For Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong(a)yahoo.com
City Art
Presents A Reading with Author Judith Freeman
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday October 12th 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Novelist
Judith Freeman will read from her work on October 12th at the Salt
Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading
Series.
Judith
Freeman is a novelist, essayist, critic, and short story writer whose first
work of non-fiction, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The
Woman He Loved, is due out from Pantheon in November 2007. Her first
book was a collection of short stories, Family Attractions (1988), which was
praised in the New York Times and The New York Review of Books for its
originality. Her novels include The Chinchilla Farm (1989), Set
For Life (1991), A Desert of Pure Feeling (1996), and
most recently, Red Water, named one of the 100 best books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times.
Red Wateralso won the Utah Book Award and was short listed for the Mountain and Plains
Booksellers’s award. Widely reviewed, The
New Yorker called it a novel ‚”that makes astute points about the almost
indistinguishable similarities between faith and love. .” The story is set in
19th Century Utah and focuses on a bloody event known as The Mountain Meadows
Massacre in which 120 emigrants from Arkansas, on a wagon train passing through
Utah, were slaughtered by a group of Mormon settlers on Sept. 11, 1857. Only
one Mormon was ever tried and convicted for the crimes, a polygamist named John
D. Lee, and Red Water is told through the voices of three of Lee’s wives.
Judith
is the recipient of many awards and prizes. In 1997 she received a John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, and also won the Western Heritage Award in
1992 for her novel Set For Life. Her essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in
numerous magazines and journals, including The
Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles
Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She teaches fiction
in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern
California, and a class on noir, focusing on films and mystery novels set in
LA, through the USC Master of Liberal Studies program. She has also been a
writer-in-residence at many workshops around the country, appearing most
recently at the Carmel Authors Festival in September, and the Tomales Bay
Writers Workshops in October 2007.
In
2005 Judith received a Visiting Fellowship from the Rothermere American
Institute at Oxford where she did research in the Raymond Chandler archive in
the Bodleian Library and in the fall of 2006 she was a visiting artist at Johns
Hopkins University, where she completed work on The Long Embrace.
She
has collaborated with other artists and writers on projects. During a year
spent in Rome in 1999, she collaborated with the prize-winning composer, Chris
Theofanidis, providing the text for a piece for soprano and string instruments, Song of Elos, which was performed at
Carnegie Hall, the American Academy in Rome, and the Da Camera Society in
Houston. She also traveled to India in 1997 with her friend, the photographer
Tina Barney, where they spent seven weeks photographing and writing about an
extended family in Rajasthan.
The
past four years have been devoted to researching the life of Raymond Chandler,
whom Judith considers to be one of the most original writers America has ever
produced, and rereading all of his work. The resulting book, The
Long Embrace, is not a traditional biography but rather a portrait of
the iconic writer and his marriage to a much older woman, Cissy Pascal, a woman
who has long been considered an enigma, and how that marriage affected his work
and imagination. It is also a portrait of Los Angeles—the city Chandler put on
the literary map and one which gave him his material and inspired his work.
Chandler lived in over 36 different residences in and around L.A., and Judith
tracked down many of these residences and photographed what she found. There
are 44 photographs in the book, some of Chandler residences, some archival
photographs of LA, as well as pictures of the Chandlers that have never been
published before, including the only photograph showing Chandler and his wife
together that seems to have survived. There is also a map of Southern
California in The Long Embrace, with dots indicating Chandler’s residences,
and a legend listing all 36 addresses.
Judith
lives in Los Angeles and rural Idaho, dividing her time between an apartment in
the MacArthur Park area of the city and a small farm on the Camas Prairie. She
is married to the artist-photographer, Anthony Hernandez, whose new book of
black and white photographs of L.A. from the late 70s and early 80s,
“Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles,” has just been published
by Loosestrife Press.
City Art is longest running literary arts series
in Salt Lake. We present authors of all genres as well as artists and musicians
on the first three Wednesdays of each month at the Main Public Library from
September to May. We feature both local as well as nationally and
internationally acclaimed writers.
Many reading are followed by an open reading. City
Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public
Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.
The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts
Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and
audience donations.
Joel Long
