Photos of the 2011 Brattleboro Literary Festival are now online. Go to “About” and click on 2011 Photo Gallery.
Humorists and NPR personalities Roy Blount Jr. and Tom Bodett will lead off the second day of Brattleboro Literary Festival events. Bodett and Blount have been entertaining audiences for years, and are featured panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Each week, two million listeners tune in to the show to test their knowledge of current news. At the Latchis, Roy and Tom will interview each other and answer audience questions about their books, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, Roy’s life as a sports writer and rock star, and Tom’s life as a Clio Award–winner and the most famous homebuilder in Homer, Alaska. Roy noted that the audience can expect plenty of “witty repartee”. “By that, I mean Tom making clever, insightful remarks and I going ‘H’yuck’,” he said.Roy recently spent several months on the road promoting Alphabetter Juice: The Joy of Text, and after the “usual gay mad whirl of a book tour” the Massachusetts resident is looking forward to his stop in Brattleboro. “Vermont book-related audiences have been gratifyingly responsive. No throwing of babies in the air or pleas to run for governor, but warm gestures of appreciation, extending even to (I blush to be the one to say it) actual purchases of books,” he said. “It could be that cold weather is conducive to book-warmth. Certainly I can think of warm-weather places —Southern California, parts of Alabama —where I have found less evidence of book-warmth than in Vermont.” Free and open to the public.
The Brattleboro Literary Festival is excited to welcome the Montreal Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival presenting a reading and conversation with two of Quebec’s most popular writers, one Francophone and one Anglophone. Monique Proulx is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter, and her novel Wildlives is a lush and dense meditation on love and attraction in a small town in the Laurentians. Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, explores themes of gender and identity by tracing the life story of a child born without a clearly defined gender. Enjoy two renowned Quebec writers as they discuss a new Quebecois literature and a new Quebecois identity.
2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Below is a photo of Saul Bellow from his appearance at the first Brattleboro Literary Festival. Saul Bellow’s widow, Janis Bellow will appear in conversation with author Benjamin Taylor who edited the recently published collection of Bellow’s letters.
