Next Book Club for Writers

The library will hold its next Book Club for Writers discussion on Thursday, April 24, featuring short stories by James Baldwin and Percival Everett.

Copies of “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “The Appropriation of Cultures” by Percival Everett will be available from the library in advance. The discussion will begin at 7:00 PM at the library and will be free and open to the public.

In fiction, plays, and essays, James Baldwin (1924–1987) was one of the foremost social critics of mid- and late-twentieth century America, addressing issues of race, class, and sexual orientation. His non-fiction works include Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time (which put him on the cover of Time magazine), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, while his novels include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk. “Sonny’s Blues,” which appeared in the 1965 collection Going to Meet the Man, is frequently anthologized.

Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor English at the University of Southern California and author of more than twenty books. Noted for the wide variety of his work, Everett has written novels with settings ranging from the American West to ancient Greece. He has won the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and twice won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction. His most recent novel, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly. His other books include Erasure and I am Not Sidney Poitier.

Book Club for Writers is a fiction discussion program that meets four times a year. Discussions are open to all, and focus particularly on questions of craft and technique that will interest writers and aspiring writers. Created by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, Book Club for Writers is sponsored locally by a fiction writing group that meets weekly at the Haverhill Corner Library.

The next Book Club for Writers discussion will be held on Thursday, July 31 and will feature “Servants of the Map” by Andrea Barrett and “Ancestral Legacies” by Jim Shepard.

Calvin Trillin Book Discussion

The library will host a discussion of Third Helpings by Calvin Trillin on Monday, April 21 at 7:00 PM. The program will be free and open to the public.

Readers will find Third Helpings collected in Trillin’s omnibus volume The Tummy Trilogy. This program is the third and final in the library’s discussion series featuring American food writing, led by writer and editor Linda Landrigan.

Calvin Trillin is a journalist, humorist, and food writer. He wrote the “U. S. Journal” feature for The New Yorker for fifteen years; a weekly, syndicated newspaper column, “Uncivil Liberties,” for over a decade; and a weekly column for Time magazine. Also a longtime contributor to The Nation, he currently writes the “Deadline Poet” feature. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2012 and in 2013 was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Trillin’s essays on food were collected in American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings, and these three books were subsequently published as a single volume, The Tummy Trilogy.

Though he has written extensively, and with participatory zeal, about food during his career, Trillin once explained to the New York Times that he had no desire to be a restaurant critic. “I’m not interested in finding the best chili restaurant in Cincinnati,” he said. “I’m interested in Cincinnatians fighting about who has the best chili.”