Inprint

Cool Brains! Inprint Readings for Young People featuring award-winning children’s writer Kate DiCamillo presents a fun afternoon for the whole family.

Free and open to the public.

A great way to get kids excited about reading, DiCamillo will read from and talk about her work, including her just-released new novel The M...agician’s Elephant. That will be followed by a book sale and signing, providing audience members a chance to visit with the author.

The Magician’s Elephant, aimed for elementary school children, tells the story of an orphan boy who asks a travelling fortuneteller whether his sister still lives and how he might find her. The man’s strange answer-- it involves an elephant--sets in motion curious and wonderful events. “This book, these characters, undid me, just opened up my heart in a totally new way,” DiCamillo says. She hopes that when readers finish it “they will be more inclined to hope and believe in the impossible.”

This new fable, illustrated by Yoko Tanaka, is DiCamillo’s fifth novel (she’s also written several picture books for younger children). She made a roaring debut in 2000 with Because of Winn-Dixie, which became a runaway bestseller and earned a Newbery Honor. Her third novel, The Tale of Despereaux, about a tiny mouse driven by love to perform heroic deeds, won the Newbery Medal and inspired a well-received animated movie.

DiCamillo was born in Philadelphia, raised in Florida, and now lives in Minneapolis. She describes herself as short and loud, and says she hates to cook but loves to eat. She’s single and childless but has lots of friends and is aunt to “three lovely children (Luke, Roxanne, and Max) and one not so lovely dog (Henry).” She faithfully writers two pages a day, five days a week. She likes to quote E.B. White, who once said, “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” Says Kate: “And that’s the way I feel too.”Read More

The 2009/2010 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents an evening with E.L. Doctorow, whose brilliant evocations of 19th- and 20th -century American life have earned him a place among the handful of essential living novelists.

Tickets are $5 general admission, available online at www.inprinthouston.org

The r...eading will be followed by an onstage interview led by Alexander Parsons, a novelist and professor in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. The evening concludes with a book sale and signing.

Doctorow, who says that “art and life make each other,” will read from Homer and Langley, his new novel inspired by two eccentric brothers who devoted their lives to obsessive hoarding. Homer, who is blind and narrates the novel, shares a four-story New York mansion with Langley, who has been permanently damaged by mustard gas in World War I, and a wild miscellany of objects the brothers collect and cannot bring themselves to throw away. “Doctorow’s achievement is in not undermining the dignity of two brothers who share a lush landscape built on imagination and incapacities,” Publishers Weekly said in a starred review. “It’s a feat of distillation, vision and sympathy.” Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review calls the book “masterly” and “compassionate.”

Homer and Langley illustrates Doctorow’s skill at opening vistas on history. The Book of Daniel, which put Doctorow on the literary map in 1971, was a fictional retelling of the Rosenberg spy case. Newsweek called it “a ferocious feat of the imagination … Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole – the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating.” Books that followed include Ragtime (1975), set in the early years of the 20th century and mingling fictional characters with real people such as Henry Ford and Harry Houdini. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and gave birth to a successful film and Broadway musical. Modern Library’s editorial board named Ragtime one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. World’s Fair, set during the Depression, won the National Book Award. Billy Bathgate (1989), about Bronx mobsters, took the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For The March (2005) Doctorow turned back to the American Civil War, limning characters caught up in Sherman’s march to the sea. The novel won Doctorow a third Book Critics Circle Award.

Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in 1931 in New York City. He was educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University. After a stint in the Army he went to work in the publishing industry, serving as a senior editor at New American Library and then editor in chief at Dial Press. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University.
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