Episode Description:
In partnership with WHYY and other local PBS stations, PBS Books Heather-Marie Montilla is joined by author James McBride to discuss his latest book The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store as the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival author featured this week by PBS Books.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
The 24th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, August 24, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
About the Book:
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
Guest Biography:
James McBride
James McBride is the author of The New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong; The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award; The Color of Water; Song Yet Sung; the story collection Five-Carat Soul; and the James Brown biography Kill ’Em and Leave. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a 2008 film. In 2016, McBride was awarded the National Humanities Medal. He is also a musician, a composer and a current distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University. McBride’s most recent New York Times bestselling novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
