Ploughshares is hosting an event at Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the launch of their summer issue, guest-edited by JILL MCCORKLE. She’ll be in conversation with MARGOT LIVESEY, their former fiction editor and current faculty member at Iowa.
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.
Harvard Book Store welcomes bestselling and award-winning author JAMES MCBRIDE for a discussion of his latest book, Five-Carat Soul, his first work of fiction since the National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird.
This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, this event includes a book signing.
About Five-Carat Soul
The stories in Five-Carat Soul—none of them ever published before—spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They’re funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic—all told with MCBRIDE’s unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail. MCBRIDE explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.
As MCBRIDE did in his National Book award-winning The Good Lord Bird and his bestselling The Color of Water, he writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend. The result is a surprising, perceptive, and evocative collection of stories that is also a moving exploration of our human condition.
Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer ALEXIS OKEOWO for a discussion of her new book, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa.
In the tradition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a masterful, humane work of literary journalism by New Yorker staff writer ALEXIS OKEOWO—a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent’s wave of fundamentalism.
In A Moonless, Starless Sky, OKEOWO weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony’s LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women’s basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America’s most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary—lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.
This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, This event includes a book signing.
Harvard Book Store welcomes writer, poet, and teacher KL PEREIRA and writer, critic, and translator MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR for a discussion of their books, A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality and Landslide: True Stories.
This event is free; no tickets are required. Also, This event includes a book signing.
About A Dream Between Two Rivers
Both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange in the tradition of Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection, KL PEREIRA weaves elements of fairy tale, folklore, and myth into the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Her lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are most vulnerable, who live on edges between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality, PEREIRA explores rebirth amidst darkness.
About Landslide
MINNA ZALLMAN PROCTOR’s Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother―who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years later―and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of PROCTOR’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of PROCTOR’s own life―shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother.
PROCTOR has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.
Newtonville Books presents JOYCE MAYNARD and ROLAND MERULLO on October 11, 2017! This event is free to attend.
In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, beloved author and journalist JOYCE MAYNARD met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn’t mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of.
Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married, JOYCE resolved that no one could alter her course of determined independence. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the nineteen months that followed, as they battled his illness together, she discovered for the first time what it really meant to be a couple–to be a true partner and to have one.
This is their story. Charting the course through their whirlwind romance, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and JOYCE’s return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.
JOYCE MAYNARD is the author of sixteen books including the novels To Die For and Labor Day (both adapted for film) and the bestselling memoir At Home in the World. Her essays and columns have appeared in dozens of publications and numerous collections. She is a frequent performer with The Moth, a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and founder of the Lake Atitlan Writers’ Workshop. She is the mother of three grown children, and makes her home in Lafayette, California.
ROLAND MERULLO is a bestselling author, most recently of The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama.
Porter Square Books is pleased to host UK poet/immigration caseworker, CAROLINE SMITH for a discussion of her book of poems, The Immigration Handbook.
Inspired by her years as an immigration caseworker to one of the most diverse inner-city areas in the UK, Caroline Smith has written a collection of poems, The Immigration Handbook, that details the many troubling and moving incidents in the lives of those she tries to help. This is a book that reaches out of the headlines into our hearts.
This event is free and open to the public.
Brookline Booksmith hosts novelist KARL GEARY for his first-time novel, Montpelier Parade.
The house is on Montpelier Parade: just across town, but it might as well be a different world. Working on the garden with his father one Saturday in Dublin, Sonny is full of curiosity. Then the back door eases open and she comes down the path towards him. Vera.
Chance meetings become shy arrangements, and soon Sonny is in love for the first time. Casting off his lonely life of dreams and quiet violence for this new, intoxicating encounter, he longs to know Vera, even to save her. But what is it that Vera isn’t telling him?
This event is free and open to the public.
Many of the political issues we struggle with today have their roots in the US Constitution.
Husband-and-wife team CYNTHIA and SANFORD LEVINSON join Porter Square Books with their nonfiction book Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws That Affect Us Today.
They take readers back to the creation of this historic document and discuss how contemporary problems were first introduced—then they offer possible solutions. Think Electoral College, gerrymandering, even the Senate. Many of us take these features in our system for granted. But they came about through haggling in an overheated room in 1787, and we’re still experiencing the ramifications.
This event is free and open to the public.
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.