Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Anne Lamott at Greenbelt Festival a dream come true for me


Anne Lamott

Latest lineup – Anne Lamott will be at Greenbelt 2014

On the other side of the pond, Anne Lamott is a really big deal. Our hunch is that after one visit to Greenbelt Festival, she will soon be big news here too. We know that she already enjoys a cult following among some here in the UK. But her secret is about to become an open one. Greenbelt is about to welcome a writer who we think will touch our nerve perhaps more than other we have enjoyed over the years. And, to be honest, we can’t wait.
So let’s tell you some more.
Anne Lamott is a best-selling American novelist and non-fiction writer. Honoured with a Guggenheim Fellowship, her bi-weekly Salon Magazine “online diary,” Word by Word, was voted ‘The Best of the Web’ by TIME magazine. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Freida Mock made a documentary on her life entitled Bird by Bird. She has been inducted into the California Hall of Fame and is beloved by Oprah Winfrey.
And here’s just a bit about just two of her books which will give you a flavour …
——————
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
‘I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe, over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help. Thanks. Wow.’
Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about faith and prayer. And in Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she’s learned about prayer into these simple, transformative truths.
Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is a book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure, in a beautiful, slim-line hardback.
In praise of …
“Lamott is a narrator who has relished and soaked up the details of her existence, equally of mirth and devastation, and spilled them onto her pages.”

The New York Times

“[A] prayer manual for people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading prayer manuals…”

Publishers Weekly

——————
Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair
A wise and compassionate exploration of how we can make sense of life’s chaos.
What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one other and to what’s sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable?

Lamott explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped shreds of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together, one stitch at a time.
In praise of …
“Lamott is a narrator who has relished and soaked up the details of her existence, equally of mirth and devastation, and spilled them onto her pages.”

The New York Times

“Lamott’s pithiest, most insightful book yet, Stitches offers plenty of her characteristic witty wisdom…this slim, readable volume [is] a lens on life, widening and narrowing,
encouraging each reader to reflect on what it is, after all, that really matters.”

People

“Anne Lamott, you are amazing”

The Huffington Post