NEA Big Read

NEA Big Read: Cape Fear As part of the NEA Big Read: Cape Fear, UNCW’s Office of the Arts and Randall Library are hosting a collaborative, year-long effort to promote literacy in Wilmington and the broader Cape Fear region. Programming for the NEA Big Read: Cape Fear spans three counties and includes community book reads, discussions, family-friendly events, book clubs, teacher trainings, performances, story times, and art festivals that focus their efforts on Andrew Krivaks's The Bear and other companion titles.  

NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The NEA Big Read: Cape Fear is sponsored by the Arts Council of Wilmington & New Hanover County and the Brunswick Arts Council. 

For more information, contact Cara Marsicano (marsicanoc@uncw.edu) 

Como parte del programa NEA Big Read: Cape Fear y la Oficina de Arte & la Biblioteca Randall de UNCW están organizando una colaboración de un año con el objetivo de promover la alfabetización en nuestra comunidad y la región de Cape Fear. La programación de NEA Big Read: Cape Fear, será parte de tres condados e incluye lectura de libros, debates, eventos familiares, clubs de lecturas, capacitaciones para maestros, presentaciones, cuentos y festivales artísticos centrados en el libro The Bear de Andrew Krivak y otros títulos complementarios.

NEA Big Read es un programa del Fondo Nacional de las Artes en asociación con Artes del Medio Oeste. El NEA Big Read: Cape Fear está patrocinado por el Consejo de las Artes de Wilmington & New Hanover y el Consejo de las Artes de Brunswick.

2023-24 NEA Big Read Featured Title

The Bear

National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak’s third novel, is a “beautiful and elegant … gem” (Publishers Weekly) that explores a world at the end of humanity.

The last two humans on Earth—a father and daughter—live off the land at the foot of a mountain, learning to live alongside the rhythms of a world reclaimed by nature. Then one day, the girl is alone: left only with the lessons her father taught her and the companionship of the vast wilderness.

"Krivak folds the deep past and the far future into a remarkable fable about our inheritance as humanity makes a harmonic return to the spirit and animal worlds," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson.

Krivak’s descriptions are “so loving and vivid that you can feel the lake water and smell the sea” (Slate). “This tender story is endowed with such fullness of meaning that you have to assign this short, touching book its own category: the post-apocalypse utopia” (Wall Street Journal).