ARMISTEAD MAUPIN Presents – Logical Family: A Memoir

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning novelist ARMISTEAD MAUPIN—author of the nine-volume Tales of the City series—for a reading from his debut memoir, Logical Family.

Tickets:

Tickets only are $5 + $1.27 fee

Tickets (bundled with book) are $27.95 + $2.57 fee

Doors close at 5:30pm! — This event includes a book signing.

About Logical Family: A Memoir
In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.
Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, ARMISTEAD MAUPIN lost his virginity to another man “on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.” Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, MAUPIN shares his candid search for his “logical family,” the people he could call his own. “Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us,” he writes. “We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.” From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who MAUPIN insisted was the reincarnation of her artistic bachelor cousin, Curtis, to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, MAUPIN tells of the extraordinary individuals and situations that shaped him into one of the most influential writers of the last century.

MAUPIN recalls his losses and life-changing experiences with humor and unflinching honesty, and brings to life flesh-and-blood characters as endearing and unforgettable as the vivid, fraught men and women who populate his enchanting novels. What emerges is an illuminating portrait of the man who depicted the liberation and evolution of America’s queer community over the last four decades with honesty and compassion—and inspired millions to claim their own lives.

CELESTE NG in conversation with ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome back award-winning local author of Everything I Never Told You CELESTE NG for a discussion of her latest novel, Little Fires Everywhere. Celeste will be joined in conversation by The Fact of a Body author ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH. This event is co-sponsored by 826 Boston.

This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, this event includes a book signing!

About Little Fires Everywhere
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, this riveting novel traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

ALEXIS OKEOWO Discusses A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer ALEXIS OKEOWO for a discussion of her new book, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa.

In the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer ALEXIS OKEOWO—a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent’s wave of fundamentalism.

In A Moonless, Starless Sky, OKEOWO weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony’s LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women’s basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America’s most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary—lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.

This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, This event includes a book signing.

KL PEREIRA and MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR share their latest works

Harvard Book Store welcomes writer, poet, and teacher KL PEREIRA and writer, critic, and translator MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR for a discussion of their books, A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality and Landslide: True Stories.

This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, This event includes a book signing.

About A Dream Between Two Rivers
Both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange in the tradition of Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection, KL PEREIRA weaves elements of fairy tale, folklore, and myth into the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Her lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are most vulnerable, who live on edges between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality, PEREIRA explores rebirth amidst darkness.

About Landslide
MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR’s Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother―who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years later―and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of PROCTOR’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of PROCTOR’s own life―shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother.

PROCTOR has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.

Award-winning author JAMES MCBRIDE shares his latest: Five-Carat Soul

Harvard Book Store welcomes bestselling and award-winning author JAMES MCBRIDE for a discussion of his latest book, Five-Carat Soul, his first work of fiction since the National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird.

This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, this event includes a book signing.

About Five-Carat Soul
The stories in Five-Carat Soul—none of them ever published before—spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They’re funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic—all told with MCBRIDE’s unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail. MCBRIDE explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.
As MCBRIDE did in his National Book award-winning The Good Lord Bird and his bestselling The Color of Water, he writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend. The result is a surprising, perceptive, and evocative collection of stories that is also a moving exploration of our human condition.

KHIZR KHAN at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes KHIZR KHAN—the Muslim American Gold Star father well known for his 2016 Democratic National Convention speech—for a discussion of his debut memoir An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice. He will be joined in conversation by writer, Harvard Law School professor, and human rights expert MARTHA MINOW.

About An American Family

In fewer than three hundred words, KHIZR KHAN electrified viewers around the world when he took the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. And when he offered to lend Donald Trump his own much-read and dog-eared pocket Constitution, his gesture perfectly encapsulated the feelings of millions. But who was that man, standing beside his wife, extolling the promises and virtues of the U.S. Constitution?
In this urgent and timeless immigrant story, we learn that KHIZR KHAN has been many things. He was the oldest of ten children born to farmers in Pakistan and a curious and thoughtful boy who listened raptly as his grandfather recited Rumi beneath the moonlight. He was a university student who read the Declaration of Independence and was awestruck by what might be possible in life. He was a hopeful suitor, awkwardly but earnestly trying to win the heart of a woman far out of his league. He was a brilliant and diligent young family man who worked two jobs to save enough money to put himself through Harvard Law School. He was a loving father who, having instilled in his children the ideals that brought him and his wife to America—the sense of shared dignity and mutual responsibility—tragically lost his son, an Army captain killed while protecting his base camp in Iraq. He was and is a patriot, and a fierce advocate for the rights, dignities, and values enshrined in the American system.

An American Family shows us who KHIZR KHAN and millions of other American immigrants are, and why—especially in these tumultuous times—we must not be afraid to step forward for what we believe in when it matters most.

Author/environmentalist BILL McKIBBEN at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated author and environmentalist BILL McKIBBEN—founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement—for a discussion of his debut novel, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance. This event is co-sponsored by 350 Mass.

Tickets: $5 for only entrance into the event itself; $23.75 for the book & entrance into the event. Tickets are to be purchased online. Doors close at 5:30PM.

In Radio Free Vermont, BILL McKIBBEN entertains and expands upon an idea that’s become more popular than ever—seceding from the United States. Along with Vern and Perry, McKIBBEN imagines an eccentric group of activists who carry out their own version of guerilla warfare, which includes dismissing local middle school children early in honor of ‘Ethan Allen Day’ and hijacking a Coors Light truck and replacing the stock with local brew. Witty, biting, and terrifyingly timely, Radio Free Vermont is BILL McKIBBEN’s fictional response to the burgeoning resistance movement.

Mad Men-creator MATTHEW WEINER in conversation with BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON

Harvard Book Store welcomes Emmy Award–winning writer, director, and producer MATTHEW WEINER for a discussion of his debut novel, Heather, the Totality. He will be joined in conversation by Bret Anthony Johnston, author of the bestselling novel Remember Me Like This.

About Heather, the Totality:
A collision course between a privileged family and a dangerous young man, Heather, The Totality is a chilling debut novel by the creator of Mad Men, MATTHEW WEINER.

Tickets: $26.25 for the book & entrance into the event. Tickets are to be purchased online. Doors close at 5:30PM.

ALEC BALDWIN and KURT ANDERSEN at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning actor, producer, and comedian ALEC BALDWIN and bestselling author and Studio 360 host KURT ANDERSEN for a signing of their co-authored book, You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody).

Please Note:
-This is a book signing event only. See the event’s signing guidelines below.
-We are not taking requests or pre-orders for signed books for this event.

Tickets and Book Pickup
-Tickets are required to join the signing line. Each ticket admits one (1) and includes one (1) copy of You Can’t Spell America Without Me.
-Tickets go on sale September 22nd at 9am in the store and at harvard.com. Tickets are non-refundable and non-returnable.
-Books will be signed in-person only, one book per ticket holder. Additional copies of You Can’t Spell America Without Me will be available for purchase at Harvard Book Store, but the signing is limited to one book per person.
-Those purchasing tickets online can pick up their book at the bookstore the evening of the signing, but not before. Those purchasing tickets in the store can pick up their books starting on publication date (November 7th).

Timeline
-The signing will begin at 5:00pm on Monday, November 13th, at Harvard Book Store.
-Doors will open to the signing line shortly before 5. Until then the line will form outside the store, down Plympton Street (towards Mount Auburn Street).
-E-ticket and will-call ticket holders will receive their books when checking in on the evening of the event.

Signing Line Guidelines
-This book signing is limited to copies of You Can’t Spell America Without Me—no memorabilia.
-The authors will be signing one book per attendee.
-Due to limited time, no personalizations or photography.

WALTER ISAACSON on Leonardo da Vinci

Was Leonardo da Vinci history’s most creative genius? Was he also a Florentine spy in foreign courts? Find out when Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated writer and journalist WALTER ISAACSON—author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin—for a discussion of his latest biography: Leonardo da Vinci.

This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.

Tickets: $5 for only entrance into the event itself; $34.75 for the book & entrance into the event. Please purchase your tickets online.