Friday, May 13th at 8pm - join us and co-authors Lorraine Tosiello and Jane Cavolina as they discuss and read letters from their new book, The Bee & the Fly : The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson.

Researched for over five years and drawing heavily on biographical facts, The Bee & the Fly presents a lifelong exchange of unknown letters between Dickinson, the reclusive poet, and Alcott, the most renowned author of the time. Though fictional, these luminous letters present a believable friendship that explores the questions of family responsibilities, women’s growing influence in the literary world, the cost of fame and the power of sorority.

Lorraine Tosiello read Alcott’s Little Women in the first grade, and again and again most years of her childhood after that.  That set her off on her life journey of reading, working as a physician, motherhood, traveling, and general rabble-rousing. Rereading Little Women in later adulthood renewed her Alcott enthusiasm and years of study resulted in her first novel, Only Gossip Prospers: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott in New York. She lives with her husband in midtown Manhattan and at the New Jersey shore.

Jane Cavolina has been absorbed in a book since her mother signed her up for a book club before she started nursery school. That led to a career in publishing, first as a senior editor at William Morrow, Crown, and Pocket Books, and now as a copyeditor. She is the coauthor of Growing Up Catholic, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for forty-weeks, and other works. She has read every Louisa May Alcott book in the Bayside Public Library with the exception of Little Women, and has worn out several copies of Leaves of Grass, by her other favorite poet, and cherishes her well-flagged copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Author Talk - The Bee & the Fly