The Rebel Housewife

(Nick) Booker Prize-nominated. On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of WWII and into the close of the twentieth century.

(Amazon Best of 2007/Editors’ Picks: Literature & Fiction)
In his run-down store in a gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Ethiopian immigrant Stepha Stephanos regularly meets with fellow African immigrants Ken the Kenyan and Joe from the Congo. Their favorite game is matching African nations to coups and dictators, as they consider how their new immigrant expectations measure up to the reality of life in America after 17 years. When Judith, a white woman, and Naomi, her mixed-race daughter, move into the neighborhood, Stephanos finds tentative prospects for friendship beyond his African compatriots. Mengestu, himself and Ethiopian immigrant, engages the reader in a deftly drawn portrait of dreams in the face of harsh realities from the perspective of immigrants.

(LaTrelle/Nick) Explorer, travel writer, tanslator of Sufi verse, intelligent, devoid of fear, Gertrude Bell was a scholar and a spy whose extraordinary career spanned the heyday of the British Empire and culminated in the creation of Iraq. She seems to have excelled at everything she tried – except finding someone to fall in love with her. NOTE: At 512 pages, this book has been called “hefty.”

(recent news - author's death) In 1948, before continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Mailer published The Naked and The Dead, based on his military service in WWII. Hailed by many as one of the best American wartime novels and named one of the “one hundred best novels in English language” by the Modern Library.

(recent news - author's death) Awarded a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Sub-titled History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially creates his own genre for the narrative, split into historicized and novelized accounts of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon.

Latest Oprah pick – A Medieval Masterpiece. Set in 12th-century England, chronicles the building of the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known – and the struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, brother against brother.

(Lynda) Possible local author - Freelance journalist Abbott’s vibrant first book probes the titillating milieu of the posh, world-famous Everleigh Club brothel that operated from 1900 to 1911 on Chicago’s Near South Side. The madams, Ada and Minna Everleigh, were sisters whose shifting identities had them as traveling actors, Edgar Allan Poe’s relatives, Kentucky debutantes fleeing violent husbands and daughters of a once-wealthy Virginia lawyer crushed by the Civil War. While lesser whorehouses specialized in deflowering virgins, beating and bondage, the Everleighs spoiled their whores with couture gowns, gourmet meals and extraordinary salaries. The bordello – which boasted three stringed orchestras and a room of 1,000 mirrors – attracted such patrons as Theodore Dreiser, John Barrymore and Prussian Prince Henry. But the successful cathouse was implicated in the 1905 shooting of department store heir Marshall Field Jr. and inevitably became the target of rivals and reformers alike. Madam Vic Shaw tried to frame the Everleighs for a millionaire playboy’s drug overdose, Rev. Ernest Bell preached nightly outside the club and ambitious Chicago state’s attorney Clifford Roe built his career on the promise of obliterating white slavery. With colorful characters, this is an entertaining, well-researched slice of Windy City history.

(Nick) The subject of John Singer Sargent’s most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the “it girl” of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame.

Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau’s portrait generated the attention she craved, but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau’s dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home.

Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.

Doris Lessing – Recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. At 87, the oldest person ever to win the Nobel Prize. Lessing was born to British parents who raised her in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Cited as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subject a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

An alternative feminist history in which the human race originates with women and the introduction of the male presence into the world creates havoc.

(see author note above) Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one, she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one, she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one, she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

local author (Sherri) See www.RebelHousewife.com/jedwinsmith
OUR BROTHER’S KEEPER – military legacy, brother’s death in Vietnam, Jedwin’s personal spiral and life as a journalist with the AJC.

(see author note above) FATAL TREASURE – treasure hunting – and finding! – with the infamous Mel Fisher and his family in Key West. Soon to be a major Hollywood movie.

(local interest) The embattled characters who people McCall's trenchant, slyly humorous debut novel (following the 1994 memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler and a 1997 essay collection) can't escape gentrification, whether as victim or perpetrator. As he turns 40, Barlowe Reed, who is black, moves to buy the home he's long rented in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. His timing is bad: whites have taken note of the cheap, rehab-ready houses in the historically black neighborhood and, as Barlowe's elderly neighbor says to him, They comin. Skyrocketing housing prices and the new neighbors' presumptuousness anger Barlowe, whose 20-something nephew is staying with him, and other longtime residents, who feel invaded and threatened. Battle lines are drawn, but when a white couple moves in next door to Barlowe, the results are surprising.