Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome debut author ANGELICA BAKER and Boston College’s STUART NADLER—acclaimed author of Wise Men, The Book of Life, and The Inseparables—for a discussion of BAKER’s new novel, Our Little Racket, the story of five women whose lives are dramatically changed by the downfall of a financial titan.
This event is not ticketed.
Brookline Booksmith hosts KIT SCHLUTER and EMMA RAMADAN as they discuss their translated works: SCHLUTER’s The King in the Golden Mask and RAMADAN’s Not One Day.
Two translators discuss two European masters, available in English for the first time. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, Marcel Schwob’s stories (The King in the Golden Mask) are lost horror classics from the age of Poe. French Oulipo writer, Anne Garréta’s novel (Not One Day) is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, that explores the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire.
This event is co-sponsored by Greying Ghost Press.
Brookline Booksmith hosts MATTHEW KLAM, author of story collection Sam the Cat: and Other Stories, with the release of his first novel Who is Rich? He is joined by bestselling author CURTIS SITTENFELD (Prep).
Who is Rich? A provocative and hilarious satire of love, sex, money, and politics in our new gilded age.
This event is not ticketed.
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.
Join Papercuts for a double-author event with MARGOT LIVESEY, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury and The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, and LIZ MOORE, author of The Unseen World.
In Mercury, Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and their world changes.
Named one of the Best Books of 2016 by Publishers Weekly, MOORE’s The Unseen World is the moving story of a daughter’s quest to discover the truth about her beloved father’s hidden past.
This event is ticketed; you can purchase tickets here.
Join local authors and Grubstreet instructors KELLY FORD and MICHELLE HOOVER at Papercuts JP for an evening of reading and discussion.
From a compelling new voice in LGBTQ and Southern fiction, FORD’s Cottonmouths is a gripping tale of crime and desire amid small-town America’s meth epidemic.
At once intimate and sweeping, HOOVER’s Bottomland follows the Hess family in the years after World War I, as they attempt to rid themselves of the Anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name.
This event is ticketed; you can purchase tickets here.
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.
Harvard Book Store welcomes Whiting Writer’s Award–winning author ALLEGRA GOODMAN, author of The Cookbook Collector and Intuition, for a reading from her latest novel, The Chalk Artist.
Collin James is young, creative, and unhappy. A college dropout, he waits tables and spends his free time beautifying the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his medium of choice: chalk. Collin’s art captivates passersby with its vibrant colors and intricate lines—until the moment he wipes it all away. Nothing in Collin’s life is meant to last. Then he meets Nina…
The Chalk Artist will be on sale at the event, 20% off.
This event is not ticketed.
Porter Square Books hosts author PHILIP G. SMUCKER, a fifth-great grandnephew of George Washington, with his nonfiction book Riding with George.
SMUCKER uses his background as a war correspondent, sports reporter, and amateur equestrian to weave an insightful tale based upon his own travels in the footsteps of Washington as a surveyor, sportsman, and field commander. Riding with George is “boots-in-stirrups” storytelling that unspools Washington’s rise to fame in a never-before-told tale. It shows how a young Virginian’s athleticism and Old World chivalry propelled him to become a model of right action and good manners for a fledgling nation.
This event is not ticketed.
Porter Square Books welcomes RANDY ROSS— a Boston-area writer, performer, and web consultant. His one-man show, “The Chronic Single’s Handbook,” has been featured at fringe theater festivals in the United States, Canada, and Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2007, he took a trip around the world and learned to say in three languages: “Speak English?” “Got Pepto-Bismol?” and “Where is the evacuation helicopter?” God Bless Cambodia is his first novel.
Randall Burns is forty-eight, out of a job, and tired of wasting his time pounding away on Match.com as if it were a game of Whac-A-Mole. He is no traveler: He hates public toilets, loud noises, weird smells, and people who sweat. Eventually, the call of the thrush, his fears of dying alone, and a snarky e-mail from ex-girlfriend Ricki, compel him to take the trip.
This event is not ticketed.