Historic St. Mary’s City is excited to announce the first meeting of a new community book club, “A Farthing for your Thoughts.” The club will meet inside The Shop at Farthing’s Ordinary on November 15 from 2 – 3:30 p.m. The first meeting will discuss the novel “A Wolf by the Ears” written by local author Wayne Karlin (pictured), who will be in attendance.
ST. MARY’S CITY, Md. – Historic St. Mary’s City is excited to announce the first meeting of a new community book club, “A Farthing for your Thoughts.” The club will meet inside The Shop at Farthing’s Ordinary on November 15 from 2 – 3:30 p.m. The first meeting will discuss the novel A Wolf by the Ears written by local author Wayne Karlin, who will be in attendance.
The novel’s title refers to a quote by Thomas Jefferson, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
The novel is set during the war of 1812, when thousands of enslaved people from plantations across the Tidewater rallied to the British side, turning against an American republic that had barred them from the promises of freedom and democracy. Against the backdrop of rebellion and war, Wayne Karlin’s A Wolf by the Ears follows the interconnected stories of Towerhill and Sarai, two African slaves, and their master, Jacob Hallam. Educated side-by-side and inseparable as children, the three come of age as they are forced to grapple with and break free of the fraught linkage of black and white Americans and how differently each defines what it means to fight for freedom.
Wayne Karlin has published eight novels and a collection of short stories, as well as three non-fiction works. His books have also been published in England, and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Vietnam. He has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction for 2019.
Anyone interested in joining the book club please get in touch with Iris Ford by emailing icford@smcm.edu.
The Shop at Farthing’s Ordinary is located at 47414 Old State House Road, St. Mary’s City, Maryland 20686.
About the author:
Wayne Karlin has published eight novels: A Wolf by the Ears, Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners (all with Curbstone Press), Lost Armies, The Extras, Us (all with Henry Holt), and Crossover (Harcourt), and a short story collection, Memorial Days (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), as well as three works of non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone Press), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). His books have also been published in England, and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Vietnam. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999 for Prisoners, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction for 2019 for A Wolf by the Ears. The manuscript for his novel What Their Fathers Never Told Them was a finalist for the 2021 PEN American Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.