The Friends of the Library (FOL) will hold its 46th annual Richard D. Whittemore Book & Author Luncheon on Friday, May 15, from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at North Hills Country Club, Manhasset. The FOL will welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Jules Feiffer, who will speak on his noir graphic novel, Kill My Mother (Liveright), and acclaimed writer Mary Gordon, who will speak on her collection of novellas, The Liar’s Wife (Pantheon). Port’s own best-selling novelist Susan Isaacs will return as program moderator.
Adding to a legendary career that includes a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, Obie Awards and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Cartoonists Society and the Writers Guild of America, Jules Feiffer presents his first graphic novel, Kill My Mother, as a loving homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth. It centers on five formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and fatally by a has-been, hard-drinking private detective.
Reviewers have lauded the book as bluesy, fast moving, and funny — a trip to Hammett-Chandler-Cain Land, and a graphic novel “like the movies they don’t make anymore.” Jules Feiffer is a cartoonist, playwright, children’s book author and illustrator, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches writing at Stony Brook Southampton College and lives in East Hampton.
The Liar’s Wife by Mary Gordon is the award-winning author at her storytelling best. These absorbing novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, are “a book-lover’s dream,” according to the BBC. In them, we meet a ferocious Simone Weill during her final days in New York City, a vulnerable graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first love affair, Thomas Mann in the Midwest in 1939, and the charming Irish liar of the title story.
Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments and Pearl, the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother, and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded The Story Prize. She has received numerous honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event. Tickets are $75, and reservations can be made using brochures available in the library or for download at www.pwpl.org/fol. Reservation forms are due by May 6. For questions regarding reservations, contact FOL board member and event registrar Mary Alice Kohs at 516-883-9434 or fol@pwpl.org. For more information on the event and the FOL, see www.pwpl.org/fol.
