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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Bow down before Ellen Gilchrist
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta is blessed with plenty of authors who come here to promote books, but it’s not often we are privileged to have someone who writes at the level of Ellen Gilchrist.
Gilchrist, a National Book Award winner, is here to promote her new novel (her first in a long time), “A Dangerous Age,” which tells the stories of several women in one family, and the impact of 9/11 and the war in Iraq on their lives. She’s at the Margaret Mitchell House tonight. 6 p.m.reception, 7 p.m.program . Admission is free for members, $10 for non-members.
I haven’t had the pleasure of reading “Dangerous” yet, but I know that Gilchrist can create wonderful female characters, contemporary women who come alive on the page and linger long after the book is over. Like Amanda, the teenaged unwed mother in her debut novel, “The Annunciation,” or Nora Jane from “In the Land of Dreamy Dreams.”
Here’s a nice comment from critic Sabine Durrant: Gilchrist’s writing “swings between the familiar and the shocking, the everyday and the traumatic. … She writes about ordinary happenings in out of the way places, of meetings between recognizable characters from her other fiction and strangers, above all of domestic routine disrupted by violence. It is disorienting stuff, but controlled always by Gilchrist’s wry tone and gentle insight.’”
Writing this blog has made me realize it’s been too long since I’ve read Gilchrist, and it’s time to rectify that. “Dangerous,” here I come!
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