History buffs, fiction fanatics and those itching to learn the secret history of church ladies will get more than their fill this August when the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival Summer Series returns.
Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard is a Russo family tradition. “I’m trying to remember the first time we took my daughters to the Vineyard, but I know they’ve been coming every year since they were 10 or 11, maybe even earlier,” said novelist Richard Russo, who in 2002 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book Empire Falls.
Maggie Shipstead was not yet 30 when she finished her first novel, Seating Arrangements. The story, as she described it in a recent interview, is about “an ever-so-slightly dysfunctional Waspy family holding a shotgun wedding on a resort island.”
Ms. Shipstead has never been to the Vineyard before. It is of Nantucket that she speaks, naturally.
11:00 a.m. History: Past and Present with Jill Lepore (Mansion of Happiness), Tony Horwitz (Midnight Rising), and Tom Reiss (The Black Count). Moderator Patricia Sullivan
11:50 a.m. Gangsters, Guns and Sociopaths with Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy (Whitey Bulger), and Dick Lehr (Whitey). Moderator John Kennedy
Best-selling author Adam Mansbach claims that he’s “really bad” at not working. He has spent a lifetime of summers at his family’s longtime home in Chilmark, times full of idyllic pleasures — bodysurfing, grilling fish from Larsen’s, living in a house overlooking a beach — that anyone would find enviable. But Mr. Mansbach cites his time on the Vineyard as his most productive as a writer.
There is a large group of literature in the American canon referred to as “coming of age.” Though Susan Choi will discuss her new book, My Education, at a Saturday afternoon panel at the Harbor View Hotel entitled Coming of Age, she says it only partially belongs there.
When Eric Asimov visits the Island for the book festival it will be his first time on the Vineyard in 30 years. His last trip was marked by trying his first farm-fresh egg. He was in college at the time, sleeping on a friend’s floor, and for breakfast one morning they went to the neighbor’s next door to fetch the eggs for breakfast.
