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Painted Worlds: Where History and Fiction Blend

Friday, September 11 at 12:00pm via Crowdcast

About the Event

Marco Rafalà, author of How Fires End, Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio, and Tracey Enerson Wood, author of The Engineer’s Wife as they discuss the complex process of interweaving history and fact with fictional narratives in their novels. Ranging from the Sicilian hillside to a Sicilian neighborhood in Connecticut, How Fires End is a story of sin and secrets. Alexander Chee calls it, “Beautiful, mesmerizing, [and] consoling.” The Flight Portfolio is a tale of courage in helping artists flee the Nazis at great peril. Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer called Orringer’s book, “Bighearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” The Engineer’s Wife asks the question “Who really built the Brooklyn Bridge?” in what Stewart O’Nan calls “a colorful and romantic tale of a storied era.” Sponsored by the Fairfax Library Friends.

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Marco Rafala

About Marco Rafalà

Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a cocurator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary  Review and LitHub. How Fires End is his debut novel. How Fires End is a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards. Read more here.  

Julie Orringer

About Julie Orringer

Julie Orringer is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels The Invisible Bridge and The Flight Portfolio, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the MacDowell Colony, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. www.julieorringer.com

Tracey Enerson Wood

About Tracey Enerson Wood

Tracey Enerson Wood is a published playwright whose family is steeped in military tradition. This is her first novel.

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