Elizabeth Graver is the next featured author in this year’s Visiting Writers Series. Graver will host a graduate workshop with participating MFA students in the fiction track at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers space next Friday, March 6th. This will be followed by a Reading, Q&A and Book Signing at Auntie’s Bookstore in downtown Spokane at 8:00 PM.
All readings are free and open to the public.
About the Author
Elizabeth Graver’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Graver’s work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001), The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998). She teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College and is currently at work on a new project that draws on the Sephardic Jewish history of her family.
About the Book…
“Eloquent ….Graver’s engaging, expansive storytelling allows us to take up residence inside the minds of a host of different characters, watching as they create their own pictures of the world around them, as they invest certain places and people with mythic significance.” (Alida Becker, New York Times Book Review)
A place out of time, Ashaunt Point—a tiny finger of land jutting into Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts—has provided sanctuary and anchored life for generations of the Porter family, who spend summers along its remote, rocky shore.
But in 1942, the U.S. Army arrives on the Point, bringing havoc and change. That summer, the two older Porter girls—teenagers Helen and Dossie—run wild. The children’s Scottish nurse, Bea, falls in love. And youngest daughter, Janie, is entangled in an incident that cuts the season short and haunts the family for years to come.
“Moves fluidly across time, all on this same beloved piece of land….Graver is incredibly good at evoking past, present, and future, and the ways in which they intersect….Graver’s gifts—her control of time, her ability to evoke place and define character—are immense.” (Publishers Weekly)
As the decades pass, Helen and then her son Charlie return to the Point, seeking refuge from the chaos of rapidly changing times. But Ashaunt is not entirely removed from events unfolding beyond its borders. Neither Charlie nor his mother can escape the long shadow of history—Vietnam, the bitterly disputed real estate development of the Point, economic misfortune, illness, and tragedy.
An unforgettable portrait of one family’s journey through the second half of the twentieth century, The End of the Point artfully probes the hairline fractures hidden beneath the surface of our lives and traces the fragile and enduring bonds that connect us. With subtlety and grace, Elizabeth Graver illuminates the powerful legacy of family and place, exploring what we are born into, what we pass down, preserve, cast off or willingly set free.
Please join us next Friday at Auntie’s to welcome Elizabeth Graver!
The Specifics
March 6, 2015 at 8:00 PM
EWU Visiting Writers Series: Elizabeth Graver
Reading, Q&A and Signing
Auntie’s Bookstore
402 W. Main
Spokane, WA 99201
(509) 838-0206
The 2014-2015 EWU Visiting Writers Series is co-presented by the Inland Northwest Center for Writers and Get Lit! Programs. For more information, visit www.getlitfestival.org.
