The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House offers a variety of lectures throughout the year showcasing award-winning authors who share insight into their latest publication.
Admission for all lectures is $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers, and FREE to Annual Fund donors, unless otherwise noted.
Reservations are requested for all lectures.
For more information or to purchase tickets, please call 404.814.4150.
The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House
990 Peachtree Street
Atlanta, GA 30309
February | March | April
 T.C. Boyle
Wild Child
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
7:00 PM
In his collection of short stories, Wild Child, T.C. Boyle chose Thoreau’s line, “in wilderness is the preservation of the world,” as an epigraph. Most of his stories address natural concerns or nature run amok in what has become a sub specialty of Boyle’s stories. Brilliant, incisive, and always entertaining, Boyle’s short stories showcase his mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that makes him one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. T.C. Boyle has written 12 novels, including World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Drop City, a National Book Award finalist, as well as eight short story collections.
 Victoria Rowell
The Women Who Raised Me
Thursday, February 11, 2010
7:00 PM
Victoria Rowell has played a multitude of roles in her career as a two-time Emmy Award-nominated and an eleven-time NAACP Image Award-winning actress. But as many women as she’s played in her professional life, even more have played starring roles in her personal life as foster mothers, caretakers, social service workers, neighbors, friends, teachers, grand dames, and mentors, all of whom Rowell honors in her touching memoir, The Women Who Raised Me. The book is a tribute to the amazing women who cared for her when her birth mother could not, as well as to the foster system that brought them into her life.
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 Chris Cleave
Little Bee
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
7:00 P
Told in turns in the first person by Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee just released from a UK detention center, and Sarah, a British journalist whose fate is braided with Little Bee’s through tragedy, the novel follows these two women as they struggle to save each other and themselves. Little Bee tries to make a life for herself in a totally alien land, while Sarah must come to terms with her personal and professional choices. United by their past and by love for Sarah's young son Charlie, Little Bee and Sarah become indispensable to each other. But their bond will face the ultimate test when the system catches up with Little Bee, and each woman must make a devastating decision.
 Lisa See
Shanghai Girls
Thursday, March 4, 2010
7:00 PM
In 1937 Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Two sisters are forced to leave their cosmopolitan lives in Shanghai for a new start in Los Angeles. Suspenseful, provocative, and intelligent, Shanghai Girls is both a story about the adventures of two particular sisters and a story that reminds us all of the intense love, tension, and struggle inherent in every family.
Lisa See is the New York Times-bestselling author of Peony in Love, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), The Interior, and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year.
 Laura Skandera Trombley
Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years
Monday, March 29, 2010
7:00 PM
An enduring mystery of Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, following the death of his wife of thirty-four years and up to his own death in1910. Despite many biographies, it is unclear how his experiences in those final years affected him, personally and professionally. It was believed Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges.
Suspecting there was more to the story, Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, went in search of Isabel Lyon, the one woman who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twain’s life and writings. Following sixteen years of research, Mark Twain’s Other Woman reveals Lyon’s daily journals, the only detailed record of Twain’s last years that were overlooked by Twain’s previous biographers.
Raised in Southern California, Trombley attended Pepperdine University where she earned her B.A. and M.A., and the University of Southern California, where she earned a Ph.D. in English literature. She is the author of Mark Twain in the Company of Women and is the president of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where she lives with her husband and son.
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 Katherine Howe
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
7:00 PM
Scholars of the Salem witch trials have long asked why the accusers chose to ruin so many lives. In The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, author Katherine Howe,asks another question - what if the women really were witches? In the novel, Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin finds the name “Deliverance Dane” on a scrap of paper inside an old Bible.
The discovery launches her on a quest that includes visions of a woman condemned in 1690s Salem for practicing “physick” - herbal healing - and her own efforts to save her injured boyfriend through an ancient and mystical cure. Before time runs out, she must locate the actual physick book of Deliverance Dane. As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story fall into place, Goodwin begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past than she imagined.
Katherine Howe is completing a Ph.D. in American and New England Studies at Boston University. Two of her ancestors were tried as witches in 1692. Elizabeth Proctor survived the ordeal; Elizabeth Howe did not. The idea for The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane developed while Howe was studying for her exams, walking her dog through the woods between Marblehead and Salem, Massachusetts. She lives in Marblehead with her husband.
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