The Moveable Feast in Myrtle Beach for July 2016

Mostly Fridays, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., $25 each

Literary luncheons with exciting authors at area restaurants

The Moveable Feast is held at area restaurants throughout the year on Fridays, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. On occasion, an author’s book tour schedule is accommodated with a mid-week Moveable Feast. For each feast, the chef prepares an exquisite menu, typically unavailable during the restaurant’s public hours. The presentation precedes the meal. Individuals, couples, friends, book clubs and other groups are assigned table seating. Each literary luncheon is followed by a book signing at Litchfield Books for those unable to participate in the feast. Each feast is $25 (occasionally more); books are available at a 10% discount from Litchfield Books. For schedules and reservations, call 843-235-9600 or www.classatpawleys.com.Bronwen Dickey

July 1 – Bronwen Dickey (Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon) at Carefree Catering

With unfailing thoughtfulness, compassion and a firm grasp of scientific fact, the daughter of James and sister of Christopher explores how a popular breed of dog became the most demonized and supposedly the most dangerous of dogs – and what role humans have played in the transformation. When Bronwen Dickey brought her new dog home, she saw no traces of the infamous viciousness in her affectionate, timid pit bull. Which made her wonder: How had the breed – beloved by Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and Hollywood’s “Little Rascals” – come to be known as a brutal fighter? Her search for answers takes her from 19th century New York City dogfighting pits to early 20th century movie sets, from the battlefields of Gettysburg and the Marne, to desolate urban neighborhoods, culminating in a clear-eyed portrait of this extraordinary breed and an insightful view of Americans’ relationship with their dogs.

 

July 8 – Beatriz Williams (A Certain Age) at Kimbel’s, Wachesaw

We last met New York Times bestselling author of A Hundred Summers when she trio-ed with Karen White, and here she brings the Roaring Twenties brilliantly to life in an enchanting and compulsively readable tale of intrigue, romance, and scandal in New York Society, brimming with lush atmosphere, striking characters, and irresistible charm. As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, has done the unthinkable: she’s fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War. An intense and deeply honorable man, Octavian is devoted to the beautiful socialite of a certain age and wants to marry her. While times are changing and she does adore the Boy, divorce for a woman of Theresa’s wealth and social standing is out of the question, and there is no need; she has an understanding with Sylvo, her generous and well-respected philanderer husband. Full of the glamour, wit and delicious twists that are the hallmarks of Beatriz Williams’ fiction, A Certain Age is a beguiling reinterpretation of Richard Strauss’s comic opera Der Rosenkavalier, set against the sweeping decadence of Gatsby’s New York.

 

TUESDAY, July 12 – Charles Joyner, Orville Vernon Burton, Eldred E. “Wink” Prince, Jr. (Becoming Southern Writers: Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner) at Ocean Club, Grande Dunes

Nearly thirty exceptional writers of fact, fiction and poetry pay tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner’s fifty-year career as a Southern historian, folklorist and social activist. These exceptional writers – a veritable Who’s Who of Southern writers – are among Joyner’s many friends, admirers and colleagues, as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and the manner they came to write about it, as well as offering reflections on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author’s personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner’s own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner’s theme that “all history is local history, somewhere.”

 

July 15 – Emily Edwards (Bars, Blues, and Booze) at Inlet Affairs

True accounts from musicians, bar owners, and regulars at the crossroads of good times and despair.

Bars, Blues, and Booze collects lively bar tales from the intersection of black and white musical cultures in the South. Many of these stories do not seem dignified, decent, or filled with uplifting euphoria, but they are real narratives of people who worked hard with their hands during the week to celebrate the weekend with music and mind-altering substances. These are stories of musicians who may not be famous celebrities but are men and women deeply occupied with their craft – professional musicians stuck with a day job. The author is a professor of media studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is also an independent filmmaker, whose work includes the documentary “Deadheads: An America Subculture, “which is distributed nationally on PBS stations, and two feature films with blues music scores, “Root Doctor” and “Bone Creek.”

 

July 22 – Julia Franks (Over the Plain House) at Carefree Catering

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie – tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt – is practicing black magic. When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to the lady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces. Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this mesmerizing debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice – stalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can’t quite dispel.

 

July 29 – West Fraser (Painting the Southern Coast) at Pawleys Plantation

This stunning collection of the works of West Fraser, one of the nation’s most respected painters of representational art. A mastery of his medium and the scope of work ensure his place in Southern art history. A true son of the lowcountry, Fraser has dedicated much of his career to capturing the lush, primordial beauty of the Southeast’s coastal regions that have been altered by man and time. The 260 works in this book are representative of the sketches, studies, and finished paintings he has generated over his nearly forty-year career, works that depict coastal locales from Winyah Bay, South Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida, and include Charleston, Hilton Head, Savannah, and the islands of the lowcountry through the Golden Isles of Georgia.

 

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