Thinking of applying to the Novel Generator? GrubStreet will host an informal Q&A session with instructor ANNIE HARNETT on Wednesday, June 27th, 6:30-7:30 p.m., here at GrubStreet HQ, to answer any questions you have about the Generator, including the workload, the application process, what the program does and doesn’t entail, the schedule, the philosophy behind our approach, and anything else you have on your mind. No need to register, just show up!
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.
Porter Square Books is pleased to host local novelist, and best-selling author of Everything I Never Told You, CELESTE NG for a reading of her newest novel, Little Fires Everywhere.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead.
When old family friends of the strict Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town–and puts single-mother Mia Warren and Elena Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
This event is free and open to the public.
Join Porter Square Books for a night with Grubstreet’s MICHELLE HOOVER (Bottomland), award-winning memoirist PATRICIA HORVATH (All the Difference), and English poet/journalist SAM WITT (Everlasting Quail).
At once intimate and sweeping, 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. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.
HORVATH’s transformation from a visibly disabled young woman to someone who, abruptly, “passes” for able-bodied, reveals cultural and personal tensions surrounding disability and creates an arc that connects imprisonment to freedom. What transpires is both suffocating and liberating. HORVATH’s confinement keeps her from being seen, but also cocoons a deeply personal sense of self-hood and relationship.
In Everlasting Quail, WITT combines diverse conventions such as the confession and the sexual love poem, with structures and language to invent a psycho-political landscape in which the physical world is transformed and the energy of human relationships celebrated. What holds these poems together is not the act of confession, description, or memory. Rather, they draw their vocabulary from a perpetually transformative relationship with the physical world, and with human beings, which, when merged, approaches transfiguration.
This event is free and open to the public.
Join Trident Booksellers for a night of conversation between authors M.T. ANDERSON and JULIA GLASS.
National Book Award winner M.T. ANDERSON returns to future Earth with Landscape with Invisible Hand, a sharply wrought satire of art and truth in the midst of colonization. When the vuvv first landed, it came as a surprise to aspiring artist Adam and the rest of planet Earth— but not necessarily an unwelcome one. Can it really be called an invasion when the vuvv generously offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable? As it turns out, yes.
In A House Among Trees, GLASS’s fifth book since her acclaimed novel Three Junes won the National Book Award, she gives us the story of an unusual bond between a world-famous writer and his assistant—a richly plotted novel of friendship and love, artistic ambition, the perils of celebrity, and the power of an unexpected legacy.
This event is free and open to the public.
Trident Booksellers hosts longtime screenwriter, photographer, director, actor, and free-lance writer/author FRED DEVECCA for a reading of his novel The Nutting Girl.
Middle-aged Frank Raven used to be a lot of things–a blind monk, a cop, a private detective, and a hard drinker. Now he doesn’t do much except run a funky old movie theater in bucolic Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, dance and sing with the local troupe of Morris Dancers, and record bird songs on his phone. A lanky young wunderkind director, Nick Mooney, brings his Hollywood film crew to town and hires the “retired” Raven to protect his star: the wild, unpredictable, gorgeous, and prodigiously talented twenty-one-year-old Juliana Velvet Norcross, aka VelCro. Reluctant at first, Raven takes on the job and slowly sees that there is more to VelCro than the troubled rebel she appears to be. On the eve of filming, storms ravage the small village, and the river that runs through the center of town floods its banks. The storm passes, VelCro recovers from illness that Raven’s girlfriend’s daughter, Sarah, helped nurse, and filming begins. But during the first shot, she is swept away into the river, leaving no trace.
This event is free and open to the public.
Trident Booksellers is pleased to welcome local debut author DANIEL FORD for a reading and signing of his first novel, Sid Sanford Lives. FORD also co-hosts a literary podcast known as Writer’s Bone.
Riffing on noir and told in a series of vignettes, Sid Sanford Lives! douses humanistic themes—love, loss, and family—in bourbon, shoves them in the barrel of a gun, and shoots. This emotionally-charged debut is sure to keep readers up late into the night to find out who is left standing.
Sid Sanford always follows a path, just not his own. From backyard Wiffle ball games to New York City skyscrapers, Sid finds triumph and pain in equal measure during his uncertain, and at times violent, growth into adulthood.
This event is free and open to the public.
Trident Booksellers host author HEIDI CHIAVAROLI as she takes her audience back in time to discover what really happened the night of the Boston Massacre. She will read passages from her debut novel, Freedom’s Ring, answer questions, and sign books.
From the Boston Marathon bombing to the American Revolution and the Boston Massacre, past and present intertwine to create an unexpected destiny. Although two years have passed since the Boston Marathon bombing, Annie David continues to be haunted by the call to be Boston Strong. She knows the truth: she is far from strong. She cannot seem to release two burdens left to her that tragic day—guilt over a crippled niece, and an old ring that evokes a hazy hero’s face. But when she finds a business card with the same emblem as the ring, she’s finally able to discover her hero…and the story of the woman behind the ring.
This event is free and open to the public.
Freedom’s Ring is currently being sold at Trident Booksellers. You can purchase a copy in-store or online here.
Brookline Booksmith is pleased to welcome BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ, author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, for a reading and discussion of his latest young adult novel: The Inexplicable Logic of My Life.
Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it’s senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realizing he no longer knows himself. If Sal’s not who he thought he was, who is he?
This event is free and open to the public.
Attention crime-novel enthusiasts! A new series is underway, and you can meet the author, STEPHANIE GAYLE, at Porter Square Books for a reading of the second novel in her crime series: Idyll Fears.
It’s two weeks before Christmas 1997, and Chief Thomas Lynch faces a crisis when Cody Forrand, a six-year-old with a life-threatening medical condition, goes missing during a blizzard. The confusing case shines a national spotlight on the small, sleepy town of Idyll, Connecticut, where small-time crime is already on the rise and the police seem to be making mistakes left and right. Further complicating matters, Lynch, still new to town, finds himself the target of prank calls and hate speech that he worries is the work of a colleague, someone struggling to accept working with a gay chief of police.
This event is free and open to the public.