Word

Argyle’s Cinderella, while playful in some areas, humorous in others, is haunting in its elegance and simplicity. The prose itself is pitch perfect for the narrative, to the point where as a reader you forget that you’re reading. It’s presented like the glass slipper that it is: beautiful, translucent, and full of unexpected magic.

The artist/ entrepreneur is also a writer and novelist. He has combined these disparate interests Chapters: A Literary Exhibition. It is on view in the Flatiron Art Space 2 through October 16.

The Berkshire jeweler/gem merchant Richard Wise has written a historical novel, The French Blue. This is his second book, his first, Secrets Of The Gem Trade, a non-fiction connoisseur’s guide to gemstones, published in 2003 has been through three printings and has become something of a bestseller.

While struggling to overcome debt that threatened The Mount with bankruptcy its director, Susan Wissler, is moving forward with programming and development. Recently Edith Wharton's mansion and estate was the site for the first annual Berkshire WordFest at the Mount.

Edith Wharton's Estate & Gardens in Lenox, Massachusetts held its first annual writer's conference: WORDFEST. It was a rich experience by any measure and had surpassed high expectations at the end, on July 25th. Poets, writers and all who came and supported the event mingled easily and shared of themselves. It was a celebration of the written English language then and now.

Yovanoff substitutes one world for another, surely, but in doing so she restores an original and ancient mystery to our dealings with life and death and the daily transactions we make with both, until the layered world she shows us becomes, once again--as it always was--the real one, living side by side or just a sidelong glance across the surface of the one we've been collectively pretending--all of us, all along--to be whole and plausible and independent of our dark imaginings.

The second annual Boston Book Festival will take place on Oct. 16, 2010, in various locations around Copley Square. Festival Founder and Director Deborah Z Porter today announced a partial list of authors confirmed to appear at this year’s event.

Garrison Keillor will be a keynote speaker and honoree at the first annual literary festival of Edith Wharton's The Mount, Berkshire WordFest. The popular host and writer of NPR programs A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac, will speak at The Mount’s Festival Fundraiser, a dinner event held at Seven Hills Inn in Lenox, Mass., on Saturday, July 24. During the event, Keillor will be honored with The Mount’s 2010 Henry James Award.

A. S. King scatters the lessons of ownership, abandonment, the pack instinct and fending for oneself across the lifetimes of three centuries in her coming-of-age novel of piracy, disenfranchisement and the feminine. King stitches some rather provocative questions about ownership, loyalty and femininity all through the deceptively simple patterns of her novel.