What's Next for the Glimmerglass Opera Book Club?

The imminent cold winter months have spurred the Glimmerglass Opera Book Club into action. Glimmerglass is ready to choose the next book, and we want your input.

The Glimmerglass Opera Book Club began November 2007. Focused on books related to the upcoming season, the club was created to inspire audience members to take a step further in their exploration of opera and its literary connections. This past year, books have been selected based on staff recommendations, but Glimmerglass would love your assistance in choosing the next book.

A simple online survey has been created to discover what Glimmerglass audience members would like to read next. The survey offers three staff recommendations and a space for your suggestion. The suggested books were chosen based on their similarities with La Traviata, an opera featured in Glimmerglass Opera’s 2009 Festival Season. The three suggested books and La Traviata explore unconventional women who challenge societal attitudes. More information on the suggested books may be found below. Help us pick the next one by clicking here: Choose the next book!

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
by Simone de Beauvoir

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.
She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

Sins of the Seventh Sister:
A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South
by Huston Curtiss

How many times have you thought, “this has got to be true – no one could make this up?” Well, in 1929, Huston Curtiss was seven years old, living with his beautiful, opinionated mother (whose image is on the cover of this book), and surrounded by their romantic, fiercely independent, and often certifiably insane relatives. Huston has never before written about that time – an era of racism and repression, a time when this country was still relatively young, an age of quirky individualism and almost frontier-style freedom that largely has ceased to exist. Fearful he would not be believed, on one hand, but desirous of the freedom to embellish, on the other, Curtiss chronicles that time in Sins of the Seventh Sister, a book he characterizes as “a novel based on a true story of the gothic South.”

It is his story and the story of the people of Elkins, West Virginia, a small town whose inhabitants included his mother, Billy-Pearl Curtiss, and her many sisters – all stunning blondes. Billy-Pearl would prove to be an irresistibly romantic figure in her son’s life. She was the seventh of eleven children, all girls to her father’s consternation. By the time of her arrival, her father felt he had been patient enough and insisted on calling her Billy; he taught her everything he had intended to impart to his firstborn son. She would grow up to be one of the most beautiful women in the county, but also one of the most opinionated and liberal. Her aim was so precise that she was barred from the local turkey shoot because none of the men had a chance against her. When a Klansman accused her of attempted homicide after she shot him through the shoulder to stop him from setting fire to the home of her black neighbors, she told the sheriff, “If I had meant to kill him, he’d be dead.”

And with that defense, she was exonerated. Sins of the Seventh Sister is brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, as alive with flamboyant characters and wildly uncontained emotions as any book to come out of the South.

Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century
by Katie Hickman

During the course of the nineteenth century, a small group of women rose from impoverished obscurity to positions of great power, independence, and wealth. In doing so they took control of their lives – and those of other people – and made the world do their will.
Extremely accomplished, well-educated, and unusually literate, courtesans exerted an incredible influence as leaders of society. They were not received at court, but inhabited their own parallel world – the demimonde – complete with its own hierarchies, etiquette, and protocol. They were queens of fashion, linguists, musicians, accomplished at political intrigue, and, of course, possessors of great erotic gifts. Even to be seen in public with one of the great courtesans was a much-envied achievement.

Help us pick the next book by clicking here: Choose the next book!