THE PAST IS FOREIGN COUNTRY: HISTORICAL FICTION

To journey back in time is to encounter new sights, new smells, a new language—even if your time machine takes you no farther, geographically, than your own front door. Three historical novelists will discuss the preparations necessary to take such a voyage: each has written a novel about exile, from home and from fate. In Allison Alsup’s Foreign Seed, an American diplomat investigates the disappearance of explorer Frank Meyer on the Yangtze River in 1918. Yuri Herrera writes the first full account of Benito Juarez’s 1853 exile in New Orleans in Season of the Swamp. And in The Titanic Survivors Book Club, Timothy Schaffert takes readers to a bookstore in 1912 Paris, where an apprentice librarian of the White Star Line joins up with others who missed the ill-fated boat—and saved their lives. Moderated by New Orleans novelist C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World.