Carnegie Hall will host a book club discussion featuring native West Virginian Matthew Neill Null’s first novel “Honey from the Lion.” The group will meet on June 22 at 5:30 p.m. in the board room. The book club is offered in conjunction with the 2016 Lewisburg Literary Festival. Join facilitator Josh Baldwin for an interactive discussion of “Honey from the Lion” with the author. Null will be a main stage speaker at the 2016 Lewisburg Literary Festival on Saturday, Aug. 6. For more information on the Lewisburg Literary Festival, visit http://www.lewisburgliteraryfestival.com/.
Null is a recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. A native of West Virginia, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where he is currently the writing coordinator.
In the novel “Honey from the Lion,” a turn-of-the-century logging company decimates 10,000 acres of virgin forest in the West Virginia Alleghenies – and transforms a brotherhood of timber wolves into revolutionaries.
After fleeing his childhood farm in the wake of scandal, Cur Greathouse arrives at the Cheat River Paper & Pulp Company’s Blackpine camp, where an unlikely family of sawyers offers him new hope. But the work there is exacting and dangerous – with men’s worth measured in ledger columns. Whispers of a union strike pass from bunk to bunk. Against the rasp of the misery whip and the crash of felled hemlock and red spruce, Cur encounters a cast of characters who will challenge his loyalties: a minister grasping after his dwindling congregation, a Syrian peddler who longs to put down his pack and open a store, a slighted Slovenian wife turned activist, and a trio of reckless land barons. Cur must accept or betray the call to lead a rebellion – and finally reconcile a forbidden love.
The event is free and requires no registration.
