Books on the Bayou (B.O.B.)

Houston Public Library invites all Houstonians to join together to read Ellen Foster for the annual Books on the Bayou Program. Books on the Bayou brings together Houstonians to read the same book at the same time, provoking discussion among co-workers, friends, families and classrooms. The program cultivates a culture of reading in Houston by encouraging people to visit libraries, bookstores, community centers, homes, churches, and schools to discuss the featured book.

Set in the rural South in the 1970s, Ellen Foster tells the story of 11-year-old Ellen's fight for survival and search for a home.  Since 2002 Houston Public Library has hosted an annual community-wide project to foster a culture of reading by encouraging people to come together to discuss a selected book. Houston Public Library and our program partners will host book and film discussions, displays, storytelling and special programs on financial management.  Houston Public Library programs are free and seating is first come, first served. 

2008 Books on the Bayou Kickoff
Monday, September 8, 11:15 AM
Central Library, Concourse Meeting Room
In celebration of International Literacy Day, join us for readings by Literacy Advance Volunteers and refreshments to introduce the 2008 Books on the Bayou.
FOR A DETAILED LIST of EVENTSS CLICK HERE

About the Author

Kaye Gibbons was born in 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina.  She attended North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying American and English literature. At 26, she wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster, drawing from some of her personal experiences growing up.

Praised as an extraordinary debut in 1987, Walker Percy said, “Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caufield, tougher perhaps, as funny . . . It’s the real thing.  Which is to say: a lovely . . . sometimes heart-wrenching first novel.”  The book won a first fiction award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.  Now considered a classic, Ellen Foster is taught in high schools and universities. It has been widely translated, is frequently performed in theatres throughout the United States, and was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 1998.

A Virtuous Woman, Kaye Gibbons’s second novel published in 1989, received wide praise in the United States and abroad and became a bestseller.  The same year, Gibbons received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to write her third novel, A Cure for Dreams, which was published in 1991. Gibbons drew from the transcripts compiled by the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression.  She said she “discovered the voice of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature” and realized that these voices could carry her through every novel she writes.

Charms for the Easy Life, published in 1993, became a New York Times bestseller.  Sights Unseen, published in 1995, was also a national bestseller and won the Critics Choice award from the Los Angeles Times.  In 1998, a reviewer called her sixth novel, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, “a book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure.” It was followed in 2004 by Diving Women, which is set during the influenza epidemic of 1918.  In 2006 Kaye Gibbons published The Life All Around Me, a sequel to Ellen Foster.  Her latest novel, The Lunatics Ball, will be published in 2008.

In addition to the accolades received by her novels, Kaye Gibbons received the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996 in recognition of her contribution to French literature.  She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the YWCA Academy of Women and a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. 

“To be able to write literature that sells takes an almost surreal amount of stubborn persistence; imagination; the ability to forego distractions, such as vacations, men, alcohol; and a willingness to lock oneself in a room and submit oneself to constant, ruthless self-criticism . . . But getting there, to that lucky, sacrificial place, requires long, long stretches of unbroken concentration and more Diet Cokes than most people can or want to tolerate. I love the labor, the sheer manual labor that goes into making these books seem as though they were effortlessly written. I love what has come to feel like a habit of invention . . . You see, I love what I do. I raise three human beings, and I do language for a living—it’s only as terrifying as it is lovely.”   
--Kaye Gibbons

For more information about Kaye Gibbons, see:

• Interview with Kaye Gibbons by Virginia Daniel, published in the Independent Weekly, Durham, NC, Jan. 25, 2006.
• “Kaye Gibbons” in Literature Resource Center (requires a Houston Public Library Power Card for access from your home or office).
• Wolcott, James. "Crazy for You." New Yorker 71, no. 25 (August 21, 1995): 115 [profile of the author].