Writing for the New York Times Book Review, novelist E.L. Doctorow has said that Mary Lee Settle has a grand passion for what she\u27s doing... high drama... and the instinct of the novelist for panorama... Settle\u27s prodigious writing career includes the publication of six highly acclaimed novels: Blood Tie, for which she was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 1978, and The Beulah Quintet (Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat and The Killing Ground), hailed by critic Roger Shattuck as an act of faith in the novel... a source of energies we can carry back to life itself. In addition to her fiction, Ms. Settle has published articles in a variety of magazines and journals, including an essay in Esquire this year on Japan. Ms. Settle will open the festival with a reading from her fiction on Monday evening; on Tuesday she will lecture on Researching a Worldwide Novel