Events
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Start: 6:30 pm
Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. The classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder is this month's choice. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death—and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. At the time of its publication the New York Herald Tribune called it "A masterpiece." and Russell Banks says, "As close to perfect a moral fable as we are likely to get in American literature."
Start: 7:00 pm
Noted poet Mary Jo Bang, whose 2007 collection, Elegy, received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book citation, makes this welcome first Elliott Bay visit to read from her newest book of poems, The Bride of E (Graywolf). "The alphabet, as an organizing principle, is arbitrary. But around each of its discrete, singular letters, like goldfinches to thistle heads, notions flit, cluster, and congregate. This is precisely what they do in The Bride of E, Mary Jo Bang's compendious new alphabet book, casting shadows, revealing flashes of light and color. These are poems of deft invention, explorations into a trove of ready happenstance. They are not all happy poems, but they are all avowals—like the letters of the alphabet, they are for things. This is a book of darks and delights. It is totally amazing." – Lyn Hejinian. "This book bridges a gap between an experimental tradition in American poetry and an older high lyric tradition. This is some of Bang's best writing, and one of the most exciting books of the year." – Publishers Weekly.
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