Arts

Malaprop’s Welcomes Entertaining Novelists

Joshilyn Jackson. Photo by E.V. Jackson

Georgia author Joshilyn Jackson is among the popular writers who will visit with readers at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in July. Her latest book is The Almost Sisters, a bit of southern intrigue involving a single mother-to-be, divorce, dementia and a family secret. “I wanted to write a not-quite-sisters book,” Jackson says. “Geeky Leia and sleek, social-set Rachel are stepsisters, but they can’t remember life before they were related….I love Leia’s funny, wry, sometimes snarky voice, but the book’s heart is shared between Birchie (Leia’s grandmother) and Wattie (Birchie’s best friend). They seem like the kind of little old ladies that if God bit them, they would taste sweet all the way through. But as Leia is about to discover, these ladies have had whole, rich, layered lives; between them they hold the only clue to a murder mystery that stretches all the way back to the Civil War.”

Jackson’s previous New York Times bestsellers include gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. She will appear at Malaprop’s on Tuesday, July 18, at 7 p.m.

On Tuesday, July 11, two writers with a shared past share the stage to read from their respective novels and make music together. J. Robert Lennon, author of Broken River, met Adam O’Fallon Price (The Grand Tour) when he was his professor and advisor in the MFA program in creative writing at Cornell University. “We discovered that we both used to play music,” Lennon says, “as did a couple of other fiction grad students and the four of us ended up starting a band, along with Adam’s wife, Elizabeth, who’s also a writer.” Calling themselves The Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band, they put out a couple of albums. “For me, music has always been a nice counterbalancing creative outlet to writing. I suspect the same is true for Adam.”

Broken River, an Indie Next Pick, has been described as “a genuine thriller that’s genuinely literary.” The Grand Tour takes a pair of unlikely companions on an ill-fated book tour.

Other literary events at Malaprop’s this month include Black Mountain writer David Madden (Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh: Four Novellas) on Wednesday, July 5; Matthew Quick (The Reason You’re Alive) on Wednesday, July 19; and Ron Rash (The Risen) on Thursday, July 27.

Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café is located at 55 Haywood Street in downtown Asheville. To learn more about these and other events, visit malaprops.com

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