Arts & Letters Live: Distinguished Writers
Award-winning authors read from and discuss their works, respond to questions, and sign books

Wally Lamb, January 29, 2009, 7:30 p.m.—First Presbyterian, Dallas
Ian McEwan, March 6, 2009, 7:30 p.m.—Naomi Bruton Theatre
Tony Horwitz and David Grann: Epic Quests, May 12, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
Chimamanda Adichie and Alexandra Fuller, June 23, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
_________________________________

Wally Lamb
Thursday, January 29, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
First Presbyterian Church of Dallas
408 Park Avenue
Dallas, Texas 75201

Dubbed “a modern-day Dostoevsky with a pop sensibility” in a review by the New York Times, Wally Lamb has won the adulation of critics and readers alike for his memorable and well-crafted characters, his biting humor, and his compelling tales of redemption in the face of tragedy. He worked as a high school teacher for decades before he burst onto the literary scene with his debut novel She’s Come Undone. This extraordinary coming-of-age story follows Delores Price on her painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. The New York Times Book Review calls She’s Come Undone “an ambitious, often stirring and hilarious book.” It was chosen as an Oprah Book Club selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
His next book, the epic I Know This Much Is True, is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. This poignant multigenerational saga explores the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. The Tennessean raves, “Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he’s that gifted. . . . This novel does what good fiction should do—it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the ‘simple’ act of living a human life.”
His latest novel, The Hour I First Believed, tells the story of forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, both of whom worked at Columbine High School during the April 1999 shootings. The novel explores questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life, and the result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.
Lamb is a nationally recognized teacher of writing and the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He volunteers as a facilitator at the York Correctional Institution, an experience that prompted him to compile two collections of essays by women in the prison.

“For me it’s all about voice: two souls—character and reader, speaker and listener—lost together in some spooky woods and
trying to find their way out.” —Wally Lamb on writing

By the Author
The Hour I First Believed (2008), I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison (2007), Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (2003), I Know This Much Is True (1997), She’s Come Undone (1992)

Click here to purchase tickets online

_________________________________

Ian McEwan
Friday, March 6, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Naomi Bruton Theatre
Dallas Convention Center
Theater Complex
650 South Griffin Street
Dallas, Texas 75202

“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan,” the Washington Post Book World proclaimed upon the publication of the author’s twelfth novel, Atonement, which shortly thereafter won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Dave Weich of Powells.com said, “To read McEwan’s work is to be swept away by prose of astonishing precision and power, and to be constantly surprised by the ambition and breadth of his scope.” Since his collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites, arrived to international acclaim in 1975 and won the Somerset Maugham Award in the process, the literary world has cleared room for each new release: in 1987 The Child in Time won the Whitbread Best Novel Award; in 1998 Amsterdam took home the Booker Prize.
McEwan is a master at investigating human nature. His early work earned him the moniker “Ian the Macabre,” but his recent work has shifted to more introspective dramas. He claims the turning point in his writing was The Child in Time, “when political, moral, social, comic, and other possibilities moved in.” During his research for Saturday, a novel taking place over the course of twenty-four hours, he spent two years immersing himself in the world of a brain surgeon and observing surgeries. It also seems to be an interesting metaphor for a writer—the importance of thought and immersion in one’s work.
Five of his novels have been adapted to films. Atonement received seven Academy Award nominations and won for Best Score; it also won Best Film of the Year at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. McEwan has also written screenplays and an oratorio about nuclear war, and has recently collaborated with composer Charles Frieth on a libretto for the opera For You. At this event, McEwan will discuss the body of his work and will share insights about his novel-in-progress about climate change.

“One of the great pleasures of writing is not knowing where that story is taking you. You’re a character in it; you’re a character in the metafiction of What next?” —Ian McEwan

Selected Works by the Author
On Chesil Beach (2007), Saturday (2005), Atonement (2001), Amsterdam (1998), Enduring Love (1997), The Daydreamer (1994), Black Dogs (1992), The Innocent (1990), The Child in Time (1987), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), The Cement Garden (1978), In Between the Sheets (1978), First Love, Last Rites (1975)

Click here to purchase tickets online

_________________________________

Tony Horwitz and David Grann
Epic Quests: Following in the Footsteps of Legendary Explorers
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Best-selling authors and journalists Tony Horwitz and David Grann have much in common: they are both staff writers at the New Yorker and have risked life and limb putting themselves in harm’s way all for the sake of the story.
Tony Horwitz is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He delved into his own passion for Civil War re-enactments in the New York Times best-seller Confederates in the Attic, which the Washington Post called “hilariously funny.” About Blue Latitudes, Bill Bryson said, “No writer has better captured the heroic enigma that was Captain James Cook than in this amiable and enthralling excursion around the Pacific.” At this event, Horwitz will primarily discuss A Voyage Long and Strange, a thrilling ride uncovering the forgotten first chapter of America’s founding. On a visit to Plymouth Rock, he made an unsettling discovery that he’d mislaid more than a century of American history between 1492 and 1602. To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on a quest of his own—trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, Coronado’s Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colonists, and much more. He probes the revealing gap between fact and legend, between what we enshrine and what we forget. Horwitz is married to author Geraldine Brooks.
David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon will be released in February 2009. It chronicles the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett, which made headlines around the world. Hampton Sides said, “[Fawcett] has found his perfect biographer in Grann, who has gamely endured every conceivable Amazonian hardship to piece together the story of this British swashbuckler and his crazed search for a vanished civilization.” Author Doris Kearns Goodwin praised Grann’s “superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability,” all of which are on full display in this much-discussed debut.

Before the Event
6:30 p.m. Join docents on tours of the Dallas Museum of Art’s collections featuring works of art dealing with the theme of exploration, such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Icebergs.

Click here to purchase tickets online

_________________________________

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Alexandra Fuller
Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the Nigerian-born author of the critically acclaimed Purple Hibiscus, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, set in 1960s Nigeria, received the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize. Adichie says, “I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war . . . because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I wanted to engage with my history to make sense of my present . . . because I don’t ever want to forget.”
The Washington Post Book World hailed her as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” and Achebe himself called her “a new writer with the gift of ancient storytellers.” In 2008 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Her work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been translated into thirty languages. At this event, she will share insights about her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. In these twelve stories, she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the United States. She divides her time between both countries.
Alexandra Fuller was born in England but moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at age 3. The Fullers lived and farmed close enough to the Mozambique border that they could hear the landmines that separated the two countries going off when people or animals stood on them; both her parents joined up to fight against the liberation army.
She has written three acclaimed books of nonfiction. Her debut, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001), was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the 2002 Book Sense Best Non-fiction Book of the Year. Newsweek raved about it, saying, “This is not a book you read just once, but a tale of terrible beauty to get lost in over and over.” Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (2004) is an engrossing and haunting tale of love, godliness, hate, war, and survival that won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. She has also written for the New Yorker and National Geographic.

“I try to dispel the romantic myths of Africa, the Out of Africa motif, which really exists only in safari camps anymore. Very few people live that existence.” –Alexandra Fuller

Before the Event
6:30 p.m. Join Dr. Roslyn Walker, Senior Curator of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, for a tour of Nigerian art to tie in with themes in Adichie’s books.

Click here to purchase tickets online

_________________________________
*Events are held in Horchow Auditorium unless otherwise noted

Arts & Letters Live is supported by the Kay Cattarulla Endowment for the Literary and Performing Arts, The Hoglund Foundation, Annual Series Supporters, and the Donor Circle membership program through gifts by Claire Dewar and Sewell Automotive Companies. Additional support is provided by Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
BooksmART series supported by The Hoglund Foundation
Air transportation is provided in part by American Airlines. Hotel accommodations provided in part by The Adolphus. Pre-program food and beverages for performers provided by Sodexo. Promotional partners include The Dallas Morning News and Einstein Printing.
The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Photo Credits:
Ian McEwan by Nancy Crampton
Tony Horwitz by Randi Baird
Chimamanda Adichie by Okey Adichie
Alexandra Fuller by Peg Bonner