Short story author PATRICK DACEY reads from his first novel The Outer Cape
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome PATRICK DACEY, author of the short story collection We’ve Already Gone This Far, for a discussion of his first novel, The Outer Cape.
Robert and Irene Kelly were a golden couple of the late ‘70s—she an artist, he a businessman, each possessed by dynamism and vibrancy. But with two young boys to care for, Irene finds herself confined by the very things she’d dreamed of having. Robert, pressured by Irene’s demands and haunted by the possibility of failure, risks the family business to pursue a fail-safe real estate opportunity.
This event is co-sponsored with Mass Humanities.
The Outer Cape is available for purchase at the event for 20% off.
No ticket purchase necessary for attendance.
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.
Author ALLEGRA GOODMAN reads The Chalk Artist
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.
Gork, the Teenage Dragon by GABE HUDSON
Harvard Book Store welcomes Sue Kaufman Prize–winning author GABE HUDSON, author of Dear Mr. President, for a discussion of his latest novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon. HUDSON’s novel is wacky, exuberant, and a heartfelt debut: the unholy child of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter, and Sixteen Candles— but, this time, with dragons.
Gork isn’t like the other dragons at WarWings Military Academy. He has a gigantic heart, two-inch horns, and an occasional problem with fainting. His nickname is ‘Weak Sauce’ and his Will to Power ranking is Snacklicious—the lowest in his class. But he is determined not to let any of this hold him back as he embarks on the most important mission of his life: tonight, on the eve of his high school graduation, he must ask a female dragon to be his queen. If she says yes, they’ll go off to conquer a foreign planet together. If she says no, Gork becomes a slave.
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.
JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS on Hemingway and Dos Passos During WW1
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities are joined by bestselling biographer JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS—author of the National Book Prize–winning Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power—for a discussion of his latest book, The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War.
After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America’s greatest novels, giving voice to a “lost generation” shaken by war.
Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps.
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 attendance.
Award-winning novelist ANDREW SEAN GREER reads “Less” about love at the age of fifty
Join Harvard Book Store as they welcome award-winning novelist ANDREW SEAN GREER for a discussion of his latest work, Less.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
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.
ALLEGRA GOODMAN Talks “The Chalk Artist” at Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store hosts ALLEGRA GOODMAN for a discussion of her latest novel, The Chalk Artist.
A tender affair and the redemptive power of art are at the core of The Chalk Artist, from National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman, who The Wall Street Journal calls “a romantic realist who dazzles with wit [and] compassion.”
Allegra Goodman’s novels include The Cookbook Collector and Intuition. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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 attendance.
New Voices in Fiction: IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE in conversation with ANDREW KRIVAK
Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome award-winning writer IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE and The Signal Flame author ANDREW KRIVÁK for a discussion of BASSINGTHWAIGHTE’s debut novel, Live from Cairo.
From a hugely talented, award-winning young author, a brilliant, lively debut novel about an impulsive American attorney, a methodical Egyptian translator, and a disillusioned Iraqi-American resettlement officer trying to protect a refugee who finds herself trapped in Cairo during the turbulent aftermath of the January 25 revolution.
This book will be for sale at the event for 20% off. There will also be a signing after the event.
This event is part of Harvard and GrubStreet’s New Voices in Fiction event series.
No tickets required for attendance.
HILDA WERSCHKUL’s Reflections on Masterpieces
Harvard Book Store hosts School of Visual Arts professor HILDA WERSCHKUL for a discussion of her book, Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpieces.
Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpieces is a book that explores themes in the history of art through the insights of students. The book engages themes such as the origins of creativity in prehistoric art, the meaning and significance of the classical paradigm in art history since antiquity, the actual application of Renaissance art theory to an examination of famous masterpieces, an exploration of a new area of philosophical inquiry that reexamines the 18th century as both a period of rationalism and anti-rationalism (rather than the “Age of Reason”), and the tradition of individual subjectivity and expression in modern art reaching back to van Gogh.
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 attendance.