We will have a limited number of signed copies left after the event.
Malaprop's and Pack Memorial Library are proud to present authors Lee Smith and Daniel Wallace at Downtown Asheville's Pack Memorial Library! Jennifer McGaha will moderate.
This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually or in person at the library in Lord Auditorium.
The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.
We will have a limited number of signed copies left after the event.
If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop's. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. We also encourage you check out books from Buncombe County Libraries. Thank you!
This funny and endearing novel of family, secrets, and aging follows an elderly man who heads off on a joyride with a new young friend--who may have some secrets of her own. A driving force in literature, the one and only Lee Smith returns with a road trip novel, a story full of hope and humor about not going away quietly--at any age. Aging Herb's charmed life with his dear wife, Susan, in their Key West house is coming undone. Susan now needs constant care, and Herb is in denial about his own ailing health. The one bright spot is the arrival of an endlessly optimistic manicurist calling herself Renee. She sings to Susan during manicures, gets her to paint, and brings her a sense of contentment. But then Herb and Susan's adult children arrive to stage an intervention on their stubborn, independent father, and as a consequence, Renee's gig with Susan--and her grand plans for her own life--start to unravel as well. So much had seemed as if it could change for Renee, who is not the happy, uncomplicated young girl she pretends to be. She is actually named Dee Dee, and she's fleeing a dark past.And Herb can't just let go of all that he has ever had. So, he suggests one last joy ride in his Porsche. And the two take off north out of Key West, soon setting off a Silver Alert. As the unlikely friendship between Herb and Dee Dee deepens, we see how as one life is closing down, another opens up. In this buoyant novel, the masterful Smith asks: What do we deserve? And how do we make it our own? Sometimes, you just have to seize the wheel. Fans of Smith's many books in her storied, bestselling career won't want to miss her newest novel. And readers of novels like Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes will adore Silver Alert.
Lee Smith is the author of fourteen novels, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Saving Grace, and Guests on Earth, as well as four collections of short stories, including Me and My Baby View the Eclipse and News of the Spirit. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature.
In this powerful memoir, the bestselling author of Big Fish tries to come to terms with the life and death of his multi-talented longtime friend and brother-in-law, who had been his biggest hero and inspiration, in a poignant, lyrical, and moving memoir. If we're lucky, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For acclaimed novelist Daniel Wallace, he had one hero and inspiration for so much of what followed: his longtime friend and brother-in-law William Nealy. Seemingly perfect, impossibly cool, William was James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and MacGyver all rolled into one, an acclaimed outdoorsman, a famous cartoonist, an accomplished author, a master of all he undertook, William was the ideal that Daniel sought to emulate. But when William took his own life at age 48, Daniel was left first grieving, and then furious with the man who broke his and his sister's hearts. That anger led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a dark path into the tortured recesses of William's past. Eventually, a new picture of William emerged, of a man with too many secrets and too much shame to bear. This Isn't Going to End Well is Daniel Wallace's first foray into nonfiction. Part love story, part true crime, part a desperate search for the self and how little we really can know another, This Isn't Going to End Well tells an intimate and moving story of what happens when we realize our heroes are human.
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three-dozen languages. His essays and interviews have been published in The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in over fifty magazines and periodicals. He was awarded the Harper Lee Award, given to a nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jennifer McGaha has taught creative nonfiction and memoir writing in various settings for more than twenty years and currently coordinates UNC Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Flat Broke with Two Goats, and her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, the Bitter Southerner, Brevity, CHEAP POP, Lumina, PANK, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Passengers, HerStry, and elsewhere. A native of Appalachia, McGaha lives in western North Carolina with her husband, two cats, six unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of hens.
