Bookfest Literary Luncheon Tickets Now Available

Tickets are now available for the Author Luncheon at the 2nd Annual Downtown Glen Ellyn Bookfest. Tickets are available for $15 per person online or in person at The Bookstore, 475 N. Main St., Glen Ellyn.

The Featured Authors include Luis Urrea, Brigid Pasulka, Cristina Henriquez and Sarah McCoy. The luncheon is from Noon to 1:30pm on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at Glen Oak Restaurant, 479 Pennsylvania in Glen Ellyn. The luncheon theme is "Inspired By Our History."

The authors will rotate around the restaurant, greet participants and discuss their books, which all involve stories inspired by the authors' own ancestors, who herald from Mexico, Poland, Panama and Puerto Rico. Glen Oak Restaurant will pair their stories with unique ethnic menu choices created specifically for this event.

Tickets to the Bookfest Author Luncheon are $15 per person and are available at The Bookstore or online at the Downtown Glen Ellyn Alliance website. Menu choices include: The Saint of Cabora's Chicken Sandwich, Huila's Savory Crepe, Pigeon's Prize Omlette, Babba Yaga's Veggie Delight, Mira's Half & Half Plate and Verdita's Pollo Americano Big Salad. Each menu item is based on a character or a theme in one of the books.

Come enjoy a unique literary themed luncheon with some very talented authors. Book sales and signings available.

Featured Bookfest Author: Brigid Pasulka

The 2nd Annual Downtown Glen Ellyn Bookfest is proud to announce that Brigid Pasulka will be one of its Featured Authors at this year's festival on Saturday, June 18th, 2011.

Brigid will join authors Luis Urrea, Cristina Henriquez and Sarah Mccoy in a Literary Luncheon called "Inspired by Our Ancestry" at the Glen Oak Restaurant from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Tickets are $15 and are now available at The Bookstore and on the Downtown Glen Ellyn Alliance website. Purchase of the book(s) is separate.

Brigid is a Chicago area author, English teacher and graduate of the Dartmouth College and the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers. Her first book, A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2010, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It also earned a blue staff pick card at The Bookstore!

We are very excited about Brigid's appearance, particularly since we read and reviewed A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True during our Chicago Writers Month project last October. Brigid based the book on her own travels to Poland after college, where she researched and learned more about her own grandparents' story. For more information, our earlier blog post can be found here. Brigid has a wonderful website with more information about the book, including a Reader's Guide, glossary and map.

We will make an announcement as soon as tickets for the Bookfest Literary Luncheon are available. In the meantime, please follow the Glen Ellyn Bookfest on Facebook and Twitter for updates and information. The entire schedule and program will be available soon.

Chicago Author Month: A Long, Long Time Ago And Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka

I have no idea how A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True escaped my attention for so long. Somehow it made it onto The Bookstore shelves, both in hardcover and paperback, without finding a champion among our booksellers. Only recently did I learn that the author was from Chicago, an English Teacher at Whitney Young Magnet School, and the winner of last year's PEN/Hemingway Award.

What a perfect book to add to my list for Chicago Author Month. Especially because this book is set in Poland and is written by a descendant of Polish immigrants -- and Chicago just happens to have the largest population of Polish-speaking people living outside of Poland.

I am now utterly devoted to this book. I've already been raving about it to my friends and customers, and I've tucked one of our blue staff recommendation cards between its pages. I feel like I've just found a new go-to recommendation in paperback. I'm just sorry I'm so late to the game.

For our customers who haven't yet discovered this book's charms, it's a two-part story: one told like an enchanted fairytale, beginning with a love story in a small Polish village on the eve of World War II, and the other told 50 years later, as the lovers' granddaughter comes of age in modern Krakow, searching for her past and her future at the same time. The elders' experiences during the German occupation, such as hiding in the forest with the Polish resistance, brought to mind some of the things I enjoyed about the movie Defiance. The granddaughter's quest reminded me a little of Jonathon Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.

In a video interview on her own website, Brigid Pasulka explained that Long, Long Time Ago was based on a combination of "essentially true" stories that she gathered from her own experiences while on post-college visits to Krakow. She tells how she used to sit down and ask older Poles to tell her stories, and they did. In that way, Brigid bears some resemblance to the granddaughter in the book, who realizes that the often heartbreaking stories of her grandparents' generation should be preserved and savored.

There were times when the modern story, which features a "lost generation" of young people in post-Communist Poland of the 1990's, didn't seem able to hold its own weight against the intensity, romance and magic of the older tale. However, the book eventually wove the two stories together, giving the granddaughter a sense of purpose, identity and history. What a nice ending. Highly recommended, with a special thumbs up for our book clubs.

Please stop in and check out Brigid Pasulka's book on our Chicago Author Shelf next time you're in downtown Glen Ellyn. In the meantime, you might enjoy exploring her website.



A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $13.95)