We are pleased to welcome Fleda Brown to the store on Wednesday, June 27 from 7-8:30 p.m. Fleda is a poety and essayist and we look forward to her visit. This is a free wine and cheese event and reservations are requested. Please call us at 231-347-1180 or send us an email for more information.
All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of
which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that
rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her
life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet’s gift, into
something more. Driving With Dvořák is an unconventional
memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex
family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it
adds up to one woman’s story while simultaneously reflecting the story
of her times.
A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless mother, a
mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor: folded into
Brown’s reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences of family and
marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether
reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from
beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown’s telling rings with great
humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most
commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.
Reviews
“Throughout this stunning book of essays, we journey into memory
through a ‘music made of accumulation.’ Fleda Brown’s voice is edgy,
direct, yet surprisingly tender. A decrepit summer cottage, a
brain-damaged brother, even an exhaustingly difficult father are all
part of the symphony she offers her lucky readers.”
—Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings
“In these elegant, associative essays, Fleda Brown writes movingly of
her metamorphosis in spirit, body, and mind from her hoop-skirted
childhood to the present. Her essays are often elegiac, always tender
and compassionate, her language a poet’s, her memory a composer’s.”
—Robin Hemley, director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa
and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether
reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from
beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown’s telling rings with great
humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most
commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.
