Hey Birmingham, AL book readers and history buffs… I just saw that Wayne Flynt is speaking this weekend at the Avondale public library. It’s a free event (Flynt is on a 40-city book tour) where he’ll discuss and answer questions about his book Afternoons with Harper Lee.
The event is:
- Sunday, February 26, 2023
- 2:00 pm–3:00 pm
- Avondale Library
- 509 40th Street South
The folks from Thank You Books will be there too, selling Flynt’s book so you can walk out with a signed copy as well as get to hear from one of Alabama’s best historians and storytellers. Flynt’s books are always some of the best-researched and poignant.
Wayne Flynt and Harper Lee were longtime friends, so he knows the very private novelist well enough to write a book like this. It sounds like most of the stories and reflections come from his visiting Lee during the last years of her life (she died in 2016). No doubt Flynt has some unique insights to share from all of his discussions with Lee.
Afternoons with Harper Lee is published by New South Books which was recently acquired by the University of Georgia Press. While it’s sad that Alabama lost a publisher it is great to see that they have landed somewhere as srong as the UGA Press program is.
I love this praise quote that is inside the book:
“Wayne Flynt is the great Talmudic scholar of Alabama, and this vivid, affecting deconstruction of his friendship with Harper Lee through the history that produced them both is a huge reward and pleasure for those of us who understand that, unaccountably, all roads seem to lead to our grand and terrifying state.”
– Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama–The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
Have a good weekend, everyone!
