Trying to visit every event at the 16th annual Festival of the Book is a good way to get your eyes strained and your ankles sprained, so C-VILLE put together a guide of things that seemed worth doing. Don’t be shy to visit vabook.org for complete listings.
Wednesday 3/17
Hot on the heels of her first two major critical biographies, Ayn Rand is more than ever the toast of the right and roast of the left. At “Giants of the Twentieth Century” (noon, UVA Bookstore) Rand biographer Jennifer Burns will represent Rand, who envisioned a world where some people would be very rich and others very poor, alongside biographer Melvin Urofsky—he’ll discuss Louis Brandeis, the influential Supreme Court Justice who wanted everybody to be just as poor as everybody else.
“Give me a bowl of wine. In this I bury all unkindness,” says Cassius in Julius Caesar. Take the enemies you made at that debate and bring them to “Wine Drinking for Inspired Thinking” ($85, 6pm, Tastings of Charlottesville) with juggler-turned-tippler Michael Gelb. Tastings owner Bill Curtis, a Bacchus in his own right, will offer two flights of wine. Gelb will lead a poetry exercise and you’ll discover if drinking and writing go as well together for you as they did for folks like Faulkner and Carver.
Thursday 3/18
Get it straight from the horse’s mouth at “Mass Shootings: The Prism of the Press” (2pm, City Council Chambers) as Colorado journalist Dave Cullen talks his celebrated Columbine alongside Jack Censer, author of The Press Meets the Washington Sniper. If that makes you feel low, slip out halfway and check out “Give My Heart Ease: The Blues,” (2pm, The Southern Café and Music Hall) a presentation by William Ferris, a former chairman for the National Foundation for the Humanities who’s been honored by the Blues Hall of Fame for his scholarship, and who will share interviews with some of the great blues and gospel performers of the Mississippi Delta.
Later, you’ll know you’ve arrived at “How Boomers Created a Better World” (4pm, the Senior Center) by the parking lot full of Hummers outside. Leonard Steinhorn, author of The Greater Generation, discusses how Boomers “created equality and freedom for minorities and women, and dignity for all.” (Take that, Brokaw.) Or ask Paul Gaston, the decorated local activist which generation he identifies with as he discusses this year’s Coming of Age in Utopia at “Social Justice: The Power of Individuals” (6pm, City Council Chambers). Also there will be Bob Zellner, who, in The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, writes of a lifetime’s attempts to undo with activism the damage his father and grandfather did as members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Friday 3/19
Tickets are required for one of the major poetry readings that features distinguished African-American poets at various points in their careers, including bestseller Haki Madhubuti, noted young poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson (6pm, Culbreth Theater). Stay later at Culbreth, but get tickets first, if you can’t imagine your night without twice the verse—Nikki Giovanni reads and chats with Kevin Young next (Culbreth, 8pm).
Or slip out under the cover of night to the fest’s ever-popular Crime Wave series’ “Friday Night Crimes!” (8pm, Lane Auditorium at the County Office Building), which opens with a discussion of mysteries and thrillers with authors Rhys Bowen, John Hart, David Liss, Nancy Martin and Agatha award nominee Julia Spencer-Fleming.
Saturday 3/20
Take note of your surroundings as you travel to see O. Henry Award winner Lee Smith discuss how her writing has been influenced by natural landscapes—those of her native Virginia in particular—at “Sense of Place: Landscape and the Southern Writer” (Noon, Charlottesville Community Design Center). Soon after, New Yorker senior editor Hendrick Hertzberg will deliver the left hook to National Review editor Richard Brookhiser’s right at “A Conversation from Left and Right” (4pm, Culbreth Theatre). One can scarcely imagine a more comprehensive discussion, but if you didn’t get your fill, get tickets and follow Smith to “American Accents: An Evening with Four Distinguished Authors” (8pm, the Paramount Theater), where she’ll talk about American stuff alongside literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller, Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout and Colum McCann, who is definitely Irish.
Sunday 3/21
You may be wondering by Sunday whether the festival is still going on. An esteemed lineup of American Indian poets Deborah Miranda, Ron Welburn and Karenne Wood will remind you that they, along with the festival, are “Still Here” (1:30, The Student Book Store). Later, local architectural historian Roulhac Toledano speaks with Preservation Piedmont’s Eryn Brennan at “New Orleans Architecture: Rebuilding After Katrina.” (3pm, Central Library) to discuss rebuilding efforts in a city that’s only sort of still there.
Round up a wild weekend with some girl power at “Strong Women, Famous Men: Abigail and John and Charles and Emma” (1:30pm, New Dominion Bookshop), where University of Richmond professor Woody Holton will discuss America’s first Second Lady (and second First Lady) Abigail Adams, alongside Deborah Heiligman, who will talk Emma Darwin, the lady who ushered her husband Charles through the discoveries that form the basis for our understanding of life. Out from behind that backdrop step “Two Strong Women, Two Amazing Life Journeys” (3pm, Barnes & Nobel): Sasha Gong (Born American: A Chinese Woman’s Dream of Liberty) and Lillian Lambert (The Road to Someplace Better: From the Segregated South to Harvard Business School and Beyond), who will describe their ongoing journeys—at which point your journey through the land of words will have ended.