Events

Join Porter Square Books for an evening with contributors to Sisters: An Anthology.

"The stories, poems, and memoirs in the new anthology Sisters call forth sweetness and light, fury and a fierce devotion"

The Boston Globe

"The book makes clear that sisters don’t outgrow their bond…Once a sister, always one."

People Magazine

Readers will include:

Julia Glass is the author of three novels: the National Book
Award-winning Three Junes, The Whole World
Over, and I See You Everywhere.
She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including
the Tobias Wolff Award.

Jan Freeman
is the director and founder of Paris Press. She is the author of
three books of poetry, Simon Says
(nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Hyena, Autumn Sequence, and a new manuscript,
Blue Structure. She lives in Ashfield, MA.

Barbara Greenberg is a poet and fiction writer. She is the author of four
books, including What Nell Knows
and Late Life Happiness. She is
affiliated with the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

Marthya Paffrath is a singer, writer, and composer. She is the principal drummer and
percussionist for LIBANA, the acclaimed world music ensemble, and directs the
International Music and Dance Program at the Cambridge Friends School.

"An eye-opening
look into the little-known world of gene banks and crop breeding, and a
poignant reminder that the real guardians of our food security are not
armies or transnational corporations, but a handful of tireless
scientists who have labored for decades to keep us one step ahead of
famine."

Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis

"Susan
Dworkin has found a delightful way to tell the alarming story of the
fragility of the global wheat crop. She leads us expertly and
enthusiastically into Bent Skovmand's strange, infrequently penetrated
domain of plant breeding and international seed banks, a world in which
unsung scientists search and save exotic plant germplasm to protect the
staffs of life against pests, plagues, and corporate raiders."

Peter Pringle, author of Food Inc.

Susan Dworkin has written several biographies, including The Nazi
Officer's Wife (with Edith Hahn Beer), and her articles have appeared
in Ms., Cosmopolitan, and numerous magazines. Her fascination with
agriculture dates from early stints at the United States Department of
Agriculture and as a journalist covering aid programs in the Middle
East.

Head of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district
attorney's office in Manhattan for decades, Linda Fairstein is
America's most visible legal expert on sexual assault and domestic
violence-which is why she writes some of the most compelling crime
thrillers of our time and why her Alexandra Cooper series has been
topping bestseller list for more than a decade. Fans turn to Fairstein
for ripped-from-the-headline crimes, cutting-edge investigations, and
vindication for victims. Linda Fairstein brings readers inside a world
of which they can't get enough, but one they hope to never see in real
life.

And for her twelfth novel, Fairstein takes Alexandra Cooper inside a world she'd rather not see.

Linda Fairstein, one of America's foremost legal expert on crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, ran the Sex
Crimes Unit of the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan for more
than two decades. Her first novel, Final Jeopardy, which introduced the
character of Alexandra Cooper, was published in 1996 to critical and
commercial acclaim. Her nonfiction book, Sexual Violence, was a New
York Times Notable Book in 1994. She is the author of numerous other
mystery novels including Entombed, Death Dance, Killer Heat, and Lethal
Legacy.

See the development and evolution of Harvard
over the last century in this pictorial recollection of key events,
landmark structure, generous benefactors, and the dedicated presidents
who created the legacy. Nearly 200 photographs reproduced in vivid
black-and-white, written and captioned by Dana Bonstrom, revisit the
storied past of one of the world's premier universities.

A
natural companion to the college annual of every alum, Historic Photos
of Harvard University belongs in the library of every graduate and all
those devoted to America's favorite ivy-league school.

Dana Bonstrom, Harvard College Class of 1977, is a writer, book
designer, and photographer. His recent works include: editor and
co-translator of C.P. Cavafy, The Canon: The Original One Hundred and
Fifty Four Poems; co-author of Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures: The
Japanese Ninja Surprise; and librettist of Pinocchio's Adventures in
Funland, The Piper's Tale, and Gwendolyn Gets Her Wish.

"An engaging, informative study tracking the small beginnings of a
literary giant and his magnum opus...Stavans enlightens us, not just
about one literary figure, but about the culture and history of a whole
hemisphere... Stavans is a magical writer himself."

Julia Alvarez author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

"In his compelling narrative of Garcia Marquez before the phenomenon of One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Ilan Stavans takes us on a fascinating guided tour of the great man's
world from childhood to maturity, along the way, collecting the objects
and the subjects, the beetles and the battles, all that would
eventually coalesce into the vision of plenitude contained in one of
the most influential novels in modern literary history."

Judith Oriz Cofer author of The Latin Deli

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American
and Latino Culture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at
Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic's Journey. He has edited the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and, most recently, the anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing.
He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile's Presidential Medal, and the Jewish Book
Award. Stavans's work, translated into a dozen languages, has been
adapted to the stage and screen, including the movie My Mexican Shivah. He also hosted the syndicated PBS television show Conversations with Ilan Stavans.

The Porter Square Books Book Club will be discussing A Lost Lady. Visit the Book Club page for more information.

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Like to knit, quilt, felt, bead, crochet, or
practice some other handicraft. Keep the cold off and  join us in our free heat for Knit
One, Read Too, On the second Sunday of each month from 1 to 3 p.m. we host an in-store handwork session for
knitters, quilters, crocheters, and other handwork enthusiasts.

The Porter Square Books Book Club will be discussing A Lost Lady. Visit the Book Club page for more information.

December 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian
through Istanbul’s streets, unaware of the men following her. The
police discover a shipload of guns and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is
blown up. Suspicion falls on a socialist commune Arti’s friends
organized in the eastern mountains. Investigating, Special Prosecutor
Kamil Pasha encounters a ruthless adversary, Vahid, the head of a
special branch of the secret police. Vahid has convinced the Sultan
that the commune is leading an Armenian secessionist movement and
should be destroyed, along with surrounding villages. Kamil must stop
the massacre, but finds himself on the wrong side of the law, framed
for murder and accused of treason. His family and the woman he loves
are threatened. Exploring the dark obsessions of the most powerful and
dangerous men of the dying Ottoman Empire, The Winter Thief also
reflects the mad idealism of these turbulent times.

Jenny White is the author of The Sultan’s Seal (a finalist for the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award), The Abyssinian Proof and  The Winter Thief. She is a professor of anthropology at Boston University, specializing in Turkey.

"Seeing the
name...Peter Hedges...means you're in for a unique blend of humor and
heartbreak with the bruising and healing powers of family right at the
core."

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"The most successful novel yet from Hedges."

Kirkus Reviews

Peter Hedges is a novelist, playwright, and filmmaker.  He wrote both the novel and the screenplay What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and is the writer-director of Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life.  He co-wrote the screenplay for About a Boy and was nominated for an Academy Award.  He lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn.

"These memoir
pieces collectively read like a novel, and the reader will be
hard-pressed to 'eat just one.' Leblang does an excellent job of
sharing with us his falls, his rises, and his subsequent falls
as he seeks to eke out a place in this thing called life. What emerges
is a highly satisfying portrait of a boy becoming a man becoming an
adult , navigating the outrageous slings and arrows life tosses his
way--it is, in short, the story of us all, told with astonishing
intimacy."

J. G. Hayes, author of This Thing Called Boston

"Milkweed
is one of the rare stories about the Vietnam War that tell the tale of
the women who wait for their young men to return from the battlefield
... Berrini has crafted a fine story that will stay with the reader
long after the final words are read."
Donna Moreau author of Waiting  Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor; Homefront to the Vietnam War

Judah
Leblang is a Medford based writer and storyteller, who grew up in
Cleveland, Ohio. His essays and commentaries have been broadcast on
National Public Radio stations around the US, and published in various
newspapers and magazines in Boston and Cleveland. His column, "Life in
the Slow Lane," appears regularly in Bay Windows.

Deahn
Berrini has been researching and writing about returning veterans’
issues for over twenty-five years. She lives on the North Shore of
Boston, where she writes and teaches.

Nate Brodie's been given the chance of a
lifetime--especially for a thirteen-year-old star quarterback. Not to
mention the biggest Tom Brady fan around. He's won the chance to throw
a ball through a target at a Patriots game. On live TV! If he completes
the pass, he'll win one million dollars. With his parents struggling to
pay the bills, even just to keep their home, Nate knows what this money
would mean, and so the pressure is on.

Yet for Nate, the true meaning of pressure is about to change in ways he never knew.

Mike Lupica, over the span of his successful career as a sports
columnist, has proven that he can write for sports fans of all ages
and stripes. And as the author of multiple bestselling books for young
readers, including Heat, Travel Team, and The Big Field, Mr. Lupica has
carved out a niche as the sporting world's finest storyteller. Mr.
Lupica, whose column for New York's Daily News is syndicated
nationally, lives in Connecticut with his wife and their four children.
He can be seen weekly on ESPN's The Sports Reporters.

In this stunning story collection inhabited by dreams and
disappointments, good intentions and small triumphs, Keith Lee
Morris chronicles the lives of men lost in the liminal spaces
between adolescence and adulthood. For all their flaws—as husbands, as
fathers, as friends—Morris’s characters are portrayed with depth,
tenderness, and humanity. Call It What You Want balances realism with the surreal, humor with sadness, and explores all the hidden places in between.

"Steve
Almond had created a distinctive voice and literary persona.
Pleasure-obsessed, self-deprecating, horny, hilarious, and always
dedicated to parsing the messy terrain of the human heart."

Forward.com

Keith
Lee Morris is an associate professor of English and creative writing
at Clemson University. His short stories have been published in Tin House, A Public Space, Southern Review, Ninth Letter, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, The Sun, and the Georgia Review, among other publications. He has written three books, The Greyhound God, The Best Seats in the House, and The Dart League King.  His latest work is, Call It What You Want.

Steve
Almond is the author of two short story collections; My Life in
Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak,
the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-authored by Julianna Baggot, and
the collection of essays Not That You Asked. His short stories have
appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, Ploughshares and
others, and his other work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times,
the Boston Globe, the Believer, and Boston Magazine.

"Anonymous Fox is
a book you can dive right into even though the familiar yet obscure
images keep you wondering what deftly sculpted insight you're about to
experience."

Barbara Bialick

"In
this slim and amiable book Ms. Thomas gathers a pile of small, not
uninteresting observations about deer, and in doing so she subtly
alters the way you look at them in a forest or from a window."

New York Times

Naomi
Chase's previous work has appeared in publications such as the Havard Magazine and
Iowa Review. She won the Flume Press poetry chapbook award and she's
published a variety of poetry books and chapbooks,nonfiction books, and
fiction.

One of
the most widely read American anthropologists, Elizabeth Marshall
Thomas has observed dogs, cats, and elephants during her
half-century-long career. In the 1980s Thomas studied elephants
alongside Katy Payne—the scientist who discovered elephants'
communication via infrasound. In 1993 Thomas wrote The Hidden Life of Dogs, a groundbreaking work of animal psychology that spent nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her book on cats, Tribe of Tiger,
was also an international bestseller. She lives in Peterborough, New
Hampshire, on her family's former farm, where she observes deer,
bobcats, bear, and many other species of wildlife.

Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan
Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con
artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist
hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories
that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and
unforgettable mysteries.

Each of the dozen
stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world
and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the
gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of
those caught in its grip. There is the world’s foremost expert on
Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson
sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent; and
sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New
York City’s water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout,
Grann’s hypnotic accounts display the power—and often the willful
perversity—of the human spirit.

David Grann is the author of The Lost City of Z and a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker.
He has written about everything from New York City’s antiquated water
tunnels to the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, from the hunt for the
giant squid to the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock
Holmes expert. His stories have appeared in several Best American writing anthologies, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. 

Toby Lester is the author of The Fourth Part of the World and a contributing editor to and has written extensively for The Atlantic. His work has also been featured on the radio show This American Life.
A former Peace Corps volunteer and United Nations observer, he lives in
the Boston area with his wife and three daughters. He is an invited
research scholar at Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library.

Join Porter Square Books for a book signing with Erica Perl at The Garment District, on Saturday March 27, from 1-3pm.

Veronica
Walsh is 15, fashion-minded, fat, and friendless. Her summer job in the
Consignment Corner section (Employees Only!) of a vintage clothing
store is a dream come true. There Veronica can spend her days
separating the one-of-a-kind gem garments from the Dollar-a-Pound duds,
without having to deal with people. But when two outrageous yet
charismatic salesgirls befriend her and urge her to spy on and follow
the mysterious and awkward stock boy Veronica has nicknamed the Nail,
Veronica’s summer takes a turn for the weird. Suddenly, what began as a
prank turns into something else entirely. Which means Veronica may have
to come out of hiding and follow something even riskier for the first
time: her heart.

Erica S. Perl is the author of three picture books: Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early, illustrated by George Bates; Ninety-three in My Family, illustrated by Mike Lester; and Chicken Butt! illustrated by Henry Cole. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two daughters.

"A riveting emotional roller coaster into the behind the scenes life of a veterinarian."

Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

"Dr. Trout has given us a remarkable love story, reminding us of the preciousness of every life, human or animal."

Jeffrey Zaslow, coauthor of The Last Lecture

Nick Trout graduated from veterinary school at the University of
Cambridge, England, in 1989. He is a diplomate of the American and
European Colleges of Veterinary Surgeons and a staff surgeon at the
Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston. He lives in Massachusetts with
his wife, daughters, and two dogs: Meg, a yellow Labrador, and Sophie,
a Jack Russell terrier.

Please Join Porter Square Books and PEN/New England for Stephen Burt at Upstairs on the Square.

Stephen Burt is a literary critic who teaches at Harvard University.  Burt's most recent book, Close Calls with Nonsense,
was a 2009 National Book Critics Circle finalist.  Burt writes books
about poetry, essays on other people's poems, books of his own poems,
and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction
writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA.

Please note: this is an off-site event to be held at Upstairs on the Square in Cambridge, MA.

About PEN New England

PEN (Poets/Playwrights,
Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England is an organization of
published authors, aspiring writers, and all who love the written
word.  Our mission is to advance the cause of literature in New England
and defend free expression everywhere. PEN New England is a branch of
PEN American Center, and part of International PEN, the oldest
international literary organization and also the oldest human rights
organization in the world.

"Dubus proves himself both an exquisitely careful craftsman and a painstaking recorder of society."

Boston Magazine

"A
Consummate exploration of the themes of violence, religion in modern
Europe, the rise of antisocial tendencies in the great social
democracies, and love… [In the Company of Angels] lacks nothing … Kennedy is a master craftsman …"

Books Ireland

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days, Bluesman, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and House of Sand and Fog
(a National Book Award Finalist and Oprah Book Club Selection). His
writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a
National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his family
north of Boston. His memoir Townie is forthcoming in February 2011.

Thomas Kennedy
is the author of eight novels, as well as several collections of short
stories and essays, and has won numerous awards including the Eric
Hoffer Award, the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and the National
Magazine Award. He teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson
University. In the Company of Angels was first published in Ireland in
2004, as Greene's Summer, to rapturous critical acclaim. It is one of four novels comprising the Copenhagen Quartet.

The story centers on "The Lake Shore Limited"—a play Billy
has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it
pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear
the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it. Billy had
waited in just such a way on 9/11 to hear whether her lover, Gus, was
on one of the planes used in the attack.

How
Billy has come to create the play out of these emotions, how it is then
created anew on the stage, how the performance itself touches and
changes the other characters’ lives—these form the thread that binds
them all together and drives the novel compulsively forward.

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels The Senator's Wife, Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father.

"In this siular
book, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot introduces a new stage of life,
delineates its intriguing and unexpected contours, and draws lessons
that are meaningful for every human being."

Howard Gardner, author of Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur Prize-winning sociologist, is the
Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University,
where she has been on the faculty since 1972. Educator, researcher,
author, and public intellectual, Lawrence-Lightfoot has written nine
books, including Respect: An Exploration and The Essential
Conversations: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other. Her
book Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer won the 1988 Christopher Award.