Wednesday, Dec. 18 at 6pm, Phyllis Rose, literary critic and biographer will appear at Books and Books to read from and discuss her latest book – a biography of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame, and for many years, because of his active engagement in the camera club movement, he was in effect the CEO of photography in America.

As part of his strategy for establishing photography as fine art, he produced beautiful and influential photography magazines, including the legendary Camera Work. Simultaneously, he opened a gallery, 291, the first American gallery to show Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, and other great European modernists. After single-handedly introducing European modern art to Americans, Stieglitz devoted himself to nurturing American artists and to encouraging Americans to appreciate American art. His tireless work promoting Georgia O’Keeffe was essential in establishing her as the first respected and collected American woman artist.

In this compact and readable book, Rose argues that Stieglitz, so influential and important in his time, has been undervalued in ours. His missionary zeal for the art enterprise has been disregarded, and because his career was so long and varied, it has proved hard to position him as a photographer. Rose is a photographer as well as an award-winning biographer. With this new book, she presents a vivid portrait of a man whose work, marriage, and passion for art transformed American culture.

Friday, Dec. 13 at 6pm, artist Roberta B. Marks, will give a presentation of work featured in the new anthology book WORKS AND WORLDS. Marks, who has an MFA from the University of South Florida, is widely collected. Her works are featured in numerous museums and galleries throughout the country and Europe and she has taught widely, including regular classes at The Studios of Key West.

The first monograph on the artist explores her collages and constructions, which focus on the themes of memory, time, and transcendence through the feminist and Buddhist perspective that has defined the evolution of her work. Marks creates constructions that have an intimacy to them and at the same time contain entire worlds of feeling and memory.

Each vignette is a narrative of a personal nature as she transforms a range of objects and materials, often of mundane and humble origin, into eloquent and highly personal forms of self-expression.  Marks’s work speaks to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and immortalize and her pieces are intuitive and instinctual, exuding a sense of mystery. The viewer enters into an intensely private realm, yet the themes are universal—loss, longing, old age, death, repression, and liberation—evoking a feeling of familiarity within the mystery.

A practicing Buddhist, Marks achieves her clarity through daily meditation. She has written “when constructing a work, I pare it down to the essence–the minimal. Each chosen object represents years of seeing with acute awareness.” Marks’s writings accompany a selection of approximately 200 of her most evocative works.

For a reading and signing, Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 6pm, Pushcart Prize–winning author and former Studios of Key West artist in residence Ayse Papatya Bucak returns to the island with her debut story collection THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM.

In Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, showcasing spectacular imaginative range and lyricism, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.

A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.

Jami Attenberg returns to Books and Books Friday, Dec. 6 at 6pm for a reading and signing of her new novel ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS. Think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer.

credit: Michael Maren

DANI SHAPIRO will visit Books & Books @ The Studios Nov. 20 at 6pm to read from her beautifully written memoir INHERITANCE, a thought-provoking genealogical mystery.

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.

INHERITANCE is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Also an essayist and a journalist, Shapiro’s short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

photo: Meredith Morris

A misunderstood piece of advice spurred Stephen Chbosky to a unique career. Leading up to the reading and book signing on Monday, November 25 at 6pm for his novel, Imaginary Friend, we had the chance to ask him a few questions about his new book and what’s coming next.

Q: Please tell us a little about your career? Is working in television and film very different or complementary to your work as a novelist?

A: My career happened as the result of the right advice taken the wrong way. When I was 12, I told my father I wanted to be a writer. He said, “Great writers are great readers”, then promptly left the room to smoke a cigarette and watch the hockey game. His advice was good. He was trying to get me to read more books. But I didn’t take it as advice. Instead, I took it as a rule. Since I was a very slow reader, I thought I wasn’t allowed to be a novelist. So, I thought, “Well, I watch a lot of movies. I guess I read movies. So, okay, I’ll write movies.” That misunderstanding is the foundation of my career. I am a born novelist who has trained exclusively in film. Now, the two art forms are very complementary. The combination of my novelist nature and cinematic training has led to richer movies and more enjoyable books.

Q: How did you come to write Imaginary Friend?

A: Because of my background, for years, I considered The Perks of Being a Wallflower something of a fluke. A 213-page monologue pretending to be a novel. Then, when I did the movie adaptation of Perks, I read the novel through an adult’s eyes. And what I realized was that I was meant to write books. Imaginary Friend was the proof that I could. Write something epic but intimate. Third person that feels like first. A different genre but with all the emotion I’m known for. I am very proud of this book.

Q: Any chance we’ll see Imaginary Friend on the big or small screen?

I can’t wait to adapt this for the screen! And knowing Hollywood, I would imagine by the time the 21st century wraps up, there will be at least two remakes and a TV show.

Q: What are you reading and recommending currently?

A: I’m on a real literary thriller kick lately. I just read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Both were great. I love The Fireman by Joe Hill. And I thought An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen was fantastic. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: As I write the screenplay for Imaginary Friend, I am preparing to direct the movie version of the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. I am very excited for 2020!