Brooklyn Reading Works at The Old Stone House presents Hot and Bothered: Writers on Fire, a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event. On September 16 at 8PM, acclaimed authors Lisa Gornick, Beth Bosworth and Marian Fontana come together to explore just what makes fire irresistible to us as writers, readers, and human beings. Gornicks’ Tinderbox speaks to the power of unearthing old secrets, and lighting a match to engulf a family in its own dark past. Marian Fontana’s memoir A Widow’s Walk addresses her marriage to a New York City firefighter. Beth Bosworth, author of The Source of Water and Other Stories, will read an excerpt from , “Sequoia,” about how a fire destroys one home and brings about another.
Each author will read from their work. There will be a panel discussion that touches on fire as subject, metaphor and literary device.
Painting by Wayne Visser
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Beth Bosworth’s latest book The Source of Life and Other Stories was the 2012 winner of the Heinz Drue Award. She has a story coming out in Agni in 2014. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, CUNY’S NYC Technical College, and for many years at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, where she is also founding editor of the Saint Ann’s Review. Her publications include a novel, Tunneling, and a collection of short stories, A Burden of Earth. Her stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Seneca Review, Forward, IMAGE, Hanging Loose, Guernica, and elsewhere.
Lisa Gornick is the author of two novels: Tinderbox (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Picador) and A Private Sorcery, (Algonquin). Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun, and have received many awards, including Distinguished Story by the Best American Short Stories. She holds a B.A. from Princeton, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at N.Y.U. and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. A collection of linked stories, Louisa Meets Bear, will be published June 2015, also with Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Marian Fontana has been a writer and performer for over twenty-five years. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and more. Her memoir, A Widows Walk was published by Simon and Schuster and was in the Top Ten Great Reads of 2005 by People magazine and the Washington Post’s Book Raves of 2005. She is currently on the board of the New York Writers Coalition, a not-for-profit that offers creative writing classes to some of the most underserved populations.