Culture in brief: Isabelle Allende to appear at Open Book/Open Mind
Isabelle Allende will appear at Buzz Aldrin Middle School, 173 Bellevue Ave., in discussion with Montclair author Christina Baker Kline, on Wednesday, Nov. 8, at 7 p.m.
The event is free with the hardcover book purchase at this link: https://app.etapes-try.com/onlineforms/MontclairPublicLibrary/IsabelAllende.html or call 973-744-0500 ext 2222.
Allende, a Chilean American, will discuss her latest book "In the Midst of Winter. Allende’s best-sellers include “The House of the Spirits,” ”Eva Luna,” “The Japanese Lover” and “Daughter of Fortune.” Her fiction and non-fiction books, all written in her native Spanish, have been translated into more than 35 languages and have sold more than 67 million copies.
According to a release, her writing is shaped by her experiences growing up in Chile, having to leave her country and live in exile and how she made a new life for herself as an American. Allende’s cousin Salvador Allende, who had been elected Chile’s president in 1970, died in the coup. "Allende was a prominent journalist for Chilean television and magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Allende’s life was forever altered when Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup in 1973 that toppled Chile’s socialist reform government," a release states. The release also states that following the death of her daughter in 1992, she established in Paula’s honor a charitable foundation dedicated to the protection and empowerment of women and children worldwide, http://isabelallende.org/. Since 1987, Allende has made her home in the San Francisco are in California. Allende became a U.S. citizen in 1993 but, as she says, she lives with one foot in California and the other in Chile.
"In the Midst of Winter" is a love story set in Brooklyn and South America about a human rights scholar and an immigrant from Guatemala. According to her publisher Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, the book begins with a snowstorm and chance meeting in Brooklyn and flashes back to Chile and Brazil in the 1970s.
The Open Book/Open Mind series has been proudly sponsored by Susan and Thomas Dunn and supported by grants from The Montclair Foundation, and Investors Foundation. This event is sponsored by a grant from Pollack Financial Group.