Cynthia Graubart & Nathalie Dupree

Sat., February 25th, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ Soby’s, $25 per person
Purchase Tickets & Books / Menu to come
Event status: Event confirmed; minimum met

Renowned Southern cooking show personalities and authors Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart share how to make the perfect Southern Biscuits (Gibbs Smith, hardcover, $21.99) in their latest cookbook.

Layered, fluffy, feathery, silky, soft, and velvety biscuits all come together in Southern Biscuits, a book of recipes and baking secrets for every biscuit imaginable. Southern Biscuits features easy biscuits that are hassle-free and undemanding to make, as well as embellished biscuits laced with silky goat butter, crunchy pecans, or tangy pimento cheese, and everything in between.

The biscuits in this book encompass a number of types, from the beaten biscuits of the Old South and England, to biscuits reminiscent of Sunday Supper, to modern trends and ingredient combinations. Try Angel Biscuits–a yeast biscuit sturdy enough to split and fill but light enough to melt in the mouth; Carolina Biscuits–flaky little bites made with cream cheese; or Chocolate Soldiers–mixed with cocoa powder and sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar. You will find biscuits for every occasion, from hearty breakfasts to delicate party hors d’oeuvres.

Filled with beautiful photography, including dozens of how-to photos showing how to mix, stir, fold, roll, and knead, Southern Biscuits is the definitive biscuit baking book.

About the authors:
Nathalie Dupree has written or coauthored many cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winners Nathalie Dupree’s Southern Memories and Nathalie Dupree’s Comfortable Entertaining, as well as New Southern Cooking, which contains recipes for every dish she cooked on her television show of the same name. Her latest book before Southern Biscuits is Shrimp and Grits. She has hosted more than 300 television shows and specials, which have shown nationally on PBS, The Learning Channel, and The Food Network. Dupree holds and Advanced Certificate from the Cordon Bleu and has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Cynthia Stevens Graubart is an author and former television producer who began her culinary television production career with “New Southern Cooking with Nathalie Dupree.” She is also the author of The One-Armed Cook: Quick and Easy Recipes, Smart Meal Plans, and Savvy Advice for New (and Not-So-New) Moms, which was a finalist for USABookNews’ Book of the Year, and which has been called the culinary version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Graubart lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Eleanor Brown

Sat., February 18th, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $45 per person*
Purchase Tickets & Books / View menu
Event status: Minimum not yet met — order your tickets today to help us confirm the event.

Eleanor Brown explores the subjects of sisterhood, books, and home in her New York Times bestselling debut novel, The Weird Sisters (Berkley, paperback, $15.00, on sale 2/7/12).

*Please note that the ticket price for this event includes one paperback copy of The Weird Sisters (the book can be picked up from Fiction Addiction when the book releases on February 7th, or we can bring it to the event for you).

The Andreas sisters were raised on books – their family motto might as well be, ‘There’s no problem a library card can’t solve.’

Their father, a renowned, eccentric professor of Shakespearean studies, named them after three of the Bard’s most famous characters: Rose (Rosalind – As You Like It), Bean (Bianca – The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia – King Lear), but they have inherited those characters’ failures along with their strengths.

Now the sisters have returned home to the small college town where they grew up – partly because their mother is ill, but mostly because their lives are falling apart and they don’t know where to go next.

Rose, a staid mathematics professor, has the chance to break away from her quiet life and join her devoted fiance in England, if she could only summon up the courage to do more than she’s thought she could. Bean left home as soon as she could, running to the glamour of New York City, only to come back ashamed of the person she has become. And Cordy, who has been wandering the country for years, has been brought back to earth with a resounding thud, realizing it’s finally time for her to grow up.

The sisters never thought they would find the answers to their problems in each other, but over the course of one long summer, they find that everything they’ve been running from – each other, their histories, and their small hometown – might offer more than they ever expected.

About the author:
Eleanor Brown is the New York Times and national-bestselling author of The Weird Sisters, hailed by People magazine as “a delightful debut” and “creative and original” by Library Journal.

Eleanor’s writing has appeared in anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers. The Weird Sisters, her first novel, hit the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and national Indie best seller lists, and is available now from Amy Einhorn Books in the US, and from multiple international publishers.

Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Eleanor has lived in St. Paul, San Francisco, Philadelphia, South Florida, and Oxford, London, and Brighton, England.  She lives in Colorado with her partner, writer and transmedia superstar, J.C. Hutchins.

Taylor M. Polites

Sat., Feb. 11, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
Purchase Tickets & Books / View menu
Event status: Minimum not yet met — order your tickets today to help us confirm event.

Dive into the antebellum South in Taylor Polites’ debut novel, The Rebel Wife (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $25.00, on sale 2/7/12), about a young widow trying to survive in the deep South of the Reconstruction era.

Augusta Branson was born into antebellum Southern nobility during a time of wealth and prosperity, but now all that is gone, and she is left standing in the ashes of a broken civilization. When her scalawag husband dies suddenly of a mysterious blood plague, she must fend for herself and her young son. Slowly she begins to wake to the reality of her new life: her social standing is stained by her marriage; she is alone and unprotected in a community that is being destroyed by racial prejudice and violence; the fortune she thought she would inherit does not exist; and the deadly blood fever is spreading fast. Nothing is as she believed, everyone she knows is hiding something, and Augusta needs someone to trust. Somehow she must find the truth amid her own illusions about the past and the courage to cross the boundaries of hate, so strong, dangerous, and very close to home. Using the Southern Gothic tradition to explode literary archetypes like the chivalrous Southern gentleman, the good mammy, and the defenseless Southern belle, The Rebel Wife shatters the myths that still cling to the antebellum South and creates an unforgettable heroine for our time.

About the author:
Taylor M. Polites is a novelist living in Providence, Rhode Island, with his small chihuahua, Clovis. He graduated in June 2010 with his MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. He has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York City, St. Louis, and the Deep South. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a BA in History and French and spent a year studying in Caen, France. He has covered arts and news for a variety of local newspapers and magazines, including the Cape Codder, InNewsWeekly, Bird’s Eye View (the in-flight magazine of CapeAir), artscope Magazine, and Provincetown Arts Magazine. The Rebel Wife is his first novel.