If there’s a common thread connecting two of July’s most anticipated literary events, it’s this: paying attention.
Daniel Mason, whose acclaimed North Woods transformed a single Berkshire woodlot into a sweeping novel spanning centuries, and Lili Taylor, the Oscar-nominated actor whose new memoir Turning to Birds chronicles her passion for birdwatching, arrive in the Hudson Valley this month with books that invite readers to slow down and look more closely at the world around them. One approaches the natural world through fiction, the other through observation, but both suggest that the landscapes and creatures we often overlook have stories to tell.
On July 11, Rough Draft Bar & Books welcomes Mason to Senate Garage in Kingston for the independent bookstore’s first major author event in its future home. Mason will discuss his new novel, Country People, in conversation with Rough Draft’s Drew Broussard before signing books. The evening also offers readers an early glimpse of Rough Draft’s expansion into the historic Uptown space. Tickets are $30 and include a copy of Country People.
While Country People is one of the summer’s most anticipated novels, many Hudson Valley readers will know Mason from North Woods, the 2023 bestseller that unfolded across hundreds of years on a single plot of land in the Berkshires. The novel treated the forest itself as its central character, following generations of Indigenous inhabitants, colonists, farmers, lovers, artists, insects, birds, and trees through cycles of settlement, loss, and renewal. Few recent novels have made place feel so vividly alive, and its Berkshire setting lent it a particular resonance for readers on both sides of the Taconic Range.
A physician as well as a novelist, Mason has built a career weaving science, history, and the natural world into richly imagined fiction. His previous books include The Winter Soldier and the Pulitzer Prize-finalist story collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth. Country People shifts from the epic scope of North Woods to a more intimate family story set in Vermont, while retaining Mason’s fascination with the ways people shape—and are shaped by—the places they inhabit.
Three days later, on July 14, the Crandell Theatre in Chatham continues its Crandell LIVE! Author Series with an evening featuring actor and author Lili Taylor. Tickets are available with or without purchase of the book, ranging from $12 to $35.
Best known for memorable performances in films including Mystic Pizza, Say Anything…, and I Shot Andy Warhol, along with television roles in “Six Feet Under” and “Outer Range,” Taylor has spent decades inhabiting other people’s stories. In Turning to Birds, she turns inward.
Part memoir, part meditation on the rewards of close observation, Turning to Birds traces how Taylor’s fascination with birdwatching evolved into a daily practice that sharpened her awareness of both the natural world and her own life. Rather than presenting herself as an expert birder, she writes as an enthusiastic learner, discovering that paying attention—to warblers, hawks, owls, and sparrows—can become a way of paying better attention to everything else.
Taylor will discuss the book with Crandell Executive Director Mirissa Neff in an event presented in partnership with The Chatham Bookstore. Taylor’s memoir has earned widespread praise, including recognition as a Gotham Book Prize finalist and one of The New Yorker‘s Best Books of the Year.
Mason stretches time across centuries to reveal the hidden lives embedded in one patch of forest. Taylor slows time to notice the lives unfolding in the trees overhead. Different books, different forms, but a remarkably similar invitation. In a season that encourages us to head outside, both writers remind us that the natural world has always been speaking. All we have to do is learn how to listen.
