Well before his King: A Life won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography, Jonathan Eig knew he had outdone himself. Readers and critics were responding to his book about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in ways that set it apart from his past biographies of Muhammad Ali, Al Capone and Lou Gehrig. “From the minute the book came out, it was getting a special reaction,” Eig said. “People were connecting with it emotionally and spiritually, so I could tell I had touched a nerve.”
Eig is among more than 150 authors looking to connect with readers at the Kentucky Book Festival on Nov. 2 at Lexington’s Joseph-Beth Booksellers. Other big names at this year’s festival, a program of Kentucky Humanities, include TV personality Al Roker, young adult author Nic Stone, Louisville chef Edward Lee and two prominent Lexington writers—novelist Gwenda Bond and Kentucky Poet Laureate 2021-2023 Crystal Wilkinson. (Wilkinson, author of the culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, also will be featured at a literary luncheon at Fasig-Tipton in conversation with the award-winning food writer Ronni Lundy on Oct. 31.) Also appearing will be newcomer Yolanda Renee King, the only granddaughter of MLK and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who celebrates her grandparents’ legacy in a new children’s book, We Dream a World.
Eig always expected that King: A Life—a page-turning, deeply human portrait of the great man that relies, in part, on newly released FBI files and new interviews with scores of people who knew the slain civil rights leader personally—would require unusual sensitivity, especially when revealing details about his personal life, including infidelity and struggles with mental health. “The bar was always higher on this book because he matters so much to people … There are plenty of people who have pictures of Jesus and MLK on their walls,” Eig said in an interview from his home in Chicago. “I had to be careful to write a book that dealt with his greatness and his flaws. If I balanced it right and didn’t overemphasize those negative things, I felt that readers would give me a fair shake.”
The decision to use information from the FBI files, including transcripts of wiretapped conversations and other electronic surveillance over many years, was particularly fraught. “The files had to be handled delicately and with the overriding goal of showing how the Bureau and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, were out to destroy King,” Eig said. “You could argue that the files don’t belong in the book because they come from a corrupt source, but they also help us understand him better as a person. They show how vulnerable, how distraught he is, how he’s suffering.”
The book reveals for the first time the existence of a shocking note anonymously mailed to King by the FBI in 1964 suggesting that he should avoid the exposure of his extramarital activities by committing suicide. “When I do public readings from the book,” Eig said, “that draws audible gasps from the audience every time.”
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MLK figures in the work of another KBF guest, Nic Stone, author of the bestselling young adult debut novel Dear Martin (2017) about a Black teenager who begins writing letters to King after a frightening run-in with a racist policeman. Since then, Stone has written several books that, unlike many YA novels that keep the mood light, delve into surprisingly dark themes.
In her most recent novel, Chaos Theory, Stone writes about Black high school students dealing with heavy issues—including mental illness and alcohol abuse. The story follows Shelbi, a physics genius with bipolar depression and a history of self-harm, and Andy, an excellent student-athlete who deals with grief and the stress of his troubled family life by drinking too much.
Andy and Shelbi find themselves falling in love, but can their relationship withstand the pressure of their respective “brain stuff,” as Shelbi calls it? The answer is moving, complicated and, for the author, deeply personal. In an author’s note, Stone revealed to her readers that much of the story is inspired by her own experiences. “I needed to validate my own reality,” she said in an interview from her home in the Atlanta area. “For me growing up, my father was an alcoholic, and he never hid his drinking from me, including the fact that he was actively working to mitigate it. He used to take me with him to his AA meetings, and just recently hit his 30-years-sober mark.”
Stone used that life experience as inspiration for Andy’s story, while Shelbi’s neurodivergent condition is informed by the author’s struggle with bipolar depression and generalized anxiety disorder. She hopes to help reduce the stigma around mental illness by reminding affected young people that they’re not alone and that it’s OK to talk about it. “As human beings, we’re not designed to exist in isolation, so it’s important that we not hide from each other,” she said. “Books like mine can serve as mirrors and can help young people realize that there’s nothing wrong with them. It’s only dark because we keep it out of the light.”
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In another neck of the fictional woods, bestselling author Gwenda Bond once again does what she does best: mixing genres. In The Frame-Up, a feisty former con artist named Dani must reassemble her estranged mother’s old crew of art thieves with magical abilities to pull off a new job: stealing a painting that might have supernatural properties. Bond delivers a fast-paced mash-up of an old-fashioned heist caper and fantasy, with big dollops of action, screwball comedy and romance—not to mention that the book is set mostly in Lexington and Louisville.
“It’s Ocean’s Eleven meets The Picture of Dorian Gray in Kentucky,” Bond said. “Weird combinations of things are my rubric.”
As research before she began writing, the author watched about 50 heist movies, focusing on ones that “put a lot of time into building the team,” including the Ocean’s series (including Ocean’s Eight, which she says is unfairly unappreciated) and both versions of The Thomas Crown Affair and To Catch a Thief.
“It’s really about how everyone’s going to work together with competing motives, about second chances and found family,” Bond said.
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There’s also a strong Bluegrassy flavor in Bourbon Land: A Spirited Love Letter to My Old Kentucky Whiskey, the newest book by the chef and author Edward Lee. A collection of short essays on the history of bourbon, profiles of industry luminaries and 50 recipes featuring the Commonwealth’s famous libation, Bourbon Land is a delicious concoction for bourbon lovers and adventurous home cooks alike. (For a recipe sampling from Bourbon Land, see Kentucky Monthly’s Setpember issue, page 8.)
“When I was thinking of what my next book would be about, I asked myself whether I had something to say that’s not already out there,” said Lee, chef and owner of 610 Magnolia and Nami in Louisville, whose earlier books include Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine, winner of a 2019 James Beard Book Award. “There were a lot of barbecue cookbooks that featured bourbon, but there are a lot more uses of bourbon in cooking than that.”
In Bourbon Land, Lee explains how to use what he calls “the one true American spirit” in a dazzling array of delectable-sounding dishes featuring bourbon in marinades, vinaigrettes, sauces and gravy; bourbon for poaching, basting and braising; and bourbon combined in a multitude of ways with gochujang, miso and other Asian ingredients, not to mention old standbys such as honey, maple syrup and sorghum, to infuse, enhance and otherwise glorify meats, fish, vegetables and desserts.
“In the beginning of America’s culinary journey, we were mostly fascinated by European cuisines, but now American cuisine is fast becoming a melding of cultures: Mexico, the Far East, the American South,” Lee explained. “Now you need something stronger than wine to stand up to all those chiles and ginger, all that turmeric, all that smoke. You need bourbon.”
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Much of Brother Paul Quenon’s half-century of monastic life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in New Haven has been spent nurturing the legacy of his former novice master: acclaimed writer, poet and theologian Thomas Merton. But in the just-published A Matter of the Heart: A Monk’s Journal—a follow-up to his 2018 memoir In Praise of the Useless Life and several earlier poetry collections—Quenon consolidates his reputation as Merton’s literary heir and continues to emerge as a gifted writer in his own right.
Based on excerpts from his journals from the 1970s to the 2000s, A Matter of the Heart barely mentions Brother Louis, as Quenon called Merton. Instead, it oscillates between spiritual reflections and elegantly observed, sometimes gently comic slices of daily life at the monastery: the routines of worship; insightful encounters with nature, including animals, on the Gethsemani grounds; conversations—sometimes in sign language—with other monks; and occasional reactions to world events such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
“Brother Louis didn’t like imitators,” said Quenon, who will participate in a KBF panel discussion about spiritual writing with Fenton Johnson and Jon Sweeney. “He wanted people to be themselves, the way God made them, and I suppose I’ve tried to do that as a writer and poet. I can’t be compared with him, really, but I admit that he inspired me to develop that part of my life. There’s something about monastic life that allows for writers and inspires them. You’re given the gift of the contemplative life and having these moments, so why not share them? It’s about having something to give and to give it freely to others.”