Above / The stage at the Wentz Concert Hall creates great space to hear book talks from well-known authors arranged by Anderson’s Bookshop.
Anderson’s Bookshop, Naperville, is delighted to present a special event with Stacy Schiff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra and other bestsellers, at 7PM on Monday, November 9.
Schiff is headed to Naperville to meet with readers and fans at Wentz Hall, 171 E. Chicago Ave., on the campus of North Central College. Tickets are available with the purchase of Schiff’s new book, The Witches, from Anderson’s Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson Ave. in downtown Naperville or online at www.andersonsbookshop.com.
Event tickets are required and available with the purchase of Schiff’s new book from Anderson’s Bookshop. For additional information please call Anderson’s at 630-355-2665.
Brief Overview of The Witches
Schiff will be sharing her new book, The Witches that unravels the highly explosive Salem Witch Trials in early America. That fascinating chapter of American history began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and a 75-year-old man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal,The Witches is the enduring American mystery unveiled fully by one of our most acclaimed historians.
Stacy Schiff Brief Bio
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. All three were New York Times notable books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a best book of the year.Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010.
As the Wall Street Journal‘s reviewer put it, “Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we’d miss if it didn’t exist.” The New Yorker termed the book “a work of literature;” Simon Winchester predicted “it will become a classic.” Ron Chernow may explain why: “Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence.” Cleopatraappeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. A #1 bestseller,Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages.
Her fourth book, The Witches, will be published in October 2015. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011 she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
