Please join us for a very special evening in the bookstore to celebrate esteemed and beloved author and professor Bret Lott to celebrate his new book, Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and The Holy Land.
This beautiful book is about "about hope and food and community and the way there can be solidarity in sharing a meal [and] it is about peace in a time when peace in the Holy Land is a faraway, even radical notion.” Bret is a dear friend of the bookstore and we could not be more excited to host him to help bring this important book into the world!
This is a free event, but please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot.
About Gather the Olives:
Gather the Olives is a dangerous book. That’s because it is about peace in a time when peace in the Holy Land is a faraway, even radical notion. It is about hope and food and community and the way there can be solidarity in sharing a meal. Hence the danger: this book might remind its brave readers of how peace is nourished and how hope can’t be extinguished. Over the years, Bret Lott—the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including the novel Jewel (an Oprah’s Book Club selection)—has lived and taught in Jerusalem, affording him the opportunity to travel throughout Israel and the surrounding area. Now, in Gather the Olives, this gifted storyteller has brought together a collection of intimate portraits of the people, the food, and the hope for peace to be found in a region ravaged by war and conflict. Through meditations on such varied matters as an olive oil cooperative run by Israeli and Palestinian women, a non-kosher butcher shop in the middle of upscale—and very kosher—German Colony, the nighttime harvesting of olives by Bedouins in downtown Jerusalem, a traditional Shabbat dinner at an ancient home within the walls of the Old City, a simple yet beautiful plate of fruit in an office in Ramallah, Bret Lott considers how food and the people with whom we share it can bring together hearts and souls in a lasting, meaningful, and peaceful way.
About Bret Lott:
Bret Lott is the bestselling author of eight novels, three story collections and three nonfiction books; his fifteenth book, a nonfiction collection titled Cherries on the Golan, Olives in Jerusalem, will be out in 2023. His first novel, The Man Who Owned Vermont, was read in nationwide broadcasts on public radio. and his novel Jewel was both an Oprah Book Club selection and made into a film. His work has been translated into eight languages. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1984, studying under Jay Neugeboren and James Baldwin. He has spoken on Flannery O'Connor at the White House, and served as Fulbright Senior American Scholar to Bar-llan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. From 2006 to 2013 he served as a member of the National Council on the Arts, and from 2010 to 2022 he directed the Spoleto Summer Study Abroad program in English at the College.