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Event Name:

In Conversation: Jo Ann Beard and Ralph Sassone

Address:

17 E. 47th St.
New York, NY

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Event Date/Time:

Starts:	Wed Apr 25 2012 at 7:00 PM
Ends:	Wed Apr 25 2012 at 8:00 PM

Hosting Organization:

The Center for Fiction

Contact Name:

Sugar Vendil

Contact Phone Number:

212.755.6710

For More Information:

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Event Cost:

$0.00

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Event Description:

The coming of age novel has a long tradition in literature. We're taking a close look at the bildungsroman with two authors of recent coming of age novels. Jo Ann Beard and Ralph Sassone will read from their books and discuss the form. In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard: The narrator at the center of the story is a late-blooming fourteen-year-old everygirl living in a small Midwestern town in the 1970s and flying under the radar. Fortunately, she has a best friend, Felicia, with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed and character is forged. In time, their friendship is tested, by their families’ claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them as if they were found objects, and by the first startling intimations of womanhood. Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America’s innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders, and that within the souls of the awkward and the overlooked often burns something radiant. The Intimates by Ralph Sassone: Spanning years and continents, it is about two gifted and striving people who discover themselves in the reflection they see in each other, and how their affinity anchors them at critical points in their lives. Maize and Robbie are drawn to each other from the first time they meet in high school. When it becomes obvious that their relationship won’t be sexual, they establish a different kind of intimacy: becoming each other’s “human diaries.” For the better part of a decade they’re inseparable, but ultimately they must confront the underside of the extreme and complicated closeness that has sustained them since they were teenagers. Full of indelible characters and observations as sharply witty as they are lovely and profound, The Intimates renders the wonders and disappointments of becoming an adult, the thrills and mesmerizing illusions of sex, and the secrets we keep from others and ourselves as we struggle to locate our true character.