Please join us for a salon style discussion, Q&A, and signing with Rhode Island based authors Hester Kaplan ("Twice Born”) and Alizah Holstein (“My Roman History”).
When: Wednesday, June 3rd - 6-7pm
We recommend arriving by 5:30 pm to secure a seat and have time to grab a drink and mingle ahead of the event!
Where: Corner Bar @ The Yellow House, 3842 Main Road, Tiverton Four Corners
Free event, books and drinks (wine/beer/non-alcoholic) available for purchase.
Pre-order your copy by emailing hello@theyellowhouseri.com
About ‘Twice Born’:
Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Autobiography
A deeply reflective memoir weaving together the personal story of Hester Kaplan’s acclaimed biographer father and his fraught effect on her artistic development with a rich portrait of twentieth century intellectual life and a meditation on family intimacy, identity, and the art of writing
Twice Born opens with the death of Hester’s father, Justin Kaplan, known for his award-winning biographies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Despite his relatively prolific output, Justin rarely wrote, or said, much about himself—even to his daughter. Standing at his open casket, Hester has the realization that while alive, her father never looked her in the eyes.
Hester takes on the challenge of piecing together as intimate a biography of her own father as possible, comparing his story to the lives of his biographical subjects and dissecting the various personas he presents to the world—from which the name “dad,” “daddy,” or even “father” is conspicuously and painfully absent. Parallel to Justin’s story runs Hester’s own journey of development as a writer and a thinker, which begins in the shadow of not only her talented father, but also her novelist mother, and the fiercely protective union the two of them had built, often to the exclusion of their own children.
In sensitive, intimate writing, Kaplan paints a rich picture of the twentieth century literary world that she grew up in, all while reflecting on the deceptive nature of memory, the loneliness of creative pursuits, and the dovetailing paradoxes of biographical and autobiographical writing.
About Hester Kaplan:
Hester Kaplan is the author of novels and story collections including The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series. She is the recipient of two NEA awards, and was named a Mark Twain Fellow for Twice Born.
About ‘My Roman History’:
“A lyrical and moving exploration of the ways in which the heart governs even the pursuit of a life of the mind, this is a book for anyone who has ever loved Rome, as well as anyone who shares the experience of having found, in an unfamiliar history, their own unexpected home.” —Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch and Home/Land
“Brilliant . . . A personal intellectual history, a poignant account of how an expected life veers, and a boldly structured piece of writing." —Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, via Instagram
In this exquisite and profound memoir, a medieval historian traces her lifelong obsession with Rome and the encounters with the city’s past and present that became fulcrum points in her life
From the time she first felt called to its gates as a high school student fascinated by Dante and Italian thanks to a life-changing teacher, Rome has been a fixed star around which Alizah Holstein’s life has rotated—despite the fact that she bears no Italian heritage, and has never lived there long enough to call it home.
In this kaleidoscopic yet intimate memoir, her shifting relationship to a vibrant city layered with human history becomes a lens on why we look to the past, on the mysteries of affinity and desire, and on what it means to grow up. Holstein weaves the stories of Romans past and present, and encounters with the city of historical figures from Petrarch to Freud, into the narrative of her evolution from a curious student abuzz with the thrill of discovery, to a lonely researcher in a city to which she feels she belongs despite knowing no one, to an ambitious young historian struggling to find her place in the halls of academia. Following a trail of memories—that first taste of a tartufo cioccolato in Piazza Navona, the ancient walls of the Via Appia blurring from the back of a motorcycle, the smudge of ink on a manuscript left by a scribe's hand over seven hundred years before—she explores what it means to be romana, Roman—and to find solace and self-knowledge in the presence of the past.
An enveloping, original, and deeply resonant account, set against one of the world's most beguiling cities, of the unexpected things that give our lives meaning, My Roman History is a profound depiction of the winding path to self-realization, which—much like history itself—is mysterious, captivating, and ever-unfolding.
About Alizah Holstein:
Alizah Holstein holds a PhD in history from Cornell University and an MFA in nonfiction writing and literary translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island.