A Night of Chilling Stories with GARETH HINDS and BEN LOORY

Attention all Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fans: this is an event you’d regret missing.

Brookline Booksmith welcomes artist-adapter GARETH HINDS and author BEN LOORY for a night of their chilling tales.  HINDS will be presenting his graphic novel Poe: Stories and Poems, a Graphic Novel Adaptation, and BEN LOORY will be discussing his story collection Tales of Falling and Flying.  Both HINDS and LOORY have received high praise for their books from critics and from authors such as Ray Bradbury and Ransom Riggs.

Poe: Stories and Poems is a thrilling adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s best-known works such as “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Raven”.

LOORY returns with a second collection of timeless tales, Tales of Falling and Flying, inviting us to enter his worlds of whimsical fantasy, deep empathy, and playful humor in the signature voice that drew readers to his highly praised first collection.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Ways Women Age by Professor ABIGAIL BROOKS

Porter Square Books is pleased to host ABIGAIL BROOKS, director of the Women’s Studies Program and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Providence College, with her book exploring the identity, body image, beauty standards, and expectations of femininity.

Set against the backdrop of commercialized medicine in the United States, ABIGAIL BROOKS investigates the anti-aging craze from the perspective of women themselves, examining the rapidly changing cultural attitudes, pressures, and expectations of female aging. Drawn from in-depth interviews with women in the United States who choose, and refuse, to have cosmetic anti-aging procedures, The Ways Women Age provides a fresh understanding of how today’s women feel about aging.

This event is free and open to the public.

 

ORHAN PAMUK with MARIA TARTAR discuss “The Red-Haired Woman”

Harvard Book Store welcomes Nobel Prize–winning novelist ORHAN PAMUK and Harvard professor of folklore and mythology  MARIA TATAR for a discussion Pamuk’s latest novel, The Red-Haired Woman—a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them.

On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before.  But in the nearby town, where they buy provisions and take their evening break, the boy will find an irresistible diversion.  The Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a travelling theatre company, catches his eye and seems as fascinated by him as he is by her. The young man’s wildest dream will be realized, but, when in his distraction a horrible accident befalls the well digger, the boy will flee, returning to Istanbul. Only years later will he discover whether he was in fact responsible for his master’s death and who the redheaded enchantress was.

This event is ticketed.  You may purchase tickets here.  The ticket includes a copy of The Red-Haired Woman.

The Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things, a conversation with KIM ADRIAN and MATTHEW BATTLES

Brookline Booksmith hosts authors KIM ADRIAN and MATTHEW BATTLES who will read two entries from Object Lessons – a nonfiction series published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury press about the hidden lives of ordinary things.  From sardines to silence, juniper berries to jumper cables, now it is Sock and Tree!

Sock, by ADRIAN, tells the ‘history’ of the sock.  Socks are such an everyday part of our lives, we tend to overlook its importance— unless there’s a problem.  Sometimes functional, sometimes fashionable, sometimes government issued, and often silly looking, the humble sock can be said to complete the human foot.

Tree, by BATTLES, explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object’s entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present.  Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways. In this book, BATTLES follows the tree’s branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow.

This event is free and open to the public.  You may purchase copies of Tree and Sock at Brookline Booksmith.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Ghost of the Innocent Man, a true story by BENJAMIN RACHLIN

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome local author BENJAMIN RACHLIN for a discussion of his debut book, Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption.

During the last two decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform.

This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.

This book will be for sale at the event for 20% off.  There will also be a signing after the event.

No tickets required for entry.

Award-winning poet FRANK BIDART reads Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

Harvard Book Store welcomes Wellesley College professor and award-winning poet FRANK BIDART—author of Desire, Star Dust, Watching the Spring Festival, and Metaphysical Dog—for a reading from his latest poetry collection, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.

Gathered together, the poems of FRANK BIDART perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us.

This book will be for sale at the event for 20% off.  There will also be a signing after the event.

No tickets required for entry.

Award-winning author PAUL YOON at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author PAUL YOON—Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University and author of Once the Shore and Snow Hunters—for a reading from his latest book, The Mountain: Stories.

In The Mountain, Paul Yoon displays his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories, taking place across several continents and time periods and populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds (from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east) they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal.

This book will be for sale at the event for 20% off.  There will also be a signing after the event.

No tickets required for entry.

Author/Philosopher/Biker ALAN FISHBONE reads from Organ Grinder

Porter Square Books welcomes author ALAN FISHBONE as he reads from Organ Grinder, essays about mortality and freedom at the intersection of ancient philosophy and biker culture.

ALAN FISHBONE is the motorcycle-riding classical scholar who offers wisdom gathered from the poetry of antiquity, and from near-death experiences on the open road in his work Organ Grinder: A Classical Education Gone Astray.

This event is not ticketed.

 

 

KATHERINE VAZ and JOAN WICKERSHAM at Porter Square Books

Porter Square Books hosts authors KATHERINE VAZ and JOAN WICKERSHAM in conversation about VAZ’s collection of short stories: The Love Life of an Assistant Animator and Other Stories.

In VAZ’s new collection of short fiction, beauty is continually and painfully present in all places–in a Thanksgiving dinner assembled by a widowed DMV worker being stalked by an irate customer; in a middle-aged Hollywood actress who captivates a young studio animator for decades; in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy; and in a daughter’s memories of the ethereal, melting ice sculptures made by a woman embroiled in an affair with a wealthy lawyer.  Amid their complex, turbulent relationships in a chronic state of crisis, Vaz’s wise and restless protagonists carry within them the seeds of a vanished, gracious world of urbane dinner parties and passionate affairs–a humane and cultured civilization whose flawed inhabitants are redeemed by their ability to blend the aesthetic imperative with the power to love.

This event is not ticketed.

The Love Life of an Assistant Animator is currently being sold at Porter Square Books.

If you cannot attend the event, you can still get a signed copy by purchasing the book online and mentioning in the comments section at checkout that you want it signed (or personalized).  This must be completed at least 24 prior to the event.

Poet EZRA DAN FELDMAN presents Habitat of Stones

Porter Square Books welcomes poet EZRA DAN FELDMAN as he reads from his poetry collection Habitat of Stones.

FELDMAN’s poetry collection is tied together by a certain “arrogant man.”  This recurrent theme throughout the collection also bumps up against notions of the body: its finitude, its mortality and the struggles and regret of intimate relationships.

“Exposing patriarchal and capitalistic practices that often cripple society, Ezra Dan Feldman’s Habitat of Stones reveals the symptoms of living in a post-industrial and illusional, high-tech world: ‘He’s taken the world for a machine, a baby for a doll, a gun for a candy bar, which he offered to everyone…” –Mark Irwin

This event is not ticketed.