Be Gay!

Comments (0) By Andrea Grimes Thursday, Jul 13 2006

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Knowing what you know now, if you'd been alive back in 19th-century Britain, would you have let anything stop you from going to hear Charles Dickens talk about his novels? Or, if you were living in Elizabethan England, would there be any price you wouldn't pay to hear Shakespeare crack on about Macbeth? I realize that if we're going to be realistic, your cruel textile factory foreman wouldn't let you away from the fumes for even a minute, not even for Mr. Dickens himself. And you probably wouldn't have survived the Black Plague, so the Shakespeare thing would have been out, too, but stay with me here. The point is this: Living nonfiction writing legend Gay Talese is going to be hanging out in your backyard this weekend, and you'd be a fool to pass up the opportunity to hear him speak. Not your literal backyard, of course, but closer than most other founders of New Journalism will ever get. Talese will lecture this Saturday as part of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference. The dinner and speech starts at 6 p.m. The conference takes place at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center, 1800 Highway 26 East in Grapevine. Tickets are $100. Visit mayborninstitute.unt.edu.
July 14-16