At lit fest this week: a thriller, a mom on radical acceptance
The annual Jewish Book Festival continues with two author events this week: Mimi Lemay — raised ultra-Orthodox and mother to a child, Em, who from age 2 knew himself to be, in truth, a boy — discusses ”What We Will Become: A Mother, a Son, and a Journey of Transformation,” noon Wednesday. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday it’s Hallie Ephron on her suspense novel ”Careful What You Wish For.” Both via Zoom; free, but preregistration needed.
Other coming events include Neal Bascomb, “Faster,” June 9, and Lisa Goldberg, “The Apple and the Shady Tree,”
June 14. Almost all previous events are free to watch, including Yousef Bashir (“Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine”); Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America (“Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech For All”); and Jennifer Voigt Kaplan (“Crushing the Red Flowers,” a YA novel involving Kristallnacht). Details: tinyurl. com/JCCbookfest. Sponsors: Simon Family JCC, Virginia Beach, and the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater.
Mark Your Calendar: Christopher Newport U.’s 39th annual writers conference, virtual, May 22. $75 and lower. cnu.edu/ writers/
On Blake Bailey’s bio, “Philip Roth”: After W.W. Norton decided to pull the print edition — because of credible allegations of sexual assault and impropriety by Bailey, now a Portsmouth resident — its contractor Recorded Books pulled the audiobook, the AP said. Protesting Norton, the Authors Guild said in part: “Removing a published book from circulation because of the authors’ conduct and resulting adverse public opinion against the author or the subject, no matter how strong and justified, contradicts important principles of free speech and open discourse. The book may, for example, serve as a historical document of Roth’s treatment of women and his own misbehavior, and of conduct that some have even found acceptable in the past. ... We cannot rewrite history.”
Self-help author Rachel Hollis (“Girl, Wash Your Face”) is facing fan criticism, partly because she suggested everyone can succeed simply by hard work, partly because of a gap between persona and reality. (NYT)
You Saw It Coming Dept.: Kellyanne Conway has a deal for a book that’s more memoir than “a standard political book,” with Simon & Schuster. ... From Meghan, duchess of Sussex: a children’s book, “The Bench,” about father-son relationships. (Random House, June 8.) Terms not known for either deal. (NYT, AP)
Awards: The Edgars, from Mystery Writers of America, included, for novel, Deepa Anappara’s “Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line” and, for fact crime, Eric Eyre’s ”Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic.” ... The Joyce Carol Oates Prize for fiction, $50,000, to Danielle Evans for “The Office of Historical Corrections.”
Obituary notes: Jason Matthews, a CIA chief of station in several locales who, after retiring, wrote the Red Sparrow trilogy. He was 69; he died of a rare neurodegenerative disease. ... Fred Jordan, a key figure at Grove Press and Pantheon, was 95; Vienna born, he survived the Holocaust and edited Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Vaclav Havel, David Mamet, Kenzaburō Ōe and more.
New and recent
“Everything is Fine” by Vince Granata.
(Atria, 304 pp.) A memoir on the schizophrenia of a brother who, believing their mother was the source of his pain, killed her. Granata struggles to balance “repulsion for and love for a desperately ill brother”; he “helps us better understand the horrors of mental illness.” (Kirkus)
Also: From Chris Bohjalian, “Hour of the Witch.”