Big Read Celebrates "True Grit" with Author Visits
If you enjoy authors who can write fascinating tales and entertain a crowd, you’ll enjoy the library’s author lineup for the next week.
At 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 7, in the Library Center auditorium, author Jay Jennings will talk about his personal friend and author Charles Portis, who wrote the library’s Big Read title, “True Grit.”
Jennings edited “Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany,” a collection of Portis’ writing across several genres. The Little Rock author is a Portis scholar who has known Portis for 30 years.
As a young man, Jennings considered Portis’ books “Dog of the South” and “Masters of Atlantis” to be the funniest he’d ever read. Before heading to New York City to pursue a writing career, Jennings wrote to Portis, a fellow Little Rock resident, and thus began a 30-year friendship.
The advice served him well. Jennings is a fiction writer, journalist and humorist whose stories have appeared in many national literary journals, magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Oxford American and Travel & Leisure. He is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow in fiction. His nonfiction book is “Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City.” His work has been recognized by The Best American Sports Writing annual and has appeared in the humor anthology “Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor.”
From 7-9 p.m. April 13, Big Read partner Barnes & Noble will host two authors. Vincent Anderson, librarian at the Donald W. Reynolds Library, Mountain Home, Ark., will talk about “Bald Knobbers: Chronicles of Vigilante Justice.” The famous outlaws were not a single group, he learned, but many vigilante groups that terrorized the Ozarks.
Writer Larry Wood follows with his talk about “Wicked Springfield: The Seamy Side of the Queen City.” Springfield, Wood found, once was a rough frontier town of gunplay, whiskey brawls in the 1830s.
All of these and other Big Read events through April are free and open to the public.
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