The Writer’s Center welcomes novelist Virginia Pye for a reading from her new novel, Marriage and Other Monuments. Virginia is joined by award winning writer, Mary Kay Zuravleff.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Virginia Pye’s most recent novel, Marriage and Other Monuments, published by Koehler Books in February, is set in Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 2020. She is also the author of four previous award-winning books of fiction, including two post-colonial historical novels set in China, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, and the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness. Her last novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is a love story to writers and readers set in Gilded Age Boston. Virginia’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. To learn more about her, please visit: www.virginia@virginiapye.com.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by both her grandmothers and her coal-mining grandfathers. Her third novel, Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, was praised by People magazine for its “impressive intelligence and sly humor,” and the New York Times called her second, The Bowl Is Already Broken, “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming.” She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art’s Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts.
About the Book
Cynthia Powers’ husband, Bobby, can no longer hide his dire financial situation as it finally ruptures their marriage. Her sister Melissa’s marriage to Marshall Stone has gone off the rails, too, as she dedicated herself so fully to racial justice activism that she drifted from her own Black husband. As the summer heats up, the sisters move into adjacent apartments and though their relationship remains chilly and their marriages veer in opposite directions, they have no choice but to turn to one another. When the history of their husbands’ ancestors—one, old Virginia white, the other, old Virginia Black—comes to light, it reveals a crime that Cynthia and Bobby aim to correct through homegrown reparations, transferring to Marshall a historic house on Monument Avenue where Bobby’s father has lived all his life, and which is now at the epicenter of the protests.
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