An all-day event: Saturday, April 17, 2010
9 a.m. – 5 p.m
Holiday Inn and Conference Center
Decatur, GA
$101 (includes breakfast, lunch, and snack break) Invite your friends!

This intensive workshop will use techniques from their innovative Break Into Fiction® Character Driven Plotting Program Dianna Love and Mary Buckham created.

New York Times best seller Dianna Love’s first book sold & won a prestigious RITA® Award (as Dianna Love Snell). She now co-writes the BAD (Bureau of American Defense) Agency romantic-thriller series with #1 NYT best seller Sherrilyn Kenyon. Dianna speaks at national and international events throughout the year about the innovative Break Into Fiction® Character Driven Plotting Program she and Mary Buckham created.

Mary Buckham is an award-winning romantic-suspense author who, before becoming published in book-length mass-market fiction was a Magazine Editor, Contributing Editor and a freelance article writer, selling hundreds of articles to local, regional, and national publications. She is also the co-author of the BREAK INTO FICTION®:11 Steps to Building a Story that Sells, which was released in June 2009. For more visit www.AuthorDiannaLove.com, www.MaryBuckham.com, or www.BreakIntoFiction.com for tips on how to get published.

Registration is now open and space is limited. Sign up today!

Chris Cleave, Little Bee
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
7:00 PM

Told in turns in the first person by Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee just released from a UK detention center, and Sarah, a British journalist whose fate is braided with Little Bee’s through tragedy, the novel follows these two women as they struggle to save each other and themselves. Little Bee tries to make a life for herself in a totally alien land, while Sarah must come to terms with her personal and professional choices. United by their past and by love for Sarah’s young son Charlie, Little Bee and Sarah become indispensable to each other. But their bond will face the ultimate test when the system catches up with Little Bee, and each woman must make a devastating decision.

Lisa See, Shanghai Girls
Thursday, March 4, 2010
7:00 PM

In 1937 Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Two sisters are forced to leave their cosmopolitan lives in Shanghai for a new start in Los Angeles. Suspenseful, provocative, and intelligent, Shanghai Girls is both a story about the adventures of two particular sisters and a story that reminds us all of the intense love, tension, and struggle inherent in every family. Lisa See is the New York Times-bestselling author of Peony in Love, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), The Interior, and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year.

Laura Skandera Trombley, Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years
Monday, March 29, 2010
7:00 PM

An enduring mystery of Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, following the death of his wife of thirty-four years and up to his own death in1910. Despite many biographies, it is unclear how his experiences in those final years affected him, personally and professionally. It was believed Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges. Suspecting there was more to the story, Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, went in search of Isabel Lyon, the one woman who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twain’s life and writings. Following sixteen years of research, Mark Twain’s Other Woman reveals Lyon’s daily journals, the only detailed record of Twain’s last years that were overlooked by Twain’s previous biographers. Raised in Southern California, Trombley attended Pepperdine University where she earned her B.A. and M.A., and the University of Southern California, where she earned a Ph.D. in English literature. She is the author of Mark Twain in the Company of Women and is the president of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where she lives with her husband and son.

An Evening With Alix Dobkin
Saturday, March 13, 8:00-9:30pm
Charis Books and More

For her last 25 years as a professional folksinger, Alix Dobkin’s songs, albums, concerts, lectures and presentations have focused on women in general & lesbians in particular, frequently inspiring thought-provoking controversy. Alix will join us to read from her memoir, MY RED BLOOD: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement. You won’t want to miss a moment of this rare and intimate evening with a living legend!

Join Charis Books and More for a very special evening with historian Joe Gatins who chronicles his family’s remarkable history, including his great-grandfather who built and operated Atlanta’s famous Georgian Terrace Hotel and his French heiress grandmother, Egle Gatins, whose description of her own life between the wars in Paris gives the book its evocative title: We Were Dancing On a Volcano. In honor of women’s history month, Egle’s story will be the focus of Joe’s talk. Don’t miss this compelling discussion of the cross-currents of history and its effects on one Atlanta family.

This facilitated group is open to all writers of fiction and creative non-fiction who want a serious group to provide constructive criticism, motivational exercises, and interpersonal accountability to keep their writing on track. The group offers in-group exercises and critiques with an eye towards individual improvement and the eventual goal of publication. Writers
are encouraged to bring copies of their work to share for critique. Please direct inquiries to elizabeth@chariscircle.org

Author (Between Two Worlds), activist, and social entrepreneur Zainab Salbi is the cofounder and president of Women for Women International. Since 1993, the organization has supported more than 120,000 women survivors of war. Salbi’s presentation is the keynote address for Emory University’s Women’s History Month sponsored by the Center for Women at Emory, with books provided by Charis.

Award-winning author Michael Wiley demystifies how to write a mystery novel when he visits Bound To Be Read Books’ Inside the Writers Studio. He’ll explain the process he used to write his new book, The Bad Kitty Lounge. Michael Wiley’s first novel, The Last Striptease, was nominated for a Shamus Award and hailed as “riveting” (The Chicago Tribune), “delightful” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “hard-boiled fiction with tenderness and compassion” (New York Newsday). Now he offers another exciting, fast-paced page-turner with The Bad Kitty Lounge. (A Kona pick, based on title alone.)

Mark your calendar for The Spiritual Book Club, which takes an edgy and irreverent look at religion with A. J. Jacob’s The Year of Living Biblically. While A.J.’s wit and humor are irrepressible, The Year of Living Biblically is not acerbic satire. This is a quest for knowledge by a modern-day Manhattanite who attempts to live by 700 Biblical rules. Necessarily hilarious, A.J. also treats his subject(s) with great respect. Whether attempting to stone sinners, visiting the Negev desert where Abraham, Isaac. and Jacob once dwelled; or visiting the Answers in Genesis Museum (under construction) near Cincinnati, Jacobs gains—and provides—insights into the human desire for a connection to the spiritual.

Our in-store writing group is open to writers of all types. The group meets on the first Thursday of each month at 7:00 P.M. to read work and to give and receive feedback. It’s easy to participate! Just bring five (5) copies of your poem, short story, essay, novel, screenplay, play, children’s story, or other written work to share. The group will read and offer constructive comments on everyone’s work. For more information, email Jef Blocker at jef@boundtobereadbooks.com.

What would happen if everyone in Atlanta were reading the same book at the same time? The Big Read, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, encourages us to find out. Designed to revitalize the role of reading in American culture and bring the power of literature into the lives of its citizens, The Big Read brings communities together to read, discuss and celebrate great writing. This year’s month-long Big Read initiative promotes Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved 1937 classic is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom.