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Lili Wright next up on PCPL series
An Author’s Talk by Lili Wright on her new novel will be followed by a book sale and signing Wednesday, Sept. 14 at the Putnam County Public Library in Greencastle.
The 6:30 p.m. program is free and open to the public.
Wright will be reading from her novel, “Dancing with the Tiger,” at the library. It will be her first local reading.
Wright teaches creative writing and journalism at DePauw University. She is the author “Learning to Float,” a travel memoir which was included on The Washington Post’s best summer reads list.
“Dancing with the Tiger,” as Sheri Holman (The Dress Lodger) says, “is as hallucinatory and revelatory as a shot of mescal.”
It begins when a meth-addicted grave robber unearths what he is sure is a priceless artifact: The death mask of Montezuma, the fabled Aztec ruler.
Though the looter is in the pay of a vicious drug lord who is also an ambitious collector of ancient artifacts, he decides to steal the mask, setting off a violent struggle for its possession that pulls in a richly varied cast of Mexicans and American expats.
Above all, there’s the novel’s heroine, Anna Ramsay, a 30-year-old American with a history of bad choices for whom the mask means redemption for her father, a discredited art collector, and retribution against her unfaithful fiancé, a museum curator — and perhaps also the recovery of an identity that shriveled after her mother’s traumatic early death.
Written in taut, lyrical prose, “Dancing With the Tiger” is a riveting exploration of the masks we wear, the secrets we keep, and the revelations we owe to those we love.
“A fast-moving [and] intricately wrought thriller. Clearly written with great care, the novel plumbs the depths of love and obsession in complex yet delicately woven themes ... [a] journey of self-discovery [set] within a powerful story full of danger and pathos.”— Booklist.
A graduate of Brown University, Wright spent a decade as a journalist before earning her MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the New York Post.