CHARLESTON TO CHARLESTON LITERARY FESTIVAL NOVEMBER 7-10 2019 WHERE BOOKS, IDEAS & CREATIVITY FLOURISH WELCOME Welcome to the third Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival, a celebration of books, art and ideas. Modeled on one of England’s most prestigious and long-standing festivals - held at Charleston in Sussex, the former rural hub of the creators and thinkers associated with the Bloomsbury group - and building on the Charleston Library Society’s excellent reputation for holding events throughout the year, it is a unique transatlantic collaboration. Could there ever be a more worthwhile time to share the stimulation and joy of listening to thought- provoking and entertaining talks from a host of talented and world-renowned speakers? One of the motives behind establishing the Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival was to promote the special US/UK cultural relationship. The mutual values of the UK-based Charleston Trust and the Charleston Library Society, the founders of the Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival, embrace a belief in the power of literature, the arts, science, humanitarian ideas and respectful conversation to unify communities and society and to foster empathy in these tumultuous times. All our speakers reflect this vision. Their events will inform, challenge, stir and amuse. The Festival boasts an outstanding array of authors from Pulitzer Prize-winners, to UK-based Orange and Costa Prize-winners, to the recipient of the National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama. Subjects include history, biography, current affairs, science and art explored by novelists, non-fiction writers, journalists and thinkers. You will be transported from war-torn Holland to the Harlem Renaissance, from newsrooms to science labs, from China to Chicago. Prepare to agree, to argue, to change your mind, to laugh and to cry. Most of all, prepare to join us and be engaged. Diana Reich, Artistic Director and Members of the Charleston to Charleston Program Committee THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7TH FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH 1-2PM SHANGHAI SISTERHOOD • $25 Jung Chang, author of the classic Chinese autobiography Wild Swans and other internationally best-selling books, recounts the lives of Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth Century China. Drawing on her own experience growing up during the Maoist regime, she tells the engrossing story of the three Soong sisters from Shanghai, each of whom played a crucial role in shaping modern China, witnessing war, revolution, betrayal and seismic transformations. At a time when China is in the spotlight, Chang offers gripping insight into its recent history and power politics. 3-4PM WAR AND PEACE • $25 Nigel Hamilton, a British-born and American-naturalized historian, presents the stirring and moving climax to his magisterial three-part saga of FDR at war. This volume covers the momentous final year and a half of the ailing president’s life and is a “narrative history with illuminating detail that puts the reader in the room with Roosevelt.” (The Wall Street Journal) Hamilton discusses the justification of his portrayal of a far-sighted Roosevelt and a blundering Churchill with military historian James M. Scott, author of Rampage. 5-8PM THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING • $25 Renowned documentary filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn introduces his riveting and revealing documentary, The Price of Everything, about the obsessive characters 4-5PM engaged in the labyrinthian contemporary art market—collectors, dealers, auctioneers and artists, all caught up in a commercial maelstrom. Nathaniel Kahn was nominated for an Academy Award for My Architect, a film about his famous father, Louis Kahn. The film is immediately followed by a panel discussion, included with the film’s ticket price. PANEL DISCUSSION What does a panel of experts think about an art world culture that seems to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing?” Chair: Stuart Bennett, antiquarian bookseller and former Christie’s (London) and Sotheby’s (New York) auctioneer; Panelists: Nathaniel Kahn, Angela Mack, Executive Director of the Gibbes Museum of Art, and Deborah Gage, London-based art dealer. 6-7PM CHARLESTON TO CHARLESTON LITERARY FESTIVAL 2019 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH 11AM-12PM THE SWINGING SIXTIES? • $25 The 60s were a pivotal decade, endlessly debated to this day. Virginia Nicholson, a British social historian, focuses on the stories of a wide range of women, from debutantes to the wives of fishermen, who experienced the turbulent decade. The question that she poses throughout her book How Was It For You? is: Were the 60s really liberating for women? Frye Gaillard, a Southern journalist and historian, was a child of the 60s. His book A Hard Rain: Our Decade of Hope, Possibility and Innocence Lost is a sweeping record and personal account of the revolutionary decade and the personalities who defined its politics and culture. They will discuss the idealism and reality of the 60s with author, editor and critic, Regina Marler. 2-3PM SMALL WONDERS • $25 Deborah Eisenberg and Lionel Shriver are virtuosos of short fiction. Deborah Eisenberg’s new collection, Your Duck Is My Duck—brutally funny, unsettling, distilled meditations on the state of the world—“showcases her inimitable voice and captures our current national mood with eerie precision.” (The Washington Post) Lionel Shriver’s acerbic stories in her current collection, Property, illuminate one of the modern age’s obsessions: “Shriver’s intellect and talent, her political convictions and her confidence are all on display.” (The New York Times) They will read from and discuss their stories, which resonate well beyond their final words. Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow; Lionel Shriver is a winner of the BBC National Short Story Award. Chaired by Anne Blessing, former teacher of literature at College of Charleston and Tulane University. 4-5PM ART AND REVOLUTION • $25 Jeffrey C. Stewart’s monumental The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke was the 2019 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Locke (1885–1954), an American writer, philosopher and educator, was the trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance, which roughly coincided with the Charleston Renaissance. Stewart, a historian and professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, takes his title, The New Negro, from Locke’s seminal essay which propounded his belief that the pursuit of artistic excellence and physical mobility were the keys to black progress, rather than political protest. “A vitally important, astonishingly well researched, exhaustive biography of a brilliant, complex, flawed and utterly fascinating man.” (The Wall Street Journal) Chaired by Bill Goldstein, writer and broadcaster. 6-7PM BROKEN NEWS • $35 Former editor of the The New York Times Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution is an exposé of the US newspaper industry. The stimulus for the book is the assault on traditional journalism by the immediacy of technology, as well as by a need to court advertisers. Matthew D’Ancona is an award-winning British journalist and author of Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. He is currently an editor and partner in Tortoise Media, a recently established UK-based venture whose founding principle is to publish slower, wiser news, rather than breaking news. They will discuss the current state of newspapers and journalism in the US and UK. Chaired by William Nicholson, author and screenwriter. FOR TICKETS VISIT CHARLESTONTOCHARLESTON.COM OR CALL 843.723.9912 SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH 11AM-12PM VIRGINIA WOOLF AND SYLVIA PLATH: INSIGHTS FROM THE ARCHIVES AT SMITH COLLEGE • $25 Karen Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections at the Young Library, Smith College, gives an illustrated talk about the library’s extensive Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath archive material. Kukil discusses the rewards, frustrations and revelations inherent in archival research with Regina Marler, author of Bloomsbury Pie and editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Karen Kukil is editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath and of Woolf in the Real World and co-editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Regina Marler writes for The New York Review of Books. 2-3PM SHE HAS HER MOTHER’S LAUGH • $25 Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity is a landmark book that changes how we think about what it means to be human. Regarded as the popular science book of 2018 in the US and UK, it guides us to a new understanding of what we receive from generations past and what we might pass on to the future. Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist and Yale lecturer, takes us on a journey from the inbred Holy Roman Empire to the Japanese lab where scientists are transmuting skin cells into eggs and sperm. 4-5PM • $35 PROPHET OF FREEDOM 5-6PM David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in History 2019. It tells the story of Frederick Douglass, born in 1818, who escaped slavery to become one of the greatest orators and writers of his generation, as well as a leading abolitionist and political activist who is regarded as among the most significant figures in American history. “It is a book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’... a brilliant book.” (The Wall Street Journal) David W. Blight, a Professor at Yale University, will be in conversation with Judge Richard Gergel, author of Unexampled Courage. 6-7PM WOMAN OF LETTERS • $35 There is no more versatile, accomplished, admired and prolific writer than Joyce Carol Oates. She has published countless award-winning and best-selling novels and collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry and a memoir. Her most recent novel is My Life as a Rat. She is a long-standing Professor at Princeton University.