Join us as we welcome HADLEY HURY on SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25 at 2:00 PM to celebrate the release of his new novel AT THE VILLA BORAGO.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It is autumn 1962 and Jess Ensworth, twenty-three, of Memphis, Tennessee, is spending five weeks at a pensione high in the hills overlooking Florence. Her traveling companion/chaperone is her beloved uncle.
The opening scene of AT THE VILLA BORAGO, which is set in both Florence and Tennessee, gives a tip of the hat to E.M Forster's A ROOM WITH A VIEW, but then the narrative takes flight as something completely new. The love story at the heart of AT THE VILLA BORAGO finds its trajectory as the closely guarded conformities and moral presumptions of the 1950s begin to yield to the insistence on liberation of the '60s.
Some major events background the narrative action: James Meredith and the integration.of the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962, the highly restricted initiation in the early '60s of the birth control pill in the U.S., the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. These historic benchmarks in Civil Rights and U.S. culture and socio-politics are not major points of focus in themselves, but their significance echoes in the development of the characters.
AT THE VILLA BORAGO is imbued with a palpable sense of place. The settings in Tuscany and the American South are a presence in themselves and have an essential influence in these lives. The story--a serious exploration of love, changing eras, art, and nature--is embodied in the characters, their ideas, values, and relationships. Their individual searches for authenticity merge with steadily increasing velocity, unexpected challenges, suspense, and humor.
Jess is intelligent and intrepid, an emerging artist determined to learn what life and love can be, poised between the era in which she was raised and a brave new world in which she is determined to make her place. Indeed, each of the major characters here is aware that his or her life is being shaped by seismic shifts of social context, but none of them is willing to allow the vagaries of chronology to have the final word in defining who they are or who they can they can become.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hadley Hury has written on film and theatre for a number of publications, and his poetry and essays appear widely in journals, reviews, and magazines. His work includes a novel THE EDGE OF THE GULF (2003), a collection of short stories IT'S NOT THE HEAT (2007), and a poetry collection ALMOST NAKED (2018). For leadership in public-private partnerships benefiting the environment he received the Colorado Governor's Award. He was chair of the department of English at Hutchison School, associate professor in film at the University of Memphis, and guest lecturer on film at Memphis College of Art, Rhodes College, and Brooks Museum. In 2012 he was named a Presidential Scholars Distinguished Educator. He is married to Marilyn Adams Hury and they live in Memphis.
You may also like the following events from Novel Memphis:
Also check out other
Arts events in Memphis,
Literary Art events in Memphis,
Entertainment events in Memphis.
