Brookline Booksmith presents CLEA SIMON, as she discusses her novel, World Enough, with BRETT MILANO.
This event is free and open to the public!
The camaraderie of Boston’s club scene hides something darker. A night out to hear some music, a band she used to love; but when onetime rock critic Tara Winton accepts an assignment from her former editor, she must revisit not only the old scene but everything she holds dear.
Harvard Book Store welcomes author, Vanity Fair editor, and former The Atlantic editor CULLEN MURPHY for a discussion of his latest book, Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe. He will be joined in conversation by author and Boston Globe columnist ALEX BEAM. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Cartoon County
For a period of about fifty years, right in the middle of the American Century, many of the nation’s top comic-strip cartoonists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators lived within a stone’s throw of one another in the southwestern corner of Connecticut―a bit of Bohemia in the middle of those men in their gray flannel suits.
CULLEN MURPHY’s father, John Cullen Murphy, drew the wildly popular comic strips Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt and was at the heart of this artistic milieu. Comic strips and gag cartoons read by hundreds of millions were created in this tight-knit group―Superman, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith, Rip Kirby, Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Nancy, Sam & Silo, Amy, The Wizard of Id, The Heart of Juliet Jones, Family Circus, Joe Palooka, and The Lockhorns, among others. Cartoonists and their art were a pop-cultural force in a way that few today remember. Anarchic and deeply creative, the cartoonists were independent spirits whose artistic talents had mainly been forged during service in World War II.
Illustrated with never-before-seen photographs, cartoons, and drawings, Cartoon County brings the postwar American era alive, told through the relationship of a son to his father, an extraordinarily talented and generous man who had been trained by Norman Rockwell. Cartoon County gives us a glimpse into a very special community―and of an America that used to be.
Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning writer ANNE FADIMAN—author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down—for a discussion of her latest book, The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir.
This event is free and open to the public.
About The Wine Lover’s Daughter
In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines―with all her characteristic wit and feeling―her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.
An appreciation of wine―along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature―was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Lover’s Daughter traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.
Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadiman’s father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Lover’s Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.
Brookline Booksmith is proud to present CLAIRE MESSUD as she discusses her latest novel: The Burning Girl.
A bracing, hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children.
This event is free and open to the public!
Brookline Booksmith is proud to present CELESTE NG reading from her latest: Little Fires Everywhere.
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family, and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
This event is free and open to the public!
MassMouth continues its 2017-2018 Story Slam Season at Trident Booksellers & Cafe.
Doors open at 6pm. Slam begins at 7pm.
All slams, except semi-finals: $10 online or at the door.
Join Trident Booksellers & Cafe, in conjunction with Mass Poetry, for a bi-monthly reading series that promotes and bolsters Massachusetts poets under 35 while giving them a venue to share their work and connect with other poets under 35.
This event is free.
Yes, They sell you books – but did you know they can also do other stuff? Come and be dazzled by the hidden gifts of your friendly neighborhood booksellers at Brookline Booksmith!
This event is free and open to the public.
Porter Square Books is pleased to welcome ANNE EDELSTEIN, author of Lifesaving for Beginners, in conversation with JOANNA RAKOFF.
About Lifesaving for Beginners
When ANNE EDELSTEIN was forty-two, her mother, a capable swimmer in good health, drowned while snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. Caring for two small children of her own, Anne suddenly found herself grieving not only for her emotionally distant mother but also for her beloved younger brother Danny, who had killed himself violently over a decade before. She finds herself wrestling not only with the past and her family’s legacy of mental illness, but also with the emotional well-being of her children. Part memoir and part meditation on joy and grief, the book will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to come to terms with their parents, their siblings, their children, and their place in the world.
ANNE EDELSTEIN is a literary agent in New York City, where she lives with her family. Lifesaving for Beginners is her first book.
JOANNA RAKOFF is the author of the bestselling memoir My Salinger Year, which has been published in twelve countries and seven languages, and is currently being adapted for film.
This event is free and open to the public.
Ranging from love song to train song to jump rope rhyme, the poems in REBECCA MORGAN FRANK’S Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country are voiced by perpetual outsiders searching for a sense of place from small Southern towns to the tunnels and tracks of the urban North. Personal and regional histories blur through the intimate paths of tornadoes, guns, suburban sprawl, and the ongoing quest to escape where we come from.
REBECCA MORGAN FRANK is the author of The Spokes of Venus and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is cofounder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious.
This event is free and open to the public.