Did you love Olive Kitteridge? The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Elizabeth Strout will be appearing at a Ploughshares event on Thursday, April 15.
Bright Family Screening Room
The Paramount Center
159 Washington St, Boston MA
Q&A: 4:00 pm (Free and open to the public)
Reading: 6:00 pm (Free but RSVP to attend)
To RSVP, visit the Ploughshares website for the RSVP link.
Make sure you come see Jami Attenberg read with us on Sunday, February 28 with Steve Almond.
“Everyone’s a little damaged, honey.” No truer words are spoken in the small world of “The Melting Season,” a quirky soap opera that proves surprisingly endearing.
At 25, and naïve for her age, Catherine Madison is on the lam from a failed marriage as the novel opens, fleeing west from her snowbound hometown in Nebraska with a suitcase full of loot. Catherine has been rejected by her husband, the high school sweetheart she married too young, who is angry because she makes him feel like a sexual failure. In retribution she cashes in their savings, and when she reaches Las Vegas in a bit of a daze, she checks into a fancy hotel and commences spending the money at the urging of Valka, a flashy woman from California whom she meets in a casino.
Valka encourages her young friend to confront the truth about her toxic upbringing and her resultant sexual neuroses. We expect this tale, with its mismatched characters and farfetched plot elements, to crumble under its own slender weight, but oddly and heartwarmingly, Jami Attenberg makes it work.
Click here to see the rest of this review from The Boston Globe.
A glowing review on NPR’s Fresh Air of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who just read here last week! Stop in soon for our limited number of signed copies.
The new year began for me badly — with a thick head cold and one of those artfully written novels that start off with a lot of beguiling razmatazz and turn out to be about nothing. The novel in question, The Privileges, chronicles 20 years in the life of a golden couple who never lose their luster. Other critics have rightly enthused over the novel’s evocation of the world of the New York mega-rich, but I found myself growing crankier with every passing chapter in which very little of substance happened. By frustrating narrative expectations, The Privileges certainly makes readers conscious of the cliched plot lines we carry around in our heads, but my poor head was too congested for games. I wanted a dose of diverting plot, and interesting characters, and a point, along with my Nyquil.
That’s just when Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new novel appeared like an answer to a fevered prayer. Ever since her 1983 debut, The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein has marked out a singular space for herself in the world of contemporary fiction. A philosopher by training, (she holds a Ph.D. from Princeton), Goldstein writes about what happens when worlds collide: the realms of the ethereal vs. the everyday; of erudition vs. gut instinct; of ration vs. lust. Her novels tackle the Big Questions of Life and unapologetically reference philosophers like Spinoza and William James. Best of all, Goldstein gets away with this high-hatting because she’s so funny and she knows how to tell an engrossing story. When you have as much gleeful gravitas as Goldstein, you don’t have to find quirky ways to show off.
Click here to read the rest of the review and also to read an excerpt of the book.
John Freeman of NPR compiled a list of The Best Debut Fiction of 2009 and guess what? Two out of his five authors have read here at Newtonville Books!
The eight stories of Yoon’s debut form a kind of floating city in which water is the essential element of everyone’s lives. The sea brings travelers and part-time waiters to the South Korean island where the tales unfold. Water supplies fishermen and gift-shop owners their livelihood. It even becomes the metaphor for a widower’s emotional reverie. “In the heat of the remaining sun,” she thinks of her late husband, “she swore you could see a curtain of mist rising from the peak of his thin head.”
For Yoon’s cast, resilience is not just a stance but an aesthetic. Women grow old and do not marry. Young men are lost at sea. All the while, they soldier unfussily on. Thus, in the rare moments when the men and the women in this book yearn for more, their resolve feels all the more poignant. We know, instinctively, that Yoon’s lush sentences will end in heartache. (Read from Yoon’s story “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido,” about a young married couple who meet a stranger with an unexpected connection.)
There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers, the story of a dying man drifting back in time to his hardscrabble New England childhood, growing up the son of his clock-making father.
The mystery and machinery of these ticking timepieces appear and reappear throughout this beautiful book, which cycles backward and forward in time, capturing with awful grace the unwinding of a life. George Washington Crosby, the book’s dying hero, awakens out of delirium into the terror of his body’s revolt. His loved ones, sitting nearby, might as well be in another country: that of the living, the healthy. Harding has written a masterpiece around the truism that all of us, even surrounded by family, die alone. (Read about the hallucinations that fill George Washington Crosby’s final days.)
Click here to view the rest of the picks.
The Boston Globe interviews Ha Jin about his amazing new collection of short stories, A Good Fall. Ha Jin will read at Newtonville Books on Sunday, December 6th at 2pm with Richard Hoffman. Join us for a great event!
We recently hosted a Boston Noir night here at the bookstore. Come by for our autographed copies, a lovely gift for both natives and out-of-towners.
“Take a tour of Boston neighborhoods at their dark and murky best in “Boston Noir,’’ 11 short stories edited by Dennis Lehane. Start in the financial district with Lynne Heitman’s “Exit Interview.’’ A woman mutual fund manager in a bloodstained Tahari suit is on her Bluetooth with a Boston Police hostage negotiator. It’s five hours into a siege she set in motion when she shot her boss after the promotion she feels she more than earned was once again given to a far less accomplished man whom she’s now got tied to a chair. If you never thought of Boston’s Financial District as a dark place, read this.
Dana Cameron’s “Femme Sole’’ turns the clock back to turn-of-the-century Dock Square. There, another enterprising businesswoman (“a pretty young lass with no family and a thriving business on the waterfront’’) has married a man to insulate herself from predators, only to find she’s let the predator into her bed.
Also of note, John Dufresne’s broody “The Cross-Eyed Bear’’ takes a new slant on an aging Catholic priest’s darker impulses. Russ Aborn’s “Turn Speed’’ tells a high-paced, twisty tale of North Quincy robbers who cross the mob. And Lehane’s own contribution, the low-key, ironic “Animal Rescue,’’ is set in motion when a Dorchester bartender rescues a pit bull puppy from a garbage can.
Not the tourist’s Boston, the anthology delivers varied views of the area’s dark underbelly.”
Click here for the rest of this article by Hallie Ephron.
About COCKROACH:
With a surprising degree of humor, Hage’s second novel (after IMPAC Dublin-winner DeNiro’s Game) explores the peculiar politics of Montreal’s immigrant communities through the bleak obsessions of a misanthropic thief. After trying and failing to kill himself, an unnamed narrator who believes himself to be part cockroach is compelled to attend counseling sessions with an earnest and alluring therapist. As he unspools his personal history—from his apprenticeship with the thief Abou-Roro to the tragic miscalculation that led him to flee his home country—the narrator, reluctant to tell his story (we never learn where the narrator is from, and inconsistencies in his tale cast doubt upon his honesty), scuttles through the stories of others, recounting secrets both confidentially shared and invasively discovered. Unable to support himself on burglary alone, the narrator takes a job as a busboy, but runs into complications after discovering his lover’s connection to the restaurant’s most prominent customer. The novel’s gritty back-alley world gives rise to a host of glorious rogues, each swindling the others at every opportunity, and yet each is capable of great empathy under just the right circumstances.
About THE END:
The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for “the New Jersey.” Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel’s radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona’s calibrated precision and the story’s potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk’s highly anticipated new novel, The Museum of Innocence, comes out tomorrow!
And this is perfect timing, because Pamuk is delivering the keynote address at the Boston Book Festival, this Saturday, Oct. 24: http://www.bostonbookfest.org/index.php/bookfest/schedule_detail/schedule_orhan_pamuk_the_museum_of_innocence/
Paumk is also in town to do Harvard’s Norton Lecture Series: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~humcentr/conferences/pdf/Norton_Pamuk.pdf
Josh Weil, author of The New Valley, and a recent guest of Newtonville Books, is among the honorees of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35″ event. The event kicks off National Book Award week.
It also features Richard Hell as host and Jonathan Lethem as DJ? I’m there!!
http://www.nationalbook.org/5under35_2009.html
About GOING AWAY SHOES:
Jill McCorkle, a master of the short story whose work has been compared to that of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, is a writer whose characters insist on our immediate and total attention. Here, in her first collection in eight years, are eleven new stories bristling with her signature wit and weight. One way or the other, all of these stories are about women looking love in the face without flinching. Some of them are confronting the reality of domestic disruption; others are simply flirting with the possibilities—and dangers—of change. McCorkle’s characters make mistakes but aren’t interested in hiding behind them. They get divorced or quit their jobs or tell people to step aside, and they move on.
From the first story, about a modern-day Cinderella contemplating escape, to the last, “Me and Big Foot,” an idyll about finding the perfect prince, McCorkle’s collection is the genuine article, the work of a great storyteller who knows exactly how—and why—to pair longing and laughter.
About TETHERED:
Clara Marsh is an undertaker who doesn’t believe in God. She spends her solitary life among the dead, preparing their last baths and bidding them farewell with a bouquet from her own garden. Her carefully structured life shifts when she discovers a neglected little girl, Trecie, playing in the funeral parlor, desperate for a friend.
It changes even more when Detective Mike Sullivan starts questioning her again about a body she prepared three years ago, an unidentified girl found murdered in a nearby strip of woods. Unclaimed by family, the community christened her Precious Doe. When Clara and Mike learn Trecie may be involved with the same people who killed Precious Doe, Clara must choose between the stead-fast existence of loneliness and the perils of binding one’s life to another.
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