The Body Tourist author at Park Road Books this Saturday

Dana Shavin

Reviewers have been calling Dana Shavin's memoir, The Body Tourist, riveting, brilliant, witty, insightful, courageous and ...excruciating.

The Body Tourist is the Atlanta native's personal journey into and out of anorexia. One reviewer calls it "the biography of an illness as stubborn as the woman determined to kill it.."

Another reviewer says Shavin can "write with both hands."

You can hear the author read and talk about her book at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Park Road Books.

A former therapist, Shavin now makes her living as certified life coach and as an artist and a writer. Since 2002, she has been a monthly columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and she is editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation newspaper, the Shofar.

WHAT: Dana Shavin will read and sign copies of The Body Tourist. 

WHEN: 11 a.m., Saturday

WHERE: Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Rd., Charlotte, 28209.

COST:  Free and open to the public.

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Gail Peck Reads from 'Within Two Rooms' Sunday at Park Road Books

Gail Peck

Before Charlotte poet Gail Peck could give her first reading for her new chapbook, "Within Two Rooms" (Finishing Line Press), she learned that a full-length poetry manuscript, "The Braided Light," had won the Lena Shull Book Contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Her prize is $250 and a reading in March at Catawba College in Salisbury. Former poet laureate Fred Chappell calls "The Braided Light," about Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, "a poignant envisioning of visions, a look into the heart of light." Main Street Rag will publish this book in March.


Meanwhile, back at the chapbook ranch, Peck will read from "Within Two Rooms" at 2 p.m. Sunday at Park Road Books. Charlotte poet and essayist Rebecca McClanahan calls these  poems "a bittersweet litany of praise for the world the mother teaches us to notice, and to love."

WHAT: A poetry reading by Charlotte's Gail Peck
WHEN: 2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 15.
WHERE: Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte 28209
COST: Free and open to the public

                                                                       

 

At Park Road Books Thursday: 'How Women Lead Better Together'

Maggie Ellis Chotas

As a journalist, I've not experienced a business partnership with other women, though I have worked with and for many women over the years.

I am, however, a member of a small group of women who have met together on Wednesday mornings for almost 30 years. I am constantly amazed at how adept women are at paying attention to each others' problems. They are empathetic and patient listeners, they respond to each other thoroughly and completely, and they don't stop until they have worked together to find creative solutions to life's many vexations and perplexities.

That group is one reason I was interested in Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas's new book, "Power Through Partnership: How Women Lead Better Together" (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., $16.95).

Polk of Chapel Hill is facilitator, mediator and board-certified coach, and Chotas, who grew up in Charlotte and lives in Durham, is a also facilitator and leadership coach. Together, they founded Mulberry Partners, a business that advises business partners.
 
In her foreword, Anne-Marie Slaughter ("Why Women Still Can't Have It All") says that Polk and Chotas "offer real, practical solutions to the dilemmas that face even the most ambitious and committed women among us."


During their 12-year partnership, Polk and Chotas interviewed 125 female co-leaders who had plenty to say about the power of their partnerships. These women became their mentors as they wrote this "guidebook we never had" for women who are "ready for a better way to lead, to work, to live."

The authors will talk about their experiences and the power of female partnerships at 7 p.m., on Thursday, Jan. 15, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte, N.C., 28210.



 

Sharon Tate's sister will sign books at Park Road

Sharon Tate's sister is coming to town.

To commemorate her older sister's life, younger sister Debra Tate has put together a collection of photographs and reminiscences in hopes that people will begin to remember Sharon more for her life, her beauty, her talent and her cultural impact than for her brutal death 45 years ago this past August at age 26 and 8-1/2 months pregnant.

Married to Paris-born director Roman Polanski, who writes the introduction to "Sharon Tate: Recollection" (Running Press, $30), Tate acted in "Valley of the Dolls," "Eye of the Devil," and "Fearless Vampire Killers." 

The book includes original quotes from such celebrities as Jane Fonda, Patty Duke, Joan Collins, Viva and Trina Turk and retrospective quotes from the likes of Truman Capote, Richard Avedon and Mia Farrow. As well as many photos, including some from the Tate family album. 

Unbelievably, the gorgeous Sharon Tate would now be 71.

By the way, if you did not read the riveting profile of Polanski when it appeared in The New Yorker on Dec. 14, 2009, read it here: 
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-celebrity-defense

Debra Tate Will Sign Books 

Thursday at 6 p.m. at Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Rd., Charlotte, 28209.

Bestselling Kathy Reichs will read Wednesday at Park Road Books

Kathy Reichs by Arthur Kade

You'd think after 16 bestselling novels starring the same leading character, a writer would be teetering on the smoky edge of burnout.

Not Charlotte's own Kathy Reichs.

Now with "Bones Never Lie," her 17th Temperance Brennan novel, due in bookstores this month, Reich tells me that burnout is not a problem for her.

"I don't have time for burnout," she says by email. "I am involved in too many things. I am constantly shifting between working on Temperance Brennan books, Bones episodes and young adult books in the Virals series. And throw in a bit of forensic work too."

Same with her characters. She keeps interested, she says, by keeping them engaged in new and different experiences.

For instance, Reichs introduces a new character in "Bones Never Lie" and a new challenge for Tempe. Tempe's mother is a bit unbalanced (she's been in and out of institutions) but she's a computer whiz and therefore invaluable in tracking down the killer Tempe is sleuthing.

"She's a complicated individual," says Reichs. "Engaging, witty, but also very much troubled. Therefore, at times, annoying as hell."

We've read about this killer in "Monday Mourning." He's the monster who escaped -- killer of girls -- those ghastly murders now linked to children in North Carolina and Vermont.

Reichs, who is vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists and professor of forensic anthropology at UNC Charlotte, says she writes all day when she has a free day.

"In other words," she says, "if I am not traveling, touring for a book release or at the lab, I am at the keyboard from morning until late afternoon. I rarely work after dinner and a glass of wine."

By the way, back before Tempe, Reichs talked with the Observer's editorial editor Ed Williams about the possibility of writing op-ed pieces. She didn't, but she says she thinks journalism would've made a fascinating career.


Reichs will read from and sign copies of her new novel at 7 p.m. on Wednesday (9/24) at Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte.

Bestselling novelist Lisa Wingate writes about mysterious Melungeons

Lisa Wingate

Picture this: It's 2007, and I'm in London, trapped for a week in an old hotel near Russell Square with my 11-year-old granddaughter, who's immersed in a hair-tossing, month-long snit. At night, as I collapse into my narrow bed, she looms on the other bed, performing vigorous cheerleading routines, while gazing adoringly at herself in the full-length mirror.

Here's what saved me: Lisa's Alther's memoir, "Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree, The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors."
At 2 each morning, I wake to an hour or so of peace and a thoroughly entertaining trek as Alther struggles to find her own link to these mysterious, dark-skinned, blue-eyed people, sometimes with an extra thumb, who burrowed into Southern Appalachia before the 1600s.

So I was thrilled to see that award-winning Lisa Wingate's new novel, "The Story Keeper" (Tyndale, $14.99 paper), is also about Melungeons. In short, it's the story of a New York editor, Jen Gibbs, a native of the North Carolina mountains, who finds herself engrossed in an anonymously-written manuscript about a mixed-race Melungeon girl trapped by dangerous men in a place Gibbs thought she'd left behind.

What inspired the novel? I ask Wingate by email.

She'd just finished writing "The Prayer Box," she emails back, and was researching her next novel, which she thought would also be set on the Outer Banks, when she came across an article on the Melungeons.

She clicked on it. Then she clicked on another and another and still another until something happened that had not happened in "15 years and 23 novels."

"I literally dreamed a story," she writes. "I saw the tale of a busy New York editor who finds a partial manuscript in an old slush pile. She's captivated by the story of Sarra, a young Melungeon girl being sold off in a card game in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.

"Sarra's circumstances in some ways mirror the editor's painful childhood in the Blue Ridge mountains. In my dream, the search for the manuscript's author took the editor back home after many years away, leading her to a place called Mirror Lake, deep in the mountains."

A 2012 genetic study shows that Melungeons are the offspring of Sub-Saharan males and women of Northern or Eastern European origins, though that doesn't preclude Native American DNA flowing  into the mix at a later time.

Whatever the case, Wingate says it's been an amazing ride, solving in fiction a mystery that may never be fully solved in real life.

Hear Lisa Wingate Talk about the Novel:

• On Wednesday at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte, 28209.

• On Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m., at First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall, 317 S. Chester St., Gastonia, 28052. Reservations required: 704-864-3468 or rmaney@firstarpchurch.org.

'I Love You More' author Jennifer Murphy says 'dreams do come true'

Former Charlottean Jennifer Murphy has concocted a doozy of a plot in her debut novel, "I Love You More" (Doubleday, $24.95). Lawyer Oliver Lane is shot to death in his Outer Banks rental cottage, and the prime suspects are his three wives, who are each unaware of the other but all sport the same haircut.
The star of the book is 12-year-old Picasso, Oliver's precocious and dictionary-reading daughter, who tries to make sense of what she knows and doesn't know.

Murphy

Kirkus Review calls this "a thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies."
Murphy, who now lives in Seattle, emailed me that her biggest dream was always to write and publish a novel. But as a former single working mom, a writing schedule was a luxury. She got serious after she went to the Wild Acres Writers Conference in Little Switzerland, N.C., and studied with novelist Ann Hood, who encouraged her.
At Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, she met an agent, who offered to represent her. In 2011, Hood invited her to a conference in Tuscany, Italy. Murphy took 50 pages of her novel-in-progress, "I Love You More." Hood liked it so much, she advised her to dump the novel she'd been working on and stick with this one.
Nine months later, she completed "I Love You," and in a few more months, her agent sold it to Doubleday.
"It took awhile," she writes, "and there were a lot of rejections along the way. But ultimately I believe it was the stick-with-it-ness that made it happen."

Murphy, who served as executive director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Art Commission, will read from  "I Love You More" at 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 7, at Park Road Books in Charlotte.

Why is Jan Karon not coming to Charlotte to read or sign books?

Jan Karon

Here's what I want to know: Why is Jan Karon not coming to Charlotte to promote her new novel, "Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good," her first Mitford novel in years?
After all, Karon lived in Charlotte as a teenager, and for years she was here as an adult, working in advertising.

Just look at her schedule.
Tuesday of this week she was in Birmingham.
Wednesday in Lexington, Ky.
Today, Thursday, Dallas.
Friday, Wichita, Kansas.
Saturday, Decatur, Ga.
Sunday, at least she'll be in the state, at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.

What gives? I asked Park Road Books manager Frank Burleson.
"We have no control over where the publicist sends her," he says. "We have a hard time landing major authors sometimes. Sometimes we have great luck. We've had Anne Rice, Pat Conroy. It just depends. Sometimes they will send them out of their normal area trying to increase their readership and sales. They know she's going to sell in North Carolina.
"I wish they had sent her this way," he says. "We could have sold a lot of books."

Quirky writer Tony Earley reading Wednesday at Park Road Books

Tony Earley

Rutherfordton native Tony Earley, whose short story "Charlotte" was accepted over-the-transom

by Harper's magazine while he was still a graduate student at the University of Alabama, will talk about his writing and teaching and read from his new collection of short stories, "Mr. Tall" (Little, Brown, $25) at 7 p.m., Wednesday at Park Road Books.

The new collection has already gotten raves from The Boston Globe, Publishers' Weekly and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

"Charlotte" did not flatter us. No, indeed. It fact, it made us look like a homogenized hick town of superficial overreachers. But that's OK. Early, who graduated from Warren Wilson College in 1993 and now holds the Samuel Milton Fleming Chair in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., has new stories and new characters to engage and entertain us.

His fiction has earned a National Magazine Award and appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. Earley was chosen for both The New Yorker's inaugural best "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers and Granta's "20 Best Young American Novelists."

His 1994 collection, "Here We Are in Paradise," was followed in 2000 by his first novel , "Jim the Boy," set in fictional Aliceville, N.C. That book catapulted him to national fame. Scott Turow, writing in the New York Times, called Earley's 2008 sequel, "The Blue Star," was irresistible.

"Jack and the Mad Dog," one of the stories in the new collection and published in the New Yorker, is a brilliant take on depression.

I've interviewed Earley several times over the years, and I always come away struck by the quirky workings of his deeply intelligent and original mind. This time, he told me that he has recurring dreams of two N.C. towns, one between Shelby and Hickory, and the other "out toward Golden Valley," the latter of which "sits on the top a hill with a great view of the mountains," he says. "I always stop in that little town (in the dreams) and look at the mountains."

My longer interview with him will run in the Observer in mid-September. For now, I'll simply say you don't want to miss hearing him read from the memorable "Mr. Tall," his first collection of stories in 20 years. The reading is free and open to the public. Park Road Books is in Park Road Shopping Center, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte.

Earley will also read at 8 p.m. on Sunday at the Regulator Bookshop, 720 Ninth Street, Durham, N.C., 27705, and at 7:30 p.m. on Wed., Sept. 10, at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.

Dot Jackson's Debut Novel 'Refuge' released at last from captivity

Dot Jackson

Dot Jackson's debut novel, "Refuge," won the now-defunct Novello Festival Press Prize in 2005, sponsored by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library. It's a lush, passionate novel, based on a family scandal, set in the variegated green of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When Jackson, who recently moved from Six Mile, S.C., to Newland, N.C., read at Park Road Books in 2008, after the release of the paperback edition by John Blair, she packed the house.
Then, suddenly, the only hard copies to be found were on Amazon or in used bookstores. Gone. Down the rabbit hole. Jackson gave readings at book clubs and conferences around the Carolinas, and fans harangued her for a copy. The former Novello staff members, now scattered, said they hadn't a clue what had happened to the remaining stock.
At last, success. The books have been found -- in the nether regions of the Main Library -- and the rights released back to the author. Jackson, a former Observer reporter and columnist, dispatched her daughter to Charlotte with a rental truck to buy the lot of them.
Want an autographed copy? Make checks payable to Dot Jackson and mail them to Jackson at P.O. Box 96, Montezuma, N.C. 28653. Hardbacks $24.95; paperbacks $16. Shipping: $2.50. If you want your book signed personally, email her at dotjackson6mile@aol.com.

Tonight: George Singleton Reads from "Wrecks" at Park Road Books

George Singleton

If you didn't know that short story writer George Singleton loves flea markets and collects glass advertising ashtrays and yard sticks... .
If you didn't know he starts a short story in his new collection "Between Wrecks" (Dzank Books, $15.95 paper) this way: "Luckily for everyone in the family on down, the mule spoke English to my grandfather."
If you didn't know those things you might decide to miss his reading tonight at Park Road Books.
But if you do know those things, well, you'd be crazy not to go.
Park Road Books owner Sally Brewster says this about Singleton's latest collection: "There's a place just down the way where a trip to the salvage yard reveals infidelity and theft. There's another where an unlicensed entomologist celebrates his freedom with a compulsive liar while a manhunt ensues on the streets outside. Places where a con man and his nephew sell stolen parachutes to veterans in case the ground beneath them should suddenly give way and where Chuck Norris's face graces only the walls of the finest trailers.
A place where tongues get left in rental cars and a place where everyone insists an absolute stranger is your boyhood friend."
Singleton is the author of two novels and five short story collections, including "Stray Decorum." His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine and Playboy. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he holds an MFA degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently teaches writing at South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He lives in Spartanburg, S.C.   

Tonight: Jon Sealy reads from "simmering powerhouse of a novel"

A Prohibition-era sharecropper's son named Mary Jane in an Upstate South Carolina mill village. A Myers Park matron named Aunt Lou who runs a big-time bootlegging organization from her house with its polished brass fixtures and lacquered floors. A whiskey baron named Larthan Tull whose Hillside Inn, a one-time boarding house on Highway 9, is a front for his underground liquor business. A double murder. A star-crossed romance. No wonder Jon Sealy's first novel, "The Whiskey Baron," sold out its first printing. No wonder Wiley Cash calls this book "a simmering powerhouse of a novel."  No wonder Kirkus Review calls the novel "a near-flawless effort by a writer to watch."

Come hear Sealy read from "The Whiskey Baron" (Hub City Press, $26) tonight at 7 at Park Road Books at Park Road Shopping Center, Charlotte.

The Longing that Feeds Kim Church's "Byrd"

“Desire is not simple,” writes the poet Anne Carson.
Neither is longing, that dark river that runs through the heart of Kim Church’s first novel, “Byrd.”

Kim Church

We’ve already reviewed “Byrd,” but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the longing that fed that novel. “Byrd” is about 32-year-old Addie, who owns a bookstore in Raleigh, and, after a failed abortion, decides to surrender her baby for adoption. A baby she writes letters to for years, letters she’ll never send. Letters that will tear at your very fiber.
“Dear – What to call you? Almost-child? One who has taken root in me and won’t let go? One who might have been mine? Could still be, if I were brave enough?
“But I’m not. I can’t be the mother you deserve. I know this in the way other women know they’re meant to be mothers. I know from everything I have ever been or dreamed or wanted.”
The novel began as notes in 1998 and is not based on Church’s own experience
So I decided to ask Church, who grew up in Lexington, and lives in Raleigh where she works part-time as a lawyer: Where does all this longing spring from?
“Addie’s story is one of learning to accept and live with her own hard choices,” Church writes me. “For her, this is a slow, often painful process – much like the process of writing a novel, which involves learning to commit to choices and let go of fear, doubt, perfectionism, all those things that get in the way. It took me a long time to figure out and accept who I am as a writer.”
Church writes that she identified with Addie in other ways, too, which she says may get closer to the heart of my question.
“I’ve never been in Addie’s situation,” she says, “or had to confront her choices, but I do know how it feels to struggle with the decision over motherhood. Addie’s doubts and fears and what-ifs have personal resonance for me.”
Church told the News & Observer’s Andrea Weigl that the idea came from a dinner conversation years ago. One of the dinner guests, writes Weigl, was a man who casually mentioned that he had fathered a child who had been given up for adoption.
Weigl says Church recalled: “My thought was, ‘What about the mother?’ I felt sure this experience was not casual dinner conversation for her.’”

Church will read and sign copies of “Byrd” at 2 p.m., May 3, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

Coming to Park Road Books: Jan Brett, a big chicken bus

In the world of children's books, Jan Brett ("The Mitten." "The Hat," "The Wild Christmas Reindeer") is known for illustrating sumptuous wintry scenes so detailed they make you want to put on a sweater. 

She'll be at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, to publicize her latest picture book, "Cinders: A Chicken Cinderella." Yes, it's a  retelling of the Cinderella story, but it's set in snowy 18th-century Russia and, true to its title, features chickens.

Brett, who raises similarly fancy birds at her home in Massachusetts, will arrive in Charlotte in a custom bus decorated with images of Cinders and other fowl from her new book.

N.C. author wins American Bar Association award

The American Bar Association has given Avery County’s Jay Leutze a Silver Gavel Award honorable mention for his 2012 book “Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail.”

The book, now in paperback (Scribner; $18), is the true account of Avery County residents’ fight to stop a gravel mine owner from dynamiting Belview Mountain.

 Leutze, a lawyer and naturalist, recounts the story in first person, as an activist who joins the cause of residents battling the mining company and government officials. The Silver Gavel honors outstanding efforts to promote public understanding of the law.

"This book inspires hope," the awards committee wrote, "that, despite often long odds, deserving underdogs can prevail in our justice system."

 Leutze will read and sign copies at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 22 at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

Asheville's Dale Neal and 'The Half-Life of Home'

A simple, everyday garage sale opens Dale Neal’s new novel, “The Half-Life of Home,” but it’s a garage sale fraught with meaning.

Eva Wilder can’t wait to rid herself of the clutter her family has accumulated over two decades. But when her husband, Royce Wilder, eyes the items for sale, he sees memories, not junk.

This tug between past and present, and the complicated relationship most of us have with change, lies at the heart of Neal’s story.

It’s the second novel for Neal, 54, a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His first, “Cow Across America,” won the 2009 Novello Literary Award from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg library.

“The Half-Life of Home” (Casperian Books; $15.95) takes place in two fictional N.C. mountain towns, Beaverdam and Altamont. (He borrowed “Altamont” from Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” where it stands in for Asheville.)

Neal sets his story in 1992. The Internet and digital technology haven’t yet transformed the world, but middle-aged Royce Wilder feels his once-secure life shifting beneath his feet. Raised in rural Beaverdam, he has moved to Altamont, a town that is becoming populated by transplants, strangers instead of neighbors.

His wife seems distant, his teenaged son, rebellious. And the family is struggling to finance a lifestyle that includes his son’s private-school education.

Pressure to sell family land grows when he learns his hometown emits dangerously high levels of radon gas. There’s even talk that the area could become a radioactive waste dump.

In Beaverdam, meanwhile, a rash of break-ins prompts suspicion that Wanda McRae, a troubled soul known as the Witch Woman, has been making forays into town from her mountain cabin.

Royce discovers the Witch Woman holds a secret about his family. He also learns to move forward.

Though more than a few Southern novels mythologize the past (such as “Gone With the Wind”), one message in this book is about letting the past go.

Neal recalls a great-uncle who said it was a lot easier to start a car engine than hook up a horse. Sometimes, Neal says, progress can be a wonderful thing.

 Neal will read twice in Charlotte on May 12 -- at 2 p.m. at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, and 4 p.m. at the Wingmaker Arts Collaborative, 207 W. Worthington Ave, where he’ll be joined by fiction writer Kathryn Schwille and poet Gail Peck.

Mooresville author writes two books for tweens

Mooresville's Lisa Williams Kline will sign copies of her new novels, "Wild Horse Spring" and "Summer of the Wolves," 2 p.m. Saturday, June 30 at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

The two books, aimed at readers aged 9 to 12, are the first in Kline's "Sisters in All Seasons" series. They tell the story of Stephanie and Diana, girls with very different personalities who must learn to live together when they become stepsisters.

Kline's other books include three middle-grade novels -- "The Princesses of Atlantis," "Write Before Your Eyes" and "Eleanor Hill," which won the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award.

'Reliable Wife' author Robert Goolrick coming to Charlotte

Bestselling author Robert Goolrick will appear 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 19, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, to promote his new novel, "Heading Out to Wonderful."

Goolrick's last book, "A Reliable Wife," was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2009. In a starred review, Booklist describes "Heading Out to Wonderful" as an "erotically charged tale of of illicit passion."

Bestselling author Mary Kay Andrews at Park Road Books

Mary Kay Andrews will speak and sign books, including copies of her new novel, "Spring Fever," 7 p.m. Friday, June 8, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

Andrews' 2011 novel, "Summer Rental," hit it big last year among the beach reading set.

In her new novel, "Spring Fever," she tells the story of a woman who may or may not be over her ex-husband. Publishers Weekly calls it "an enjoyable escape." Andrews, a former journalist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, lives in Atlanta.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. coming to Charlotte

Novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. will give a reading and sign copies of his new novel, "Freeman," 2 p.m. Sunday, June 3, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

"Freeman," the follow-up to Pitt's "Before I Forget," is set is the post-Civil War South and follows three characters as they make their way in the post-slavery world.

Pitts, a columnist for the Miami Herald, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.