The APLFF together with the Austin Mayor’s Office and the Austin Public Library present The Mayor’s Book Club, “an annual citywide reading campaign to develop a community experience through reading and discussion.” The 2011 book selections were revealed at an Opening Event on Saturday, March 5th, at which Mayor Lee Leffingwell welcomed authors Siobhan Fallon and Tim O’Brien to author readings and book discussions with the Austin community. Austinites have been invited to read Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone and O’Brien’s The Things They Carried throughout the year. In addition, the Austin Public Library will make available author interviews, readers’ guides and additional Mayor’s Book Club events.
The 2011 selections are available for check out at any Austin Public Library branch and can be purchased at area bookstores. Dulce Bread & Book Shop has both available and will ship free directly to your door!
Join Senior Lecturer of UT Department of English, Betsy Berry, in a group discussion of The Things They Carried. This community discussion is scheduled for Wednesday, March 23rd at 7 PM at the North Village Branch. Visit the APL 2011 Book Clubs schedule for additional events.
About the Authors
Siobhan Fallon was raised in Highland Falls, New York, just outside the gates of the United States Military Academy at West Point. She graduated from Providence College and spent a year at Cambridge University in England. After teaching English in Japan, she earned an MFA at the New School in New York City. She lives in Monterey, California, near the Defense Language Institute with her husband and their three-year-old daughter. Her family is scheduled to be stationed in the Middle East in the spring of 2011.
Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are In the Lake of the Woods, Tomcat in Love, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and July, July.
About the Novels
You Know When the Men Are Gone | An army of women waits for its men to return in Fort Hood, Texas. Through a series of loosely interconnected stories, Fallon takes readers onto the base, inside the homes, into the marriages and families.
The Things They Carried | A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene. It is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. "The Things They Carried" depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere--from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing--it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
Links
You Know When the Men Are Gone discussion questions
The Things They Carried discussion questions
Austin American-Statesman interview with Siobhan Fallon
You Know When the Men Are Gone
By Siobhan Fallon
Pub: Amy Einhorn Books
Pub Date: January 2011
ISBN: 9780399157202
$23.95 USD | Hardcover
The Things They Carried (Anniversary 20th Edition)
By Tim O’Brien
Pub: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub Date: March 2010
ISBN: 9780547391175
$24.00 USD | Hardcover
Teresa,
Thanks so much for posting about the Austin Mayor's Book Club!
It was a wonderful weekend; I love Austin!
Siobhan Fallon