With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Leslie Jamison offers us fourteen new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. In its kaleidoscopic sweep, Make It Scream, Make It Burn creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She…

“There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt. She’s comparable only to things like sequoias, whale-song, desert thunderstorms, or wolves. The depth of her emotional world and the diaphanous, often brutal clarity with which she understands the human soul beckon us to pause, breathe, think. Here, she takes us on a journey into death and loss, and then thrusts us back out - back into life - more awake, more ready to embrace it as it comes.” - Valeria…

Brookline Booksmith celebrates the launch of Kim Liggett’s much-buzzed novel The Grace Year. Joining Kim for this special event are Holly Black, Rory Power, and Libba Bray. Sasha Alsberg will moderate. Kim Liggett, author of The Grace Year, is originally from the rural Midwest and moved to New York City to pursue a career in the arts. She’s the author of Blood and Salt; Heart of Ash; The Last Harvest (Bram Stoker Award Winner); and The Unfortunates. Rory Power, author…

Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, an eminent writer, she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth, and there she meets, first, Andrew Weissman, an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old, and, soon afterward, his father, Henry Weissman, a charismatic New York physician who specializes in—as it happens—reproductive medicine. Michael Frank is the author of the…

This revelatory new book from James Beard Award-winning author Christopher Kimball defines 75 rules of cooking that will dramatically simplify your time in the kitchen and improve your results. These powerful principles appear in more than 200 recipes that teach you how to make your food more delicious and interesting. The New Rules are simpler techniques, fresher flavors, and trustworthy recipes that just work–a book full of lessons that will make you a better cook. Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street is…

When Ashley LeMieux and her husband lost their children in an adoption battle, it sent her into a tailspin that, ultimately, taught Ashley how to soar. Most people live with constant fears, burdens, and pains. Born to Shine shares Ashley’s message of hope for women brave enough to say that everything is not okay. Ashley LeMieux has made a career out of helping others re-ignite the light within them. She is the founder and CEO of The Shine Project as…

This event will be in conversation with Jenn De Leon, author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure…

This revised and updated second edition includes 120 new entries and a fold-out road trip map (with a dream itinerary) to offer readers even more of the most unusual, curious, bizarre, and mysterious places on earth. Oversized, beautifully packaged, compellingly written, scrupulously researched, and filled with photographs, illustrations, maps, charts, and more, this is the book that inspires equal parts wonder and wanderlust. Joshua Foer is the co-founder and chairman of Atlas Obscura. He is also the author of Moonwalking…

PLEASE NOTE: this event was formerly scheduled to take place at Coolidge Corner Theatre. It will now take place downstairs at Brookline Booksmith. All other details remain the same. Heather Morris, the author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, returns with Cilka’s Journey, the story of a young woman’s survival from Auschwitz to Siberia. From child to woman, from woman to healer, Cilka’s journey illuminates the resilience of the human spirit—and the will we have to survive. This event will consist…

Everything has been hidden from Roxanne G.—her birth name, her sister, her family history—until her “boyfriend” tries to ingratiate himself by flying in her estranged mother from Tel Aviv. That visit is the start of a tumultuous journey, in which she first learns about a profoundly disabled sister who lives in a residential community in the Galilee and later begins to unearth disturbing long-held family secrets. How far should Roxanne go to care for the wounded people in her life—her…

The Hard Times: The First 40 Years is the first book from The Hard Times.net, the Internet’s favorite music satire site. Often referred to as “The Onion for punk rock,” the site has developed a sizable, devoted following for its razor-sharp takes on underground music and alternative culture. And with headlines like “Man Magically Transforms into Music Historian While Talking to Women” and “Pretentious Friend Only Listens to Podcasts on Vinyl,” you don’t have to be a punk rock diehard…

Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, Su Hwang’s Bodega tells the story of a Korean girl who comes of age in her parents’ bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work. In We Come Elemental, Tamiko Beyer leads readers to reconsider the true meaning and implications of nature and “natural” order. Reclaiming nature as…

From “one of America’s most courageous young journalists” (NPR) comes a propulsive narrative history investigating the 50-year-old mystery behind a dramatic experiment that changed the course of modern medicine. Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American…

John Freeman in conversation with Krysten Hill Dictionary of the Undoing This event is co-sponsored by GrubStreet, one of the nation’s leading non-profit creative writing centers. For John Freeman—literary critic, essayist, editor, poet, “one of the preeminent book people of our time” (Dave Eggers)—it is the rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and…

Haunted and haunting, Jones’s memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into…

Tommy Pico’s Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It’s an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York’s High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park’s cultivated gardens of wildness. Carmen Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines…

Written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church, Janaka Stucky’s Ascend Ascendis equal parts Walt Whitman and Maggot Brain, documenting the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine. A close look at the rigors of our current cultural moment, Julia Guez’s debut poetry collection In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a…

Author, editor and writing teacher Suzanne McConnell was a student of Kurt Vonnegut’s at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop during its heyday, the period from 1965-67, when Vonnegut, along with Nelson Algren and other notable authors were in residence. This was also the period when Vonnegut was writing his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, and had a lot to say about the writing process. Vonnegut and McConnell became friends, and stayed in touch over the years. She has published short memoirs of him in…

Five years into fatherhood, Calvin Hennick is plagued by self-doubt and full of questions. How can he teach his son to be a man, when his own father figures abandoned him? As a white man, what can he possibly teach his biracial son about how to live as a black man in America? And what does it even mean to be a man today, when society’s expectations of men seem to change from moment to moment? In this unforgettable debut…

Newly out as transgender, Ron finds himself adrift: kicked out by his family, jilted by his girlfriend, unable to afford to return to college in the fall. So begins Alex Myers’ debut novel Continenental Divide. From there Ron heads out to Wyoming for a new start, a chance to prove that - even though he was raised as a girl, even though everyone in Boston thinks of him as transgender - he can live as a man. Sorted is an…

In The Year of No Nonsense, Atwood shares what she learned, tackling struggles with work, family, and body image, and also willpower and time management. Ultimately, she’s the tough-as-nails coach /slash/ best friend who shares a practical plan for identifying and getting rid of your own nonsense in order to move forward and live an authentic, healthy life. Meredith Atwood is a recovering attorney, wife, mother of two, four-time IRONMAN triathlete who had never run a mile in her life…

All Kane Montgomery knows for certain is that the police found him half-dead in the river. He can’t remember anything before an accident robbed him of his memories, so when three of his classmates claim to be his friends and the only people who know what’s truly going on, Kane isn’t sure what to believe or who to trust. But as he and the others are dragged into unimaginable worlds that materialize out of nowhere–the gym warps into a subterranean…

What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves? As we navigate the rapid shifts between the physical and digital realms, what traits are we trading without being aware of it? The Stars in Our Pockets is a personal and profound reminder of the world around us and the worlds within us–and how, as alienated as we may sometimes feel, they…

In Melissa Albert’s The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang. Melissa Albert is the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog and the managing editor of BN.com. She has written for McSweeney’s, Time Out Chicago, MTV, and more. Melissa is…

When the city’s newest medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska discovers that a suspected overdose conceals a drug lord’s attempt at a murderous cover-up, her superiors pressure her to close the case and move on. But as more bodies land on her autopsy table, Jessie traces a plot involving opioid traffickers and a shifting terrain of tech start-ups, and she won’t stop until she has uncovered the truth–even if it means the next corpse on the slab could be her own.…

Josh Funk, Anika Denise, and Jamie Michalak How to Code a Rollercoaster The Love Letter Frank and Bean Join us for a very special storytime with three local children’s authors, each reading from one of their own books! By day, Josh Funk writes C++, Java Code, and Python scripts as a software engineer, which he’s been doing for the last twenty years. In his spare time he uses ABC’s, drinks Java coffee, and writes picture book manuscripts such as How…

David Meerman Scott and his daughter Reiko are very different - one is a baby boomer business strategist, the other a millennial medical student. But both noticed that the kind of enthusiasm they once reserved for pleasures like the Grateful Dead (David) and Harry Potter (Reiko) now extends to all sorts of companies and organizations. So they teamed up to explore a big question: Why do some brands, even in supposedly boring categories like car insurance and enterprise software, attract…

What could possibly be “lucky” about addiction? Absolutely nothing, thought Laura McKowen when drinking brought her to her knees. As she puts it, she “kicked and screamed … wishing for something – anything – else” to be her issue. The people who got to drink normally, she thought, were so damn lucky. But in the midst of early sobriety, when no longer able to anesthetize her pain and anxiety, she realized that she was actually the lucky one. Lucky to…

The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love–letters Eun Ji cannot fully…

A celebration of ordinary awesomeness, for all of us who were told “You can do anything!” and then found out we actually can’t. Crappy homes, lame love lives, getting passed over for a great job (again)–not what we expected for our adulthoods. Full of hilarious stories and insightful advice, Average is the New Awesome is a manifesto for ordinary awesomeness–for the beauty that can be found when we acknowledge that good enough really is good enough, and that greatness is…

Nick Heller is at the top of his game when he receives some devastating news: his old army buddy Sean has died of an overdose. Sean, who once saved Nick’s life, got addicted to opioids after returning home wounded from war. Then at Sean’s funeral, a stranger approaches Nick with a job, and maybe also a way for Nick to hold someone accountable. Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen previous novels, including Judgment, The Switch,…

In Politics Is for Power, pioneering and brilliant data analyst Eitan Hersh shows us a way toward more effective political participation. Aided by political theory, history, cutting-edge social science, as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values. Eitan Hersh received a PhD from Harvard University in 2011. He served for six years…

“A searing novel, by Iranian exile Djavahery, of love and betrayal in a time of revolution…. Djavahery’s novel is an aching evocation of paradise lost, one that is impossible to regain, even in our narrator’s searching dreams. Vivid, shattering, and utterly memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the “poor relative from the North,” but a welcome guest…

Slay meets Eliza and Her Monsters in Eric Smith’s Don’t Read the Comments, an #ownvoices story in which two teen gamers find their virtual worlds—and blossoming romance—invaded by the real-world issues of trolling and doxing in the gaming community. Karen McManus’s One of Us is Next is the highly anticipated sequel to the New York Times bestselling thriller everyone is talking about, One of Us Is Lying! There’s a new mystery to solve at Bayview High, and there’s a whole…

In the tradition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or George Hodgman’s Bettyville, Fremont writes with wit and candor about growing up in a household held together by a powerful glue: secrets. Her parents, profoundly affected by their memories of the Holocaust, pass on a penchant for keeping their lives neatly–even obsessively–compartmentalized, as well as a zealous determination to protect themselves from the dangers of the outside world. Helen Fremont is the author of the national bestseller After Long Silence. Her…

The highly anticipated third novel in the award-winning Ellery Hathaway mystery series. FBI agent Reed Markham is haunted by one painful unsolved mystery: who murdered his mother? Camilla was brutally stabbed to death more than forty years ago while baby Reed lay in his crib mere steps away. The trail went so cold that the Las Vegas Police Department gave up hope of solving the case - but then a shattering family secret changes everything Reed knows about his origins;…