/lunch_with_authors

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA BEAUFORT

Lunch With Author Series Congratulations to us!

We’ve celebrated our 10th year and it’s because of all of you and your enthusiasm for the USCB Lunch With Author Series. Your feed-back on the surveys recommended keeping different genres… fiction, history, historical fiction, and true stories. We’ve got a mix of NY Times best-selling authors and national award winning authors alongside debuting authors to maintain our commitment to comingle the famous and yet-to-be-famous.

Prices are the same as last year: full series is $270 and entitles you to the same discount (8%) on all ‘special luncheons’. Series purchasers receive a “series card” with the luncheon schedule printed on it. There are no refunds but you can sell or give your reservation to a friend if you can’t come. There are no tickets as there is a master list at each luncheon where you must check in at the door. Reservations for individual luncheons are $42 all inclusive per luncheon. All luncheons begin at noon.

Reservations are necessary and can be made by calling 843-521-4147 or email kingsley@uscb.edu. Visa, Mastercard and Discover credit cards are accepted. Checks should be made out and mailed to: USCB Continuing Education, 801 Carteret St., Beaufort, SC 29902.

 Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Colleton River Clubhouse, Bluffton

Who better to start the USCB Lunch With Author series than our old friend and NY Times bestselling author Mary Kay Andrews. Summer Rental was a well deserved #5 its debut-week. It brings three best friends since Catholic grade school days together for a month at the beach. Now in their 30’s the women leave the familiar day-to-day routine to embark on a month of togetherness and girl-talk at the shore. Because they need additional rent money, they rent a room to a total stranger who turns out to be somewhat of a mystery woman on the run. Couple these four with a handsome bachelor landlord on the verge of losing the 100-year-old beach house, Ebbtide, to developers and the intrigue begins.

Mary Kay doesn’t disappoint. As she stated recently in an interview, “I want to give my readers the gift of escape—of a few hours spent with characters they care about and root for—or against. I want to create a world they’ll willingly inhabit—if only for a few hours. I want to write a big, juicy, delicious peach of a book. And I want to give them a happy ending, because we don’t always get that in real life. And I hope as soon as they turn that last page, they’ll say, “You gotta read Mary Kay Andrews.”

Other best sellers by Mary Kay are Fixer Upper, Savannah Breeze, Blue Christmas, Deep Dish, Hissy Fit, Little Bitty Lies and Savannah Blues.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Hampton Hall Clubhouse, Bluffton

In the 150th anniversary year of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize winner, journalist, history author Tony Horwitz is the perfect writer to bring us his latest book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Tony embarked on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict when he was writing Confederates in the Attic. He joined a band of 'hardcore' re-enactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; he witnessed Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandished a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he found that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, was now exalted as a martyr and hero; and finally Tony took a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubbed their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

At this writing, I have not read Midnight Rising but I’m sure Tony’s signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism will saturate the pages as they have in his other books. He sailed the high seas to narrate Cook’s adventure in Blue Latitudes; trekked the ‘New World’ to validate A Voyage Long and Strange; free-lanced his way through Iraq in Baghdad Without a Map. Tony is a consummate journalist turned book-author who firmly believes in “location, location” to gather his material. He resides in Martha’s Vineyard with his son and his Pulitzer Prize winning wife, Geraldine Brooks.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Moss Creek Clubhouse, Bluffton

When this photo of Adrienne McDonnell arrived, I couldn’t help thinking what a beautiful woman, then I read her first book, The Doctor and the Diva …a hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking novel…and her inner beauty appeared in print. This debut novel is based on the lives of her son’s paternal great-great grandparents...a wealthy Boston importer married to an operatic diva at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a tale of passionate love affairs, dangerous decisions, and a woman’s irreconcilable desires as she is forced to choose between the child she has always longed for and the opera career she cannot live without. The historical account of fertility treatments in 1903 is very informative and more than a little surprising.

The Doctor and the Diva reads like a staged opera. Set in foggy Boston, the verdant tropical island of Trinidad and opera rich Italy, the reader gets immersed in this lushly written libretto. One can actually hear the diva sing through the fluttering curtains onto the streets of Venice or into the orchid rich gardens of Trinidad.

Adrienne, a professor of literature and fiction writing, was inspired by hundreds of pages of family letters and memories of elderly relatives, long haunted by the story. Photograph is by Heather Evans Smith.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sea Pines Country Club, Hilton Head Island

CJ Lyons says she let out "a fan girl squeal of delight" when Erin Brockovich, a fan of her books, asked her to co-write Rock Bottom. CJ, who left her career as a pediatric ER doctor to pursue a full-time writing career, has written 11 novels, including her Angels of Mercy medical thriller series. Brockovich says she and CJ "had an instant connection" According to CJ, “When we spoke, she said that she enjoyed my strong female protagonists and how they let nothing stand in their way of doing what was right. Turns out we both feel the same way about our fiction — heavy on the characters and their relationships, light on the plot devices, and as fast-paced as possible.”

They have accomplished their goal. This is a powerful story that weaves together family, ecological and legal problems in a compelling, fast-paced, adventure filled story that will mix environmental and consumer advocates together to solve a problem. The sequel to Rock Bottom is Hot Water which will be available in October, 2011.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Dockside Restaurant, Port Royal, SC Jessica Speart is a petite freelance journalist who has been published in the NY Times Magazine, OMNI, Travel & Leisure, Audubon, National Wildlife as well as written at least ten mysteries making her a member of the esteemed Sisters of Crime Inc. Her latest book, Winged Obsession, The Pursuit of the World’s Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler IS NOT FICTION. Jessica went undercover to meet with the nation’s most notorious butterfly smuggler, Yoshi Kojima. Her research took her around the world, delving into the seedy underbelly of illegal butterfly trading, the downfall of the “Indiana Jones” of the butterfly world, and the rookie Fish &Wildlife agent who put his life on the line to stop him.

Yoshi Kojima is a legend in the cutthroat world of butterfly smuggling. From his disarmingly candid nature, to his disheveled appearance, downright filthy living habits, and his cunning ability to evade the law, Kojima is the type of character you just couldn’t make up. He even told Jessica, “I am the world’s most wanted butterfly smuggler. I am the Indiana Jones of Insects.”

The illegal butterfly trade in the United States is worth $200 million a year, with some butterflies going for up to $45,000 apiece.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Holiday Inn Beaufort, 2225 Boundary St., Beaufort

Lisa See’s Dreams of Joy entered the NY Times bestselling list at #1 its first week out. It will probably follow her other novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which debuted as a movie this summer.

“In Dreams of Joy which is set in the immediate aftermath of the emotional events that brought her popular Shanghai Girls to a fevered conclusion, See continues the irresistible saga of May, Pearl, and Pearl’s daughter, Joy,” according to Booklist. Joy leaves Los Angeles with Pearl in fast pursuit only to find China in the throes of Chairman Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign, and both are immediately catapulted into lives of unspeakable deprivation and gut-wrenching horror. Through the sobering experiences of a naïve young girl and the sacrificial actions of her mother, Lisa paints a vivid, haunting, and often graphic portrait of a country and a family in crisis.

Lisa’s first book, On Gold Mountain: The One Hundred Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, was converted by Lisa into a libretto for the Los Angeles Opera. Lisa resides in Los Angeles.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Country Club of Hilton Head, Hilton Head Island

In his most recent historical novel, The Watery Part of the World, Michael Parker has created a wholly original world from two known facts: (1) Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of the controversial vice president Aaron Burr and wife of the governor of South Carolina, disappeared in 1813 while en route by schooner from South Carolina to New York; and (2) in 1970, two elderly white women and one black man were the last townspeople to leave a small barrier island off the coast of North Carolina.

In a lush feat of historical speculation, Michael Parker imagines that Theo survived a pirate attack off the coast of North Carolina and lived out a long, conflicted life on one of the barrier islands.

The Watery Part of the World — that evocative title comes from Moby Dick — is an emotionally acute tale about a brilliant woman of privilege who must suddenly use her wits to avoid dismemberment, rape and starvation.

From Theodosia’s capture at sea, to the passionate lives of her great-great-great-granddaughters, to the tender story of the black man who cares for them all his days, this is an inspired novel about love, trust, and the often tortuous bonds of family and community. Michael has written four other novels and two collections of stories. He is a Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.