Author Jonathan Lethem reading “Vivian Relf” from Cartoons and Men, along with Ben Arthur and Cindy Lee Berryhill performing their responses at Vroman’s Bookstore on Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 3:00 PM.
About Jonathan Lethem:
Jonathan Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
About Ben Arthur:
Ben Arthur’s eighth album is American Castles, which continues Ben’s exploration of “answer songs” and art-inspired inspiration and collaboration. “Young Dead” was co-written with author George Saunders, while other songs on the album were written in response to stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Patricia Lockwood, and Susan Orlean. Ben is also a producer and the host of the Emmy-nominated television series SongCraft Presents, in which Ben writes and records a song with a featured artist over the course of a day. Ben has released seven previous albums and two novels.
About Cindy Lee Berryhill:
Cindy Lee Berryhill marks an affecting, intimate, and dazzling return to record-making with The Adventurist,
an ambitious song cycle released by Omnivore Recordings on March 10. Encinitas, Calif.-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Berryhill describes her elegantly crafted set of new original compositions – her first release since 2007’s Beloved Stranger — as a collection of “tone poems about the experiential feeling of enlovement.” Written and recorded over the course of the last five years, co-produced by Berryhill with David Schwartz, Sheldon Gomberg, Ben Moore, and Lee Ray.
The album was inspired by Berryhill’s life with her late husband Paul Williams. Founder of the first modern American rock magazine Crawdaddy in 1966 and a prolific writer and critic, Williams married Berryhill in 1997. Two years earlier, Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycling accident. Following the early onset of dementia in 2004 and deepening medical challenges, he was placed in full-time care in 2009; he died in March 2013.
Berryhill says, “I vowed to write Paul a song cycle. Not songs of sadness or the despair I’d felt, but songs that reflected the love I had for him, and a remembering back to the enormous flood of feelings we’d had on meeting and courting. I wanted to write songs that felt like they’d come from that muse-driven place we feel when we fall in love.”
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