Kathy Reichs, Charla Muller, Dot Jackson to gather at Mint Uptown

You don't want to miss this event.
It's the second-annual Charlotte Observer Authors for the Holidays, bringing together writers whose books are probably already on your gift-giving list.
The event is Thursday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon Street, and writers selling their books include Kathy Reichs of the Bones series; Lisa Leake," 100 Days of Real Food;" Jason Mott, "The Wonder of All Things;" Dot Jackson, "Refuge;" and Charla Muller, "Pretty Takes Practice."
Your book purchase brings a one-day only 50 percent discount on museum general admission and a 10 percent discount at Halcyon restaurant in the  Mint complex.

Here's a complete list of the authors who'll be on hand to sign your books:

Kathy Reichs, “Bones Never Lie”
Dot Jackson, “Refuge”
Jason Mott, “The Wonder of All Things”
Joseph Bathanti, ""Half of What I Say is Meaningless" and "The Life of the World to Come"
Sarah Creech, "Season of the Dragon Flies"
Kim Wright, “The Unexpected Waltz”
Alan Michael Parker, "The Committee on Town Happiness"
Tony Abbott, “The Angel Dialogues”
Betsey Russell, "Other People's Money"
Mark de Castrique, "Risky Undertaking"
Karen Scioscia, "Kidnapped by the Cartel"
H.D. Kirkpatrick, "Alienation of Affection" and "Trafficking Death"

CHILDREN, TEEN FICTION
Christina Berkau Pope and Thomas Berkau, "ABC Charlotte Book"
Carrie Ryan and JP Davis, "The Map to Everywhere"
Dicey McCullough, "Tired" series for children
Laura Fox, "Snow Kingdom" series
Linda Vigen Phillips, "Crazy"
Karon Luddy, “A Bewilderment of Boys"
Brendan Reichs, Virals series
 
NON-FICTION
Lisa Leake, “100 Days of Real Food”
Charla Muller, "Pretty Takes Practice"
Rye Barcott, “27 Views of Charlotte” and "It Happened on the Way to War"
Cristina Wilson and Drew Humphries, “Carolina Bride: The Book”
Ken Garfield, “Billy Graham: A Life in Pictures”
Jonathan Stuhlman, “Connecting the World: The Panama Canal at 100” (Features original short fiction by NYT best seller Anthony Doerr.)
Scott Fowler, “100 Things Panthers Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die”
Kathleen Purvis, “Pecans” and “Bourbon”
Jill Dahan, “Starting Fresh”
Roland Wilkerson, “I’m So Clever”
Sarah Crosland, "100 Things to Do in Charlotte Before You Die"
Glenn Proctor, "Kicking Bottles, News & Dust: An Autobiography - 50 Years of Poems"

Contact Observer Innovations Editor Jen Rothacker if you have questions.

NBA winner Louise Gluck talks about talent vs. hunger

Louise Gluck, Yale Daily News

In a late 2013 interview with the Yale Herald, poet Louise Gluck, who last week won the National Book Award for her latest collection, "Faithful and Virtuous Night," talks about talent vs. hunger.

YH: What is the extent to which you believe the writing of verse can really be taught?

LG: It’s impossible to know. Intelligence can be stimulated. Likewise a taste for the process. Usually the person who is going to develop into a writer is a sensitive reader and a good critic. When people are good critics, anything can happen. That means there is a deep alertness to syntax, to language. You work on individual poems, poem by poem and poem; you try to point out where the phrasing and structure are, in your view, alive. I think the question of who’s going to be a writer has more to do with intelligence and hunger than anything you would say was talent. There’s a ton of talent, first of all, and it takes you only so far. People with toughness and willingness to start over, combined with really remarkable minds and intense need, those are the people who can become anything.

http://yaleherald.com/voices/sitting-down-with-louise-gluck/

Ron Rash belongs in 'pantheon of great American writers'

It thrills me when a reviewer at the New York Times can see beyond a writer's locale and read the new work as if the author were from from New Haven or Poughkeepsie. So it was last week when Patricia Wall reviewed Ron Rash's latest collection, "Something Rich and Strange." Just listen:
   

Ron Rash occupies an odd place in the pantheon of great American writers, and you’d better believe he belongs there. He gets rapturous reviews that don’t mean to condescend but almost always call him a Southern or Appalachian writer, and Mr. Rash has said he can hear the silent, dismissive “just” in those descriptions. He also baffles anyone who thinks that great talent ought to be accompanied by great ambition. Mr. Rash has planted himself at Western Carolina University and eluded the limelight that his work absolutely warrants.

And she goes on:

It’s time for Mr. Rash’s standing to change. And here is the book to do it: “Something Rich and Strange,” a major short-story anthology that can introduce new readers to this author’s haunting talents and reaffirm what his established following already knows. In this case, faithful readers really have an idea what to expect, because “Something Rich and Strange” incorporates two recent smaller Rash anthologies: “Burning Bright” (2010) and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (2013). But, as with great music, it would be a mistake not to revisit this material because you’ve experienced it once.

Read the entire review: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/books/something-rich-and-strange-a-ron-rash-anthology.html

A visit with Harper Lee's sister Alice and the charming town of Maycomb

Alice Lee in her law office, 1977

 The death of Harper Lee's sister Alice Lee at 103 early this week sent me digging through old photos for a picture of a tree that was inspiration for the Boo Tree of Harper Lee's 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I not only found the photo of the Boo Tree -- or at least the sizable stump it had been reduced to -- but also one I'd taken of Alice Lee.
It was 1977, and I'd ridden a bus to Monroeville, Ala., to write about the childhood friendship between Nelle Harper, as she was called, and her tow-headed, precocious friend Truman Capote, the  model for the fictional Dill.

I found Miss Lee -- we met in her law office -- to be a courteous woman, reserved and matter-of-fact.

In a voice that rode a pogo stick of deep South inflection, she told me, "As far as I'm concerned, Nelle just sat down and wrote a book."
The trouble was, she said, her sister had "made the book so believable that people don't want to believe it didn't happen."
If Miss Lee was less than chatty, words cascaded from Capote's aunt Mary Ida Faulk Carter, whose square face was a near-carbon of her nephew's.
"Truman is a marvel with words," she said, "but he can't stick to the truth."
Carter said his short story, "A Christmas Memory," about fruitcake-making time at another aunt's house in Monroeville, was a real stretch.
"Truman had as much as any boy in Monroeville could want, and he made out like his family was so poor that we had to go scratching in other people's yards to get our pecans."
As kids, Nelle Harper and Truman were back and forth between the Lee house and the Faulk house so often, according to Mary Ida, they wore a gap in the hedge.
Sadly, the Lee house and the Faulk house were no longer. But the town was still there, though the streets had been paved since the Lee sisters were children. You could almost feel how Harper Lee had absorbed the place into her veins -- the smells, the people, the trees -- and how she poured it all back into her only novel.
I couldn't get enough of the town during those couple of muggy July days. As I walked, characters resumed their lives. Trees their silhouettes against the evening sky. Was that Scout and Jem on Boo Radley's porch? Here, the Lee house and the Faulk house. There, the gap in the hedge where a tomboy of a girl and a tow-headed boy spent summers in a tree house making up stories.
With Alice Lee gone, the charming old town recedes a bit more into the distance.