KATE WALBERT
July 29 Kate Walbert " A Short History of Women" Just Books @ 700P
Just Books is pleased to welcome award-winning author Kate Walbert, author of Where She Went, a New York Times Notable Book of 1998; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the Connecticut Book Award for fiction in 2002; and Our Kind, finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Ms. Walbert will be at Just Books to sign copies of her new novel A Short History of Women (Scribner, $24), at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 29. Just Books is located at 28 Arcadia Road, Old Greenwich, Conn. A Short History of Women is a profoundly moving portrayal of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. The novel opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Her choice echoes in the stories of her descendants interwoven throughout: a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother's infamy by immigrating to America just after World War I to begin a career in science; a niece who chooses a conventional path -- marriage, children, suburban domesticity -- only to find herself disillusioned with her husband of fifty years and engaged in heartbreaking and futile antiwar protests; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of the times while getting drunk on a children's playdate in post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of voices and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, Walbert portrays the ways in which successive generations of women have responded to what the Victorians called "The Woman Question."
A recent New York Times Book Review stated, in part, "Nearly everything about Kate Walbert's new novel is wickedly smart... Her writing wears both its intelligence and ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art... remarkable... I found myself going back time and again to reread whole paragraphs, not because they'd been obscure, but the way one might press a finger to the crumbs littering an otherwise cleaned plate: out of a desire to savor every morsel." Walbert's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. She lives in New York City and Connecticut with her family. For more information, contact Just Books at 203-637-0707
