Authors AKHIL SHARMA and BILL ROORBACK present their short story collections
A double-header from two acclaimed short story authors! Brookline Booksmith welcomes AKHIL SHARMA with A Life of Adventure and Delight and BILL ROORBACH with The Girl of the Lake.
Respectively referred to as “hypnotic as…the pages of Dostoyevsky” (The Nation), In A Life of Adventure and Delight, SHARMA delivers eight masterful stories that focus on Indian protagonists at home and abroad and that plunge the reader into the unpredictable workings of the human heart.
ROORBACH is described as “a kinder, gentler John Irving” (The Washington Post). His characters in this collection are unforgettable: among them, an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past.
This event is free and open to the public.
ANN BEATTIE reads The Accomplished Guest: Stories
Harvard Book Store hosts award-winning author ANN BEATTIE—author of Chilly Scenes of Winter, Perfect Recall, and The State We’re In: Maine Stories—for a discussion of her latest book, The Accomplished Guest: Stories. This is a collection of short stories from authors such as O. Henry and Pushcart.
Surprising and revealing, set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, ANN BEATTIE’s astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.
The Accomplished Guest: Stories will be on sale at the event, 20% off.
No ticket purchase necessary for attendance.
Local writers CRYSTAL KING (Feast of Sorrow) and TIM WEED (Murder & Fly Fishing: Stories)
Harvard Book Store welcomes GrubStreet teachers CRYSTAL KING and TIM WEED for a discussion of their books, Feast of Sorrow: A Novel of Ancient Rome and A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing: Stories.
KING’s novel Feast of Sorrow is set amongst the scandal, wealth, and upstairs-downstairs politics of a Roman family, Crystal King’s seminal debut features the man who inspired the world’s oldest cookbook and the ambition that led to his destruction.
WEED’s A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing begins on a high mountain lake in the Colorado Rockies. This is the point of departure for these stories of dark adventure, in which vividly drawn landscapes provide an immersive setting for narratives about fishing guides, amateur sportsmen, teenage misfits, scientists, mountaineers, and expatriates embark on disquieting journeys of self-discovery in far-flung places: the hazardous tidal waters of Nantucket, the granite quarries and ski slopes of New Hampshire, Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, the ancient squares and alleyways of Rome and Granada, the summit of an Andean volcano, and the tension-filled streets of eastern Cuba.
Feast of Sorrow and A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing will be on sale at the event, 20% off.
This event is not ticketed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
