An Evening with Martha Anne Toll and Joan Wickersham

If you would prefer to buy your ticket by phone, you may call Wellesley Books at 781-431-1160.

About ticketing:

• Admission to the event is $5.
• To purchase the book with your admission, choose Admission + Book and we will waive your admission fee.
• If you decide to purchase the book at the event, we will discount your book purchase by $5.

Please note that you must purchase your copy of the book from Wellesley Books in order to have the author sign it at the event.

Please also note that we cannot issue ticket refunds within 48 hours of the event.

ABOUT DUET FOR ONE

Haunted by his youthful romance with Dara, gifted and sensitive violinist Adam must confront his past to find a way forward. At the Philadelphia graveside of his mother, Adele Pearl, wife and partner in a celebrated two-piano team, his father, Victor, mourns the loss of both his wife and musical career. As Adam reflects on their relationship, he realizes his mother was absent in ways that truly mattered. Struggling with the emptiness left by a series of failed relationships with talented women, Adam grapples with his connection to Dara, an English professor burdened by her own divorce and blind to what she lost in him.

Martha Anne Toll’ s Duet for One weaves a poignant narrative of loss, connection, and the enduring hope that love can be found where life resides, following her acclaimed debut, Three Muses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won praise from national outlets including the Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR, and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Toll is the recipient of Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and Dairy Hollow. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. Degree in Music. Her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. Degree from Boston University School of Law, and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice. Toll lives in Washington, D.C.

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ABOUT NO SHIP SETS OUT TO BE A SHIPWRECK

From the author of the National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index – hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book” – comes a startlingly original exploration of the unpredictability of fate and the mystery of our own mortality.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than three hundred years later.

Beginning with Joan Wickersham’s first sight of the ship in its Stockholm museum, her pieces – intimate, irreverent, urgent – weave together Vasa’s story and the associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates the wind that capsized the ship and the shipworms that failed to eat the wreck. Constantly rising up are the lingering echoes of her father’s suicide; memories of her mother’s final illness and death; and the paradoxical presence of the ship itself – an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure whose flaws made it an enduring success, a vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting book that both is and isn’t about the ship – a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and the question of what vanishes and what endures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a National Book Award Finalist.

Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Agni, One Story, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For the past fifteen years her op-ed column has run regularly in The Boston Globe. She has published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The International Herald Tribune and has read her work on National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.”

Wickersham has received the Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She has taught at Harvard, Emerson, the University of Massachusetts (Boston), and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She graduated from Yale with a degree in art history and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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