguin and the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm. His father Victor is an oncologist and Director of the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford, Connecticut. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (Tufts) as well as in creative writing from Boston University. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1989, he received a Thomas Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico. Before joining The New Yorker in 2003, Grann was a senior editor at The New Republic, and, from 1995 until 1996, the executive editor of the newspaper The Hill. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was also #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the book was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Bloomberg, Publishers Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. It won the Indies Choice award for the single best nonfiction book of the year.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, documented one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book, a Spur Award for best work of historical nonfiction, and an Indies Choice Award for best adult nonfiction book of the year. A #1 New York Times bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon was named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, PBS, Bloomberg, GQ, Slate, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and other publications. Amazon named Killers of the Flower Moon the single best book of the year, and so did Shelf Awareness. The book is being adapted into a major motion picture, with Martin Scorsese slated to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to play a role.

His most recent book, The White Darkness, was published in October of 2018, is a true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic. He has also published an anthology, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which contains many of his New Yorker stories, and was named by Men’s Journal one of the best true crime books ever written.  

In the following video of a "PBS News Hour" book club segment, Grann answers questions from viewers about Killers of the Flower Moon.



In this much longer video delivered at the National Archives, Grann delivers a slide presentation using some of the pictures and other archival material

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, March 2, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Introducing Emily Fridlund

History of Wolves is a first novel for Emily Fridman, and as a hitherto relative unknown, she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. She is around 40 years old and has worked mostly as an English professor and short-story writer. Her first collection of short stories, Catapult, was published the same year as History of Wolves and was nominated for the Mary McCarthy Prize. The first chapter of History of Wolves was initially published as a short story, which Fridlund then decided to expand into the novel, which was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. History of Wolves was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of USA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. (The last part of this paragraph was lifted wholesale from Emily Fridlund's page on Cornell University's online catalog.)

North Woods of Minnesota

Fridlund grew up in a family of three children in Edina, Minnesota (southwest of Minneapolis), and her family used to vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior, the area where History of Wolves is set. She attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, then Principia College in Illinois, where she earned a bachelor's degree. She earned an MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis, and a doctorate at the University of Southern California. It was while living in LA and missing real winter that she started work on History of Wolves. (See this interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)

Her academic research has included:

• Craft of Fiction
• Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature
• Twentieth-Century and Contemporary British Literature
• Gender Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory
• Narrative Theory
• the Gothic Novel
• Ecocriticism
• Animal Studies
• Creative Writing 

Also because she only recently became a famous author, there is not much on YouTube in the way of interviews. In fact there were only two, one of which had been shot with a phone which had the advantage of being brief, but her voice was barely audible. The one I am posting here is somewhat long, but more interesting, and her voice is easier to hear, although you may still have to crank the volume way up. 

The Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, February 2, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Introducing Kevin Kwan

Here's a simplified biography from a site called Who2:

Kevin Kwan is the author of Crazy Rich Asians and its sequels, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems.

Kwan grew up in Singapore until he was eleven, when his family moved to Texas.

After getting his degree in creative writing from the University of Houston (1994), Kwan headed to New York, where he earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design and began working for high profile publishers.

Kwan spent time at Martha Stewart’s Living and Interview magazines before opening his own creative consulting firm, specialzing in visual projects for fashion designers, celebrities and publishing firms.

After ten years as a designer, Kwan wrote his first novel, Crazy Rich Asians, a breakout best seller and a popular “beach read,” famous for its nutty characters and their delightfully wicked excesses.

Kwan followed with China Rich Girlfriend in 2015, and Rich People Problems in 2017, just as the filming of a film version of Crazy Rich Asian was underway. 

The Wikipedia bio is more detailed and interesting, and I suggest you check it out, but as it is Wikipedia, know that it may not be 100% accurate.

The following is a brief interview with Kwan about Crazy Rich Asians:



Singapore Album

The world's most expensive city.

The colonial-era Raffles Hotel, now considered just a tourist destination by the locals. 

A colonial-era "black and white" house.

Singapore National Archives (former site of Anglo-Chinese School)

Singapore Botanic Gardens, behind which Nick's grandma's mansion was found

The video below shows a time lapse of a tan hua flower blooming:



Singapore Food 

Singapore food carries the influences of China, India, and Malaysia. Here's a link to an article entitled "10 Best Singapore Dishes." Nick's family spend a lot of time sipping tea and snacking on "kueh" (also spelled "kuih"), which are rice cakes. Here are a couple of links: "7 Nyonya Kuih You Must Have" and "How to Know the Names of Chinese/Nyonya/Malay Kuih".

Crazy Rich Asians, the Movie 

If you're like me (and you're probably not) you knew Crazy Rich Asians was a movie before you knew it was a book. The trailer is below. Just from watching the trailer, I saw several differences between the book and the movie.

Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, January 5, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

This is what yarn-bombing looks like.

The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood

Author Biography (from the fount of all knowledge)

Ann Hood was born in 1956 and grew up in Rhode Island. After she earned her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island, she worked for TWA as a flight attendant. She attended graduate school at New York University, studying American Literature. Hood began writing her first novel in 1983 while working as a flight attendant and attending graduate school. Her flight attendant career ended in 1986 when TWA went on strike and the flight attendants found themselves replaced. This gave her the opportunity to become a full-time writer.

On April 18, 2002, Hood's five-year-old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep. For two years Hood found herself unable to write or even read. She took solace in learning to knit and in knitting groups. She gradually made her way back to her craft, writing short essays about Grace and grief. To make sense of her own grief, in late 2004 Hood began to write her novel The Knitting Circle, about a woman whose five-year-old daughter dies from meningitis. The woman joins a knitting group of others also struggling to heal from loss. Hood’s best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief chronicles her own struggle after her daughter’s sudden death.

Hood is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. She also teaches at New York University and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

She is the recipient of the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Hood lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She has two children, Annabelle and Sam, and is married to writer Michael Ruhlman.

Her body of work includes:

Novels

• Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, 1987.
• Waiting to Vanish, 1988.
• Three-Legged Horse, 1989.
• Something Blue, 1991.
• Places to Stay the Night, 1993.
• The Properties of Water, 1995.
• Ruby, 1998.
• The Knitting Circle, 2007.
• The Red Thread, 2010.
• The Obituary Writer, 2013.
• An Italian Wife, 2014.
• The Book That Matters Most, 2016.

Young-adult novels

• How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else), 2008.
• She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah), 2018.

Short story collection

• An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories, 2004.

Nonfiction

• Creating Character Emotions (textbook), 1998.
• Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (memoir). 2000.
• Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (memoir), 2008.
• Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (essay, anthology), 2013.
• Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (essay, anthology), 2015.
• Morningstar (memoir), 2017.

In the video below, Ann Hood talks about The Book That Matters Most with a group at the Norwich, VT, library.

Scene from downtown Providence, Rhode Island