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.
