JENNA BLUM, bestselling author of Those Who Save Us, presents The Lost Family, an emotionally charged, funny, and elegantly bittersweet portrait of marriage, family, and the haunting grief of World War II.
Tickets for this event are $5 and can be used as a coupon off of the book. Buy tickets in-store, by phone, or online.
ALLISON PEARSON, bestselling author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, joins us at Wellesley Books to present How Hard Can It Be?, the hilarious and poignant new adventures of Kate Reddy, the beleaguered heroine of Pearson’s groundbreaking I Don’t Know How She Does It.
This is a free event, however we ask that you RSVP. You can reserve your spot in-store, by phone at 781.431.1160, or online at store.wellesleybooks.com.
Kids, parents, teachers, and aspiring writers, join us for From Picture Books to YA: Seven Children’s Authors Discuss the Wide World of Children’s Literature. The panel will include Megan Frazer Blakemore (The Daybreak Bond), Julie C. Dao (Forest of a Thousand Lanterns), Erin M. Dionne (Lights, Camera, Disaster), Debbi Michiko Florence (Jasmine Toguchi series), Cordelia Jensen (Every Shiny Thing), Jarrett Lerner (EngiNerds), and Anna Staniszewski (Wish series).
Come celebrate the paperback launch of Crystal King’s acclaimed debut, FEAST OF SORROW (Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster), hailed as “a delight to the senses” by Library Journal (starred review) and long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Crystal, a culinary enthusiast, will speak about the food customs of Ancient Rome and share the story of Apicius, the famous first-century gourmand who inspired the world’s oldest cookbook, and the ambition that led to his destruction.
Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome award-winning author AMINATTA FORNA (pictured) for a discussion of her latest novel, Happiness. She will be joined in conversation by local bestselling novelist CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs.
This event is free and open to the public.
Kaya Press authors ANELISE CHEN and Q.M. ZHANG come together to discuss trauma, memory and the writing. Both authors push the boundaries of genres with their hybrid and experimental text that refuse to be placed in simple categories such as memoir, novels, self-help and more.
Moderated by author, educator, and playwright Proshot Kalami.
Blending elements of self-help, memoir, and sports writing, ANELISE CHEN’s So Many Olympic Exertions is an experimental novel that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hypomnemata, or “notes to the self” in the form of observations, reminders, and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on “how to live” or perhaps more urgently “why to live,” a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering.
In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. ZHANG tries to piece together the fractured mystery of her father’s exodus from China to the U.S. during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. Part memoir, novel, and historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Mixing images and text in the manner of W.G. Sebald, Zhang blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, memory and imagination, and the result is a literary page-turner of one woman racing against time to uncover and reimagine her family’s origin story.
The Friends of the Charlestown Branch of the BPL is pleased to host a presentation by DAVID DONOVAN on Henry Beston’s The Outermost House. This event is free and open to all, with a reception following. [snow date: Mon. Feb. 12, 6:00 pm]
Published in 1928, Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, was written after Beston spent a long stretch of solitude in a 20’x16’ house located on the dunes of Cape Cod’s Eastham. He used the house as a base while observing and contemplating on the natural wonders of this exceptional maritime setting.
Beston’s work is now considered a classic of American literature as well as one of the seminal works that has influenced today’s environmental movement. The Outermost House has been called one of the motivating factors in establishing the Cape Cod National Seashore, while also greatly influencing the writing of biologist/conservationist Rachel Carson.
Even though the house itself finally succumbed to the natural elements during the Blizzard of ’78, its Outer Cape location, often referred to as a ship-wreck graveyard, continues to be a transitional area, loaded with surprises. The most recent of note took place in November of 2017, with the resurfacing of some of the hull wreckage of the doomed schooner Montclair, which sunk in March of 1927. Beston’s account of the Montclair tragedy is covered in the first five pages of the Lanterns on the Beach chapter of his The Outermost House:
“There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the worst. On Monday morning last, shortly after five o’clock, the big three-masted schooner Montclair stranded at Orleans and went to pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.”
Background information:
Born in Quincy, writer/naturalist Henry Beston (1888-1968) set out in 1926, on what was initially intended to be a two-week vacation, in search of peace and solitude, while also hoping to shake off the haunting memories of his World War I experience. He spent the time in a small frame cottage that he had had built on sand dunes located two miles south of the Nauset Coast Guard Station. The cottage had the Atlantic Ocean near his front door and Nauset Marsh in the back. His only neighbors were the Coast Guardsmen, who patrolled the beach. However, as he recounted later in The Outermost House, “The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.” Thus began a solitary sojourn on the beach, a thoughtful man’s “year in outer nature;” realized in a book that would bring that location to life to legions of devoted readers.
DAVID DONOVAN has been a National Park Service (seasonal) interpretive ranger for the past eight summer seasons at Acadia National Park and Cape Cod National Seashore. As a career biology teacher & certified arborist, his interest has centered on developing and presenting natural history programs. However, this past summer, Donovan collaborated with “The Henry Beston Society” in showcasing the author’s life & literary works, with a focus on his classic The Outermost House. David Donovan & his wife Mary Kay have been Charlestown residents since the late 1960’s. Both have served as presidents of the Friends of The Charlestown Branch Library.
The Friends of the Charlestown Branch of the Boston Public Library was formed in 1953, becoming the second Friends group to organize within the Boston Public Library system. The Friends schedule four to six evening programs a year, support the Reading is FUNdamental programs for children, and maintain the library’s landscaping. The mission of the Friends remains today what it was in 1953: to serve as an advocacy and support group for the needs of the Charlestown Branch Library, its staff and users. Visit www.friendsofcharlestownlib.org, www.facebook.com/FriendsCharlestownBranchLibrary, and www.bpl.org/branches/charlestown.htm.
Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome journalist and Harvard graduate SAM GRAHAM-FELSEN for a discussion of his debut novel, Green.
Book signing included!
Infectiously funny about the highs and lows of adolescence, and sharply honest in the face of injustice, SAM GRAHAM-FELSEN’s debut is a wildly original take on the struggle to rise in America.
Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome celebrated local writer MIRA T. LEE for a discussion of her debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful. She will be joined in conversation by journalist and New York magazine editor LISA MILLER.
Book Signing included!
Told in alternating points of view, Everything Here Is Beautiful is, at its heart, the story of a young woman’s quest to find fulfillment and a life unconstrained by her illness. But it’s also an unforgettable, gut-wrenching story of the sacrifices we make to truly love someone—and when loyalty to one’s self must prevail over all.
The Associates of the Boston Public Library cordially invite you to their Hundred-Year Retroactive Book Award, a competition that weighs the enduring literary merits of three bestsellers, all published in 1917. Contenders for the prize are T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, Mohandas Gandhi’s Third Class in Indian Railways, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. The books will be defended by poet and author Charles Coe, Michael Patrick MacDonald, memoirist, and suspense author Jacquelyn Mitchard respectively. Author Stona Fitch will moderate the irreverent debate, after which the audience will vote to determine the winner. A reception with the panelists will follow.