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• Lunch with Alice McDermott

  • When
    September 27, 2017
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

  Registration is closed

  The Ninth Hour
  

  A super-star among writers, Alice McDermott has won both the National Book Award and the American Book Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times.  Her newest novel, The Ninth Hour, is lauded as "a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today."  Rendered with McDermott’s characteristic lucidity and intelligence, it speaks of love and sacrifice, and of forgiveness and forgetfulness, through multiple generations.

  *** Registration is open August 1 - September 22, 2017. ***

  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Photo credit: Jamie Schoenberger - Epic Photography
  

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• Lunch with Andre Aciman

  • When
    October 26, 2017
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

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  Enigma Variations
  

  Andre Aciman won the Whiting Award for his memoir of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt, and he received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts.  Hailed as a writer of “fiction at its most supremely interesting” by the New York Review of Book, Aciman is a memoirist, essayist, and novelist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, Granta as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.  In his most recent novel, Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist.

  *** Registration is open August 1 - October 21, 2017. ***

  
  

  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Photo credit: Unknown

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• Lunch with Edwidge Danticat

  • When
    November 16, 2017
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

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  The Art of Death
  

  Edwidge Danticat, winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award, is a two-time finalist for the National Book Award, recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius grant, among many other honors and awards.  Her latest book, The Art of Death, is a memoir of her mother’s death that also acts as a literary criticism.  Reviewers have praised it as “elegant and thoughtful, and a fascinating meditation on the thing that brings us together.”   It has been heralded as “a master class in literature and a guidebook for the most universal human experience.”

  *** Registration closes on November 11, 2017. ***

  Publisher: Graywolf Press

  Photo credit: Ernesto Ruscio
  

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• Lunch with Kevin Young

  • When
    December 14, 2017
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

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  Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News 

  “Brilliant!” is often used to describe the writing of Kevin Young, an esteemed scholar, poet, essayist, editor, and professor.  His work has won the Graywolf Press Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and made the 2016 National Book Award longlist.  About his latest collection of timely essays, Bunk, Booker Prize winner Marlon James aptly extols, “There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want.  Unexpectedly essential."

  *** Registration closes December 9, 2017. ***

  Publisher: Graywolf Press

  Photo credit: Wikipedia
  

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• Lunch with Dani Shapiro

  • When
    January 18, 2018
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

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  Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage
  

  Best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro delivers her most intimate and powerful work in Hourglass:  Time, Memory, Marriage.  In Hourglass, Ms. Shapiro draws on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology to inquire how marriage is changed over time. Reviewers have called it, “gorgeous, stunning, extraordinary-life changing,” “searing…beautifully drawn,” and “thoroughly transcendent.”  Ms. Shapiro’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on This American Life.  She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University.  

  *** Registration closes January 12, 2018. ***

  Publisher: Knopf

  Photo credit: Unknown
  

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• Lunch with Amor Towles

  • When
    February 16, 2018
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

  Register

  A Gentleman in Moscow
  

  More than half a million readers have fallen in love with the New York Times bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Amor Towles is the man behind the  masterpiece.  Brimming with humor and a glittering cast of characters, it has been variously described as intriguing, sparkling, irresistible, an elegant period piece, and as lavishly filigreed as a Fabergé egg.  Formerly an investment professional in New York,Towles first made a literary splash with his debut novel, Rules of Civility.  Now, readers everywhere eagerly await the next book, as it is sure to take them on a journey filled with charm, wisdom, adventures and twists of fate. 

  *** Registration closes February 11, 2018. ***
  

  Publisher: Viking
  

  Photo credit: David Jacobs
  

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• Lunch with Ayad Akhtar

  • When
    March 22, 2018
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

  Register

  Junk
  

  Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and actor whose 2013 play, Disgraced, won a Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for a Tony Award.  He is also the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Letters, two Obie awards, a Jeff award, an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award.  His most recent work, Junk, is, according to the Los Angeles Times, “dramatically enthralling…a thrilling play…a modern morality tale…in a world where money, the new might, now makes right.”

  *** Registration closes March 17, 2018. ***

  Publisher: Back Bay Books

  Photo credit:  Martin Godwin
  

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• Lunch with Martha Grimes

  • When
    April 25, 2018
  •  
    12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Temple Israel | 137 NE 19 Street | Miami, FL 33132

  Register

  The Knowledge
  

  Martha Grimes is a New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America.  Staggeringly prolific, she has penned at least one book a year since her first was published in 1981, when she was 50 years old.  She is perhaps best known for her much beloved character, Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard detective who has appeared in two dozen of her novels.   Reviewers laud her eccentric British humor and praise her “utterly engaging” prose.  Ms. Grimes’ most recent book is The Knowledge, but we can’t tell you anything about it because…well…it’s still a mystery.

  *** Registration closes April 20, 2018. ***

  Publisher: (Pending)

  Photo credit: Unknown
  

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