from the KEY WEST ART & HISTORICAL SOCIETY 281 FRONT STREET, KEY WEST, FL 33040 295-6616 Fax: 295-6649
Attention: News editors, news directors, features editors and programming directors. Please use the following item as a news story, public service announcement or community event. Pix available. For immediate release.
Key West writer Brewster Chamberlin read from his latest book Mediterranean Sketches at 6:00 pm, Thursday, April 21, 2005, at the Custom House. Author of two previous books, A Piece of Paris: The Grand XIVth (1996) and Paris Now and Then (2002), Chamberlin took listeners on a journey around the Mediterranean basin where he has lived and visited for 25 years. In a recent interview, Chamberlin emphasized Mediterranean Sketches is not a travel book. “Travel books are written for a specific mundane practical purpose: how to find a decent hotel room, good restaurant or clean toilet. Mediterranean Sketches is about what Lawrence Durrell called “the spirit of place.” It is the culmination of more than 20 years of short stories, poems, letters, and essays ranging from Spain to Egypt, and his particular love, the South of France. When asked why readers will enjoy Mediterranean sketches Chamberlin replied, “... it’s fun to read, that is to say the individual pieces are amusing, hysterically funny, brooding meditations on the human condition (in two pages or less!), frightening insights into the bestial mind of man, beautiful poems of love and sex, and wildly surrealistic depictions of lunches on the Mediterranean shores and islands, well-watered and brightly populated with eccentric but recognizable characters.” Of special interest to literature and art lovers is the author’s fantasy lunch on the terrace of la Colombe d’or in Saint Paul de Vence attended by writers James Baldwin, Jacques Prévert, Thomas Mann, a tipsy Lawrence Durrell, as well as painters Renoir, Matisse, Braque, Cézanne, Chagall, and many more.