112th: Mary Gordon and Margaret Vandenburg

On Thursday, April 12th at 7pm, celebrate the paperback release of Mary Gordon's There Your Heart Lies at Book Culture on 112th. Mary will be joined in conversation by Margaret Vandenburg.

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At nineteen, Marian Taylor cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family and left America to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War--an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties and diagnosed with cancer, Marian finally shares what happened to her during those years with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life's purpose. Marian's secret history--of personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelia's generation, of the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendship--compels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain to reconcile her grandmother's past with her own uncertain future. Moving and deeply felt, There Your Heart Lies explores how character is forged in a particular moment in history--and passed down through generations.

Mary Gordon is the author of eight novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Manand Circling My Mother; and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, including a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

Margaret Vandenburg is the author of novels including The Home Front, a portrait of a family facing autism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction, an Iraq War requiem.  Previous publications span a wide range of genres, including historical fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism.  She also wrote the libretto for Ada, which was most recently presented by the Center for Contemporary Opera.  Having completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University, she traveled across Broadway to Barnard College, where she is a Senior Lecturer in English.