Cynthia Riggs, daughter of Dionis Coffin Riggs, has immortalized her mother as the 92-year-old sleuth Victoria Trumbull of a popular Island mystery series. Riggs, the younger, has penned ten of these novels so far, the title of each one inspired by the name of a poisonous, or at least sinister, flower, such as Deadly Nightshade and The Paperwhite Narcissus.
Young poets have until Monday at 5 p.m. to enter their poems in the Elisa Brickner Poetry Contest, sponsored by The Elisa Brickner Fund of the Chilmark Free Public Library.
The contest was created to foster the love of poetry, and provides cash prizes of $200 and $100. To be eligible, poets must be entering grades 6 - 12 in the fall.
Winners will be asked to read their poems on Monday, August 15, at 5:30 p.m.
Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search For Jewish Cooking In France by Joan Nathan of Washington, D.C., and Chilmark, is a delectable-looking cookbook with hundreds of delicious recipes. And, best of all, since many of them come from the hot climates of southern France and North Africa, you’re sure to be able to find in it just what you want to serve at a mid-summer Island dinner party.
West Tisbury summer resident Jill Shaw Ruddock’s new best-selling book The Second Half of Your Life is part self-help book, part scientific treatise. It takes readers into the world of menopause and afterwards and argues successfully, in case anyone actually wondered, that there is indeed life after “the change.” But see for yourself.
A trademark of the boomer generation is that we never follow a straight line for a career path. It looks more like a privet hedge labyrinth in old English country gardens.
Chris Adrian is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology. He is also a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. So he’s well-versed in tragic loss and grief, as well as the more abstract issues of immortality and the meaning of life. In his newest novel, The Great Night, he mixes all of these ingredients together and bakes them in an oven fueled by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The result is an exquisitely heart-breaking novel, sprinkled with dark comedy, whimsy and sex.
Author Bill Sargent will discuss his new book, The Well from Hell: The BP Oil Spill and the Endurance of Big Oil, at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, August 17, at 5:30 p.m.
Edward Dillon doesn’t exist. Longtime readers of the Vineyard Gazette may recall reading about Mr. Dillon’s antics in the West Chop column during the summer of 1977. The column, written by then 12-year-old Amor Towles, reported the comings and goings within the close-knit community. Yet unbeknownst to most readers, the man by the name of Edward Dillon, mentioned in columns throughout the summer, was fictional.
