September August 2012 Conversations with Las Comadres: Teleconference Series
Hell or High Water, A Novel — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher Publisher
All Men Are Liars — Outside Links: Author Publisher
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Length: 00:46:14 | Size: 8.32 MB
September 2012 Book of the Month
Hell or High Water, A Novel
By Joy Castro
Published by St Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books
ISBN-13: 978-1250004574
It’s 2008 in New Orleans, and hundreds of registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation have never been found. The sex-offender story is assigned to Nola Céspedes, an ambitious young reporter at the Times-Picayune, who tries to balance her investigation with taking care of her aging mother, seeing her girlfriends, mentoring a teenager, and meeting a mysterious stranger named Bento.
As her research progresses, Nola is gradually drawn in to an underworld of violent predators–a world she struggles to keep separate from her middle-class professional life. Raised in poverty by a single mother in New Orleans’ notorious Desire Projects, Nola has her own secrets to hide.
About the Author: Joy Castro
Castro was born in Miami in 1967 and adopted four days later by a Cuban-American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
She earned her B.A. at Trinity University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in literature at Texas A&M University. After graduate school, she worked for ten years at Wabash College, one of three remaining all-male private liberal arts colleges. In 2007, she joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is currently an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Ethnic Studies and serves as the associate director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies.
Castro is finishing a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and working on a second novel. She lives with her husband in Lincoln, Nebraska.
September 2012 Additional Conversation
All Men Are Liars
By Alberto Manguel
Published by Riverhead Books
ISBN-13: 978-1594488351
Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew the deceased—including those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself—are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil and with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary bastard masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor—those are but a few of the roles attributed to a mysterious and captivating figure in this tribute to falsehood, between the lines of which the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: that of the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shapeshifting inventions, in which the objects of our desires are infinitely reincarnated.
About the Author: Alberto Manguel
Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres. In 2000, Manguel purchased with his partner and renovated a medieval presbytery in the Poitou-Charentes region of France to house his 30,000 books, where he currently resides. He has received many prizes, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).