{"id":2569,"date":"2018-08-02T10:26:02","date_gmt":"2018-08-02T14:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/?p=2569"},"modified":"2018-08-02T10:26:02","modified_gmt":"2018-08-02T14:26:02","slug":"nell-stevens-at-the-brookline-booksmith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/2018\/08\/02\/nell-stevens-at-the-brookline-booksmith\/","title":{"rendered":"Nell Stevens at the Brookline Booksmith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NellBook\"<\/a>Nell Stevens (Fiction ’13) will be reading from her latest book,\u00a0The Victorian and the Romantic,<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>at the Brookline Booksmith\u00a0next Tuesday (8\/7)\u00a0at 7 pm!\u00a0 All are welcome.\u00a0 A historical memoir, this unique\u00a0 book\u00a0weaves two love stories together across time.\u00a0 Chapters alternate\u00a0between Elizabeth Gaskell’s romance with the American critic Charles Eliot Norton and Nell’s own relationship with Max, a soulful American screenwriter.\u00a0 Described as moving, witty, and impossible to put down,\u00a0The Victorian and the Romantic<\/em>\u00a0celebrates one writer’s deep friendship with a fellow writer who lived over a century ago.<\/p>\n

Here, Nell recommends a couple books and talks with us about her reading and writing life.<\/p>\n

What is your favorite book by Elizabeth Gaskell?<\/strong>
\nLois the Witch.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0It’s\u00a0<\/em>a historical novella about a young\u00a0English girl traveling to Salem in 1691 who gets executed for witchcraft during the witch trials. Gaskell never went to America and was constantly imagining it: this story is dark and vivid and strange, in part because America for Gaskell was always a dreamscape rather than a\u00a0\u201creal\u201d place. Gaskell has a\u00a0reputation for being both cuddly and a bit preachy, so I like to remind people that she also wrote\u00a0macabre gothic tales.<\/p>\n

Which book have you particularly enjoyed recently?<\/strong>
\nI absolutely loved Sigrid Nunez\u2019s new novel The Friend\u00a0<\/em>and have struggled to think about anything else since reading it. I couldn\u2019t help wonder\/(worry?) how much the references to the narrator\u2019s students were inspired by us…<\/p>\n

How\u00a0have you been spending your time this summer?<\/strong>
\nI teach creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, but I\u2019m in the US at present doing publicity for the new book. I just spent a month at MacDowell, working on my ever-elusive first novel.<\/p>\n

Do you have any writing rituals?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m learning that I really don\u2019t have any. I still can\u2019t predict what will make for good writing conditions for me, so I\u2019m trying to accept that when it works, it works, but that most of the time it won\u2019t, and that\u2019s ok.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much, Nell, and congratulations!\u00a0 We look forward to seeing you at the Booksmith next week.<\/p>\n

Nell Stevens\u00a0has a degree in English and creative writing from the University of Warwick, an MFA in fiction from Boston University, and a PhD in Victorian literature from King\u2019s College London. She is the author of the memoir\u00a0Bleaker House<\/em>\u00a0and is at work on a novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nell Stevens (Fiction ’13) will be reading from her latest book,\u00a0The Victorian and the Romantic,\u00a0at the Brookline Booksmith\u00a0next Tuesday (8\/7)\u00a0at 7 pm!\u00a0 All are welcome.\u00a0 A historical memoir, this unique\u00a0 book\u00a0weaves two love stories together across time.\u00a0 Chapters alternate\u00a0between Elizabeth Gaskell’s romance with the American critic Charles Eliot Norton and Nell’s own relationship with Max, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2569"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2575,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions\/2575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/crwr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}