Saturday, November 16 at 12:00 pm
Meet author James Whitfield Thomson. His
extraordinary debut novel Lies You Wanted
to Hear (November
5, 2013; Sourcebooks Landmark; Paperback Original; 9781402284281) has earned praise from writers such as Jodi Picoult,
Andre Dubus II, and Margot Livesey. His work creates a haunting, shattering portrait
of how a fissure between two people, over decades, becomes a canyon too wide to
bridge. Inspired by the true story of a Boston
family, Lies You Wanted to Hear questions
if we can ever truly know the people we marry—and, given the chance, if we
would make the same decisions again.
James Whitfield Thomson was
an early member of the late Andre Dubus’s writers’ workshop, along with
Elizabeth Berg, George Packer and Dennis Lehane. He grew up on the North Side
of Pittsburgh, attended Harvard College on scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in
American Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania. A former
U.S. Navy navigator in Vietnam,
Thomson’s writing has appeared in Agni and The Ledge, and received a grant from
the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. The author lives in Natick, Massachusetts,
with his wife. Visit the author’s website at: www.jameswhitfieldthomson.com