Join us for a special lunch with Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink. Ann Patchett calls the collection of essays “Relentlessly funny, self-effacing and charming.” Your $44 ticket includes lunch from Altra Strada Restaurant and a copy of I Miss You When I Blink. Buy tickets in-store or by phone at 781-431-1160, or online through Eventbrite (fees apply).
You are invited to our annual benefit! Join us for SOCIALIZING & BRIEF READINGS BY NIGHT RIFFS GUEST AUTHORS (introduced by Dzvinia Orlowsky):
There will be LIVE MUSIC by West Street Jazz, a Boston-based jazz trio/quartet focusing on maintaining the jazz tradition and performing music from the greats, such as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Kenny Brunnell, and Grant Green.
Don’t miss out on the GOURMET GRATIS FOOD, CASH BAR, BOOK TABLE & AUTHOR SIGNINGS, AND OUR INFAMOUS SILENT AUCTION.
Adrienne Brodeur presents Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity. Wild Game has been named a Best of Fall book by NPR, People, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and more.
This is a free event, however we ask that you RSVP. You can do so in-store, by phone at 781-431-1160, or online at store.wellesleybooks.com/event/adrienne-brodeur. All RSVP methods are free.
Please note that you must buy your copy of Wild Game from Wellesley Books in order to meet Adrienne at the event and have her it.
About Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.
On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me.
Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.
Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.
About the Author
ADRIENNE BRODEUR began her career in publishing as the co-founder, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction three times and launched the careers of many writers. She was a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for many years and, currently, she is the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She has published essays in the New York Times. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod with her husband and children.
George Howe Colt, National Book Award finalist for The Big House, presents The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968, the story of that iconic American year, as seen through the young men who lived it and were changed by it. Learn more at store.wellesleybooks.com
About The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968
*A New York Times Notable Book*
*A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year*
From the bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of The Big House comes “a well-blended narrative packed with top-notch reporting and relevance for our own time” (The Boston Globe) about the young athletes who battled in the legendary Harvard-Yale football game of 1968 amidst the sweeping currents of one of the most transformative years in American history.
On November 23, 1968, there was a turbulent and memorable football game: the season-ending clash between Harvard and Yale. The final score was 29-29. To some of the players, it was a triumph; to others a tragedy. And to many, the reasons had as much to do with one side’s miraculous comeback in the game’s final forty-two seconds as it did with the months that preceded it, months that witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, police brutality at the Democratic National Convention, inner-city riots, campus takeovers, and, looming over everything, the war in Vietnam.
George Howe Colt’s The Game is the story of that iconic American year, as seen through the young men who lived it and were changed by it. One player had recently returned from Vietnam. Two were members of the radical antiwar group SDS. There was one NFL prospect who quit to devote his time to black altruism; another who went on to be Pro-Bowler Calvin Hill. There was a guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and fullback who dated a young Meryl Streep. They played side by side and together forged a moment of startling grace in the midst of the storm.
About the Author
George Howe Colt is the bestselling author of The Big House, which was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Brothers; November of the Soul; and The Game. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Anne Fadiman.
Maureen Stanton presents Body Leaping Backward, her haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a Massachusetts town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.
“A blazingly important memoir about the possibility of change.” —People Magazine
This is a free event, however we request that you RSVP. You can do so in-store, by phone at 781-431-1160, or online at the Wellesley Books website. All RSVP methods are free.
Jennifer Donnelly, bestselling author of A Northern Light and Lost in a Book, presents Stepsister, a startling, fiercely feminist YA re-imagining of Cinderella.
Christine Lynn Herman presents The Devouring Gray, a YA novel that follows seventeen-year-old Violet Saunders as she moves to a new town where stone bells hang above every doorway and danger lurks in the depths of the woods.
“Fans of The Raven Boys and Stranger Things rejoice: This is your new obsession.” —Claire Legrand, bestselling author of Furyborn
Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author and writing instructor TRACY STRAUSS for a discussion of her latest book, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life.
I Just Haven’t Met You Yet details Tracy Strauss’s dating history and her journey to dismantle the effects and stigmas of an abusive past, break free of destructive relationship patterns, and ultimately conquer her fear of truly being seen by the world, flaws and all. The author shares the transformative lessons she learned and self-empowerment she achieved while passing each hurdle along the way to finding the love of her life.
Tracy Strauss helps readers empower themselves by taking a challenging look at the ways the negative events of their lives, including sexual harassment and abuse, have shaped their self-perception and created obstacles to personal success, and how readers can change that troubled self-image along with their (love) lives.
I Just Haven’t Met You Yet is a modern-day journey of the heart. It is a story about taking big risks, changing old habits and beliefs about dating, and speaking back to the naysayers, especially that internal critic, the inner love saboteur. It is a prime mover and the only epistolary memoir cum dating/relationship essay book of its kind.
“Tracy Strauss answers the dreaded question “How are you still single?” with a narrative that’s funny, relatable, genuine, thought-provoking, and universal. She’s written more than just a book about dating; I Just Haven’t Met You Yet is a narrative about a person’s need to be seen—and understood.” —Meredith Goldstein, Boston Globe love letters advice columnist
“Tracy Strauss will break your heart. I defy you to put down this disarmingly charming book. A wry narrative turns in and out of light and deep shadow as if she were dancing. Utterly, beautifully honest. It reaches great heights and will make you wish she had always been your friend.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
“In I Just Haven’t Met You Yet, Tracy Strauss reminds us of the power of words and memory and honesty and—most of all—the power of hope. This book has one of my favorite last lines that I’ve read in a long time. But don’t cheat and peek at it. Read every single one that comes before it so that when you reach the end, like me you’ll be smiling and crying in equal measure.” —Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Knitting Circle
A politically driven graffiti artist. A transgender Christian convert. A blind girl who loves to dance. A queer daughter of a hijabi union leader. These are some of the young women who live in a Bangalore slum known as Heaven, young women whom readers will come to love in the moving, atmospheric, and deeply inspiring debut, A People’s History of Heaven.
Welcome to Heaven, a thirty‑year‑old slum hidden between brand‑new high‑rise apartment buildings and technology incubators in contemporary Bangalore, one of India’s fastest‑growing cities. In Heaven, you will come to know a community made up almost entirely of women, mothers and daughters who have been abandoned by their men when no male heir was produced. Living hand‑to‑mouth and constantly struggling against the city government who wants to bulldoze their homes and build yet more glass high‑rises, these women, young and old, gladly support one another, sharing whatever they can.
A People’s History of Heaven centers on five best friends, girls who go to school together, a diverse group who love and accept one another unconditionally, pulling one another through crises and providing emotional, physical, and financial support. Together they wage war on the bulldozers that would bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that does not care what happens to them.
This is a story about geography, history, and strength, about love and friendship, about fighting for the people and places we love‑‑even if no one else knows they exist. Elegant, poetic, bursting with color, Mathangi Subramanian’s novel is a moving and celebratory story of girls on the cusp of adulthood who find joy just in the basic act of living.
Subramanian is an award-winning Indian American writer, author, and educator. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Teachers College of Columbia University, and the recipient of a Fulbright as well as other fellowships. Her writing has previously appeared in the Washington Post, Quartz, Al Jazeera America, and elsewhere. This is her first work of literary fiction.
Moderator, Christine Bagley, author of five short mystery stories, and a finalist for the Al Blanchard Award in Best Short Crime Fiction, will discuss the differences between male and female authors when writing crime stories. Guest authors will be Bruce Robert Coffin, a former detective sergeant, short story writer, and author of the novel, Beyond The Truth, Christine Eskilson, a finalist for both the Al Blanchard Award for Best Short Crime Fiction, and Women’s National Book Association, and Gabriel Valjan, short story writer, and author of the Roma series, and The Company Files: The Good Man. Differences to be discussed include violence, sex, swearing, POV, whether readers prefer female or male crime writers, and who publishes more often. Authors will read from their stories appearing in Level Best Book’s Best New England Crime Stories: Landfall and Snowbound. A Q&A and signing will wrap up the panel discussion.