Sunday, September 10, Coral Gables, 4pm
In the popular imagination, Yiddish is an ancient language with many ways to express grumbling, hand wringing and displeasure, full of earthy attitudes and vulgar humor. While that's all true, it's not a complete picture. In Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (Harper Perennial, $13.95), author and expert Michael Wex takes a probing look at just what makes Yiddish, the principal spoken language of the Jews for over a century, so original, so resilient - and so full of complaint. Almost impossible for a non-Jew to learn or understand, Yiddish started out as a bastardized version of German to give voice to systemic exclusion and exile. Born to Kvetch explores Yiddish in relation to nature, food, childhood, courtship and marriage, sex (setting the record straight on the difference between shmuk and puts, both part of the colloquial vernacular, neither for use in mixed company!) and death, all topics worthy of a good kvetch. Armed with stories, anecdotes and perfectly delivered punch lines, Wex strikes a skillful balance between the somber and the comical aspects of his subject matter. 4pm
Wednesday, September 13, Gables
Burnt Sugar Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish (Free Press, $14) brings us the sights, sounds, and rhythms of Cuba, revealed in the evocative works of some of the finest Cuban and Cuban-American poets of the twentieth century, including Gustavo Pérez Firmat, José Abreu Felippe, Enrique Sacerio-Garí, Reinaldo Arenas, Heberto Padilla, Pablo Medina, Agustín Acosta, Angel Cuadra, Eugenio Florit, Severo Sarduy, Virgil Suárez, Sandra M. Castillo, Lissette Méndez, Ruth Behar, Rita Geada, Belkis Cuza Malé, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, José Kozer, Orlando González Esteva, Uva de Aragón, Adrián Castro, Carolina Hospital and Armando Valladares, among others. Bestselling translator Lori Marie Carlson and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos have created an intimate collection of some of their favorite modern poems, all of which are informed by cubanía -- the essence of what it means to be Cuban. Stirring, immediate, and universal in its sensibility, Burnt Sugar is a luminous collection lovingly compiled by two of the world's foremost authorities on the subject. This event is presented in collaboration with the Florida Center for the Literary Arts and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC). 8pm
Thursday, September 21, Lincoln Theatre, 541 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. His work is in the collection of the MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many others. After the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, nobody who was not directly involved in the recovery effort was allowed on the Ground Zero site. Journalists were included in this ban, but, with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and sympathetic city officials, Meyerowitz became the sole photographer granted unimpeded access to the site. For eight months, at all times of the day and night, he photographed “the pile” as the WTC came to be known, and the 800 people a day that were working in it. Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Meyerowitz knew that if he didn’t make a photographic record, there would be no history. His work is contained in a major new book, Aftermath (Phaidon, $75) that features, for the first time, the vast archive of his unpublished photos from Ground Zero. Join us for an unforgettable program, Ground Zero Through the Artist’s Lens: An Evening with Joel Meyerowitz. FREE tickets for this event are available at all Books & Books locations, beginning September 1st. 7:30pm
Thursday, September 28, Miami Beach
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95) by Alison Bechdel (the author of the long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For) takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings and- like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis- a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift . . . graphic . . . and redemptive. This event is presented in collaboration with the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and Design Within Reach. 8pm
Saturday, September 30, Gables
On a visit to her childhood home in Texas, Julie Powell pulls her mother's battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the bookshelf. And the book calls out to her. Pushing thirty, living in a run-down apartment in Queens, and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is stuck. Her only hope lies in a dramatic self-rescue mission. And so she invents a deranged assignment: in the space of one year, she will cook every recipe in the Julia Child classic, all 524 of them. How hard could it be? With fierceness, irreverence, and unbreakable resolve, Powell learns Julia Child's most important lesson: the art of living with gusto. Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (Little, Brown & Co., $13.99) is "a feast, a voyage, and a marvel," says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man, for anyone who has ever cursed at a cookbook or longed for a more delicious life. Tonight, the Café at Books & Books Coral Gables will offer a Julia Child-inspired menu to celebrate the author’s reading. Powell’s visit last year was cancelled because of Hurricane Wilma, so we are hoping to make it up to her during the paperback tour. Please join us! 7pm
tags: yiddish books miami coral gables books and books cuban poetry cooking julia child alison bechdel joel meyerowitz photography 9 11
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