Norma Watkins will read from her memoir, The Last Resort, at 7 p.m. on Oct. 14 at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva.

The Last Resort begins in childhood at Allison’s Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

828.586.9499.