BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL The Fiction: Time is. . . panel
downloadCourtesy of the Boston Book Festival, the Time Is. . . panel with Jennifer Egan, Lawrence Douglas, and Peter Mountford, moderated by Henriette Lazaridis Power. The discussion took place in the Sanctuary of Old South Church on Saturday, October 15th, 2011. The panelists discussed issues like the structural choices they made in handling narrative time in their novels, the relationship between memory and identity in their work, the way their characters manipulate history and time, and how as novelists they represent time itself. Listen through to the end to hear the discussion include physics, the Big Bang, and narrative craft.
excerpts from Hiroshima in the Morning
downloadRahna Reiko Rizzuto's memoir Hiroshima in the Morning weaves together her personal experience during a research sojourn in that city with her growing understanding of the complex political, social, and cultural issues that surround the nuclear bombing and its aftermath. She reads here from three sections of the book, examining the stresses on her marriage as she undergoes this months-long separation from her family, her relationship with her aging mother, and her own changing sense of self. Her writing examines the challenge of memory--what happens when it fails us, and when we fail it by choosing to forget.
Testimony
downloadThe female narrator of Pete Smith’s “Testimony” tells the story of an affair that starts with a cloud of drinks and ends in the mystery of not knowing a partner. Smith explores the ways in which a self can become lost between a past and a present, youth and maturity--and intoxicating drinks and an even more intoxicating partner.
A Haunt of Memory
downloadIn Tarah Masih’s “Haunt of Memory,” the narrator describes how she prunes the spirit tress of her blind friend Phineas to keep the bad spirits and memories away from his home. This short piece captures the beauty of the trees and of the friendship, and evokes an old man’s hard life on the edge of twilight.
