LibraryThing Local

Join us for an a capella evening in the café – no cover!

Dr. Thomas Graboys will be at the Bookshop September 7th at 3 PM to discuss his book, "Life in the Balance".

Well, ok. They're only two feet tall. But the cool thing is you made them! Enter our "Design a Dragon" contest to celebrate the release of "Brisingr" by Christopher Paolini on September 20th. Make a dragon in sculpture, drawing, or any visual art project with materials of your choosing. We ask that your ... (more)finished project be NO BIGGER than two feet in any direction, so they all fit in the store! Entries are due no later than 9pm September 8, 2008. Winners will be notified by Sept 18th. Runners up will receive $15 Toadstool gift certificates; the Grand Prize winner will receive a free copy of the new Brisingr book! Get busy and good luck!

Craving something more with your reading this Fall? Join us for a reading group on sexual and gender identity, featuring a top-notch booklist covering everything from cutting edge to classics. Facilitators Toni Amato and Jaclyn Friedman will lead this 5 week exploration of queerness and literature, making ... (more)connections between the worlds of the authors and our own lives. The group is FREE and will meet every other Tuesday, September 9 - November 11, from 6 to 8 PM. Books will be made available at a discount to all, and free to those with financial need. Space is limited - call 617-876-5310 or email klpereira@centerfornewwords.org to let us know you’re interested.

"Carol Band is a truly delightful storyteller..."Parenting Publications of America "Slightly sarcastic, absolutely on the mark and really, really funny!"Bill Lindsay Editor in Chief, Dominion Parenting Media/Parenthood.com Carol Band's humor column, "A Household Word," has won numerous awards--including ... (more)the Gold Award from Parenting Publications of American for two consecutive years--and is featured in publications and websites around the country. Carol's writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Parent's Paper, L.A. Parent, and AARP Magazine, as well as numerous websites Eons.com, Humorpress.com, and parenthood.com.

Hannah Diozzi of the Salem Historical Commission and Julie Rose of Historic Salem present information about their organizations and lead a conversation on the wealth of historical resources and the many fields of historical inquiry available in our region. Join the Salem History Society for this interactive ... (more)discussion.

PEN New EnglandReadings at the Hotel MarloweBarbara Helfgott Hyett is the published author of In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps ; The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus; The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife. Barbara has taught Literature and Writing at ... (more)MIT and Boston University, where she won the Sproat Award for Excellence in Teaching English. Barbara Helfgott Hyett is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her poems have appeared in dozens of magazines including The Nation, The New Republic, and The Partisan Review.Please note: this is an off-site event to be held at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge, MA. Directions to the Hotel Marlowe. For info or questions, contact: Emily Hiestand, / 617-497-1225. About PEN New England PEN New England is an organization of writers and all those who love the written word. Our mission is to advance the cause of literature in New England and defend freedom of expression everywhere. PEN New England is one of five regional branches of PEN American Center, and part of International PEN, the oldest human rights organization in the world, and also the oldest international literary organization. PEN NE is honored to collaborate with the Marlowe Hotel and Porter Square Books to produce the PEN-Marlowe Reading Series, now in its fourth year. The monthly reading series is programmed by two PEN NE board members and award-winning authors: fiction writer, Edith Pearlman, and essayist/photographer, Emily Hiestand. For more information, visit the PEN New England website.

"An outstanding medical thriller, sharply plotted, with crisp dialogue, intelligent characters--and a premise that will freeze your blood. Gary Braver is one hell of a good writer."Douglas Preston author of The Wheel of Darkness "[This book] cuts to the bone, a nerve-jangling thriller that combines ... (more)the horror of Silence of the Lambs with the medical terror of Robin Cook...As terrifying as it is ingenious, the book is destined to become a classic of suspense and horror."James Rollins author of The Judas Strain Gary Braver is the author of six critically acclaimed suspense novels. Flashback is the only thriller to have won a prestigious Massachusetts Book Award. He teaches fiction writing as well as course in popular literature as a professor of English at Northeastern University. He has taught fiction-writing workshops throughout the United States and Europe for more than twenty years.

"McCullough's concept of 'slow medicine' is an example of that ethic of care in action."Library Journal "This book will literally speak volumes to many baby boomers who find themselves helping aging parents through their late-life journey."Peggy Carlson Dennis McCullough, M.D. has been a family ... (more)physician and geriatrician for thirty years. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. He is a member of the American Geriatrics Society, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, and the American Medical Directors Association, as well as the coauthor of The Little Black Book of Geriatrics. He lives with his wife, the poet Pamela Harrison, in Norwich, VT.

The man who plays music with animals returns with a fascinating exploration of an alien intelligence in our midst: whales and their profoundly mysterious music. David Rothenberg discusses his book THOUSAND MILE SONG.

Join attorney and psychotherapist Kresh as she reviews students’ and parents’ rights within the public education system, and outlines what parents should be aware of in monitoring their child’s needs and the schools response. This presentation and interactive discussion can clarify sometimes confusing ... (more)information and can be extremely valuable in aiding parents who are advocating for their child’s’ needs. Sue-Ellen Kresh is an attorney and clinician with over two decades of combined experience providing a variety of services to children, families and s. She is currently operating a solo legal practice emphasizing family law and mediation, special education and employment-related issues.

"Kennedy excels at making the complex compelling...a stylish and wholly original triumph."Publisher's Weekly starred review. Pagan Kennedy is the author of ten books in a variety of genres--from cultural history to biography to the novel, including her most recent book The First Man-Made Man. A regular ... (more)contributor to the Boston Globe, she has published articles in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including several sections of the New York Times. A biography titled Black Livingstone made the New York Times Notable list and earned Massachusetts Book Award honors. Her novel, Spinsters, was short-listed for the Orange Prize. She also has been the recipient of a Barnes and Noble Discover Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Smithsonian Fellowship for science writing.

Join Porter Square Books for an evening with contributors to The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008, edited by Lucy McCauley. Reading with us will be: Susan Freireich is the recipient of the 1998 Frances Shaw Fellowship at The Ragdale Foundation, and the 2005 Mildred Sherrod Bissinger Memorial Endowed ... (more)Fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She has also received support and time for her work from Norcroft, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, and Casa Libre en la Solana. Her work has appeared in Poetic Voices Without Borders and in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. Tracy Slater is author of essays and articles in the US from the Boston Globe, Best Women's Travel Writing 2008, The Chronicle Review, and Post Road; and in Japan from The Asahi Weekly, Kansai Time Out, and Kansai Scene. She is also the founder of the Four Stories Boston, Osaka, and Tokyo literary series. She teaches writing at Boston University and has her PhD in English and American literature. Terri Trespicio is a senior editor at Body and Soul magazine, writer, and public speaker. She has appeared on The Today Show, The Martha Stewart Show, Fox News, and NECN. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at Emerson College, and currently teaches editing in the publishing certificate program at Boston University. Her work has recently appeared in Boston Magazine, Boston Weddings, Lola, and Boston Globe magazine, where she's a regular contributor to the Coupling column. She lives in Waltham. Kate Wheeler is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist. Once upon a time she was a Buddhist nun, but is now married and lives in Somerville. She teaches and practice meditation, and travels as much as she can. She's now at work on her second novel. Lucy McCauley's travel essays have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, Harvard Review, Science and Spirit, and Salon.com. She is series editor of Best Women’s Travel Writing and editor of three other Travelers’ Tales anthologies—Spain (1995), Women in the Wild (1998), and A Woman’s Path (2000), all of which have been reissued in the last few years. In addition, she has written case studies in Latin America for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and now works as a developmental editor for publishers such as Harvard Business School Press.

"The book is filled with fascinating dramatically told stories."Booklist "Yolen tells the tales of 13 female pirates, from Persia to China, from 500 years before the Common Era to the 19th century. Not only does she tell them vividly, she also strives to untangle fact from fiction, history from legend, ... (more)highlighting the telling details that will draw kids in."Kirkus Reviews Jane Yolen s the award-winning author of nearly three hundred children's books, including Snow, Snow: Winter Poems and The Rogues. She has been called the Hans Christian Andersen of the Americas. Jane lives in Western Massachusetts and Scotland.

"[This book] is the most masterful and engaging story of what it means to be an immigrant from America that I've ever read."Howard Frank Mosher author of On Kingdom Mountain "Limber with history, ripe with life, plus the splendors of exactitude, this magnificent narrative poem is Leland Kinsey's ... (more)richest to date. I pored over it."Edward Hoagland author of Hoagland on Nature: Essays Leland Kinsey is the author of sex collections of poetry including Sledding on Hospital Hill. He lives with his family in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, near the Canadian border.

Join the Merrimack Rounders for this Open Jam…come play along or just enjoy the music!

Get new insights into Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake in this lecture and discussion. Bakirathi Mani is a professor at Swarthmore College, and the Chair of their Women's Studies Department. She has Pd.D.s in Modern Thought and Literature and Cultural and Social Anthropology, and specializes in studying ... (more)the South Asian diaspora in the United States. As such, she is a scholarly authority on Jhumpa Lahiri and her works. This event is part of the Watertown Free Public Library's One Book, One Watertown program.

"One comes away from Miller's page-turner with a reverence, almost an unalloyed love for Tenen, Tufts, and the Kartchner family that owned the land under which the young spelunkers discovered the cave."Tuscon Weekly Kartchner Caverns tells the story of two young spelunkers, just out of the University ... (more)of Arizona, who stumbled upon some fantastically beautiful caves on a southern Arizona hillside, kept them secret for 14 years out of fear they might be looted and destroyed, and eventually succeeded in having them developed as a state park. The book is a non-fiction narrative, extensively researched, that brings to life an important piece of contemporary Western history. It is an adventure story, a character study of two eco-heroes, and a chronicle of the triumph of the environmental approach in a corner of the natural world where pillage, not preservation, had been the norm. Neil Miller teaches journalism and nonfiction writing in the English department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is a former staff writer at the Boston Phoenix. Miller is the author of five books, including Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s and Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other publications.

The library is excited to welcome the prolific author Jane Yolen to the Watertown Savings Bank Room Friday, September 19 at 3 pm. Yolen, the award winning author of nearly three-hundred works written for children, teens and adults, will showcase her highly praised new title, Sea Queens: Women Pirates ... (more)Around the World (Charlesbridge, 2008), which garnered a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. Children will be familiar with such works as How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and Owl Moon while teens and adults may recognize her works of fantasy such as the Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Award winning Briar Rose. Ms. Yolen will be available for book signing following a lecture. No registration required.

How does faith inform your sexuality? Queer and Catholic examines the culture of how being raised catholic informs and influences, positively or negatively, our queerness and how our queerness affects our Catholicism, our vestigial catholic nature or even our flight from and continued struggle with ... (more)the ‘the Church of Rome.’ Whether we embrace or reject our Catholic upbringings, they affect and shape who we are and bump up against our queer identities. Examining the culture of Catholicism, rather than the dogma or letter of it, these essays and short stories do not seek to address whether or not queers and the Catholic Church can reconcile or how and why the church should change, but instead explore the impact that growing up Catholic and queer has on us as individuals, writers, and political agents. Join editor Amie M. Evans, and contributors: Austin J. Austin, Susan McDonough-Hintz, Mallory Hanora, Vince Sgambati, and Emanuel Xavier as they read from their contributions to the anthology with special guest Scott Pomfret.

Hannah Tinti returns to the Jabberwocky to read from her first novel THE GOOD THIEF.

At the height of the Vietnam War protests, Judith Nies held “the most interesting job in Washington” as the chief staff assistant to a core group of anti-war congressmen. A graduate of John Hopkins School of Advance International Studies (SAIS) with an impressive international resume, Nies had everything ... (more)she needed to succeed in Washington except for one obvious characteristic: she was the wrong gender. In The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the 1960’s and How Women Transformed America, Nies chronicles her struggle to cope with and finally overcome the limited opportunities for women in society and politics. Shocked to find herself the focus of an FBI investigation due to her political activities, Nies traded in her role as a dutiful wife and marginalized employee to become one of a growing number of brave women who carved out a new path toward social reform.

This new Sci-Fi novel with YA appeal introduces us to Jemma, whose independent nature gets her labeled by the Administrative Government of North America as rebellious, and her behavior as inappropriate. Decrying the choices that the government allows her, she is remanded to a facility that will change ... (more)her… or kill her. Join Phoebe Wray for a Reading, Q&A and Book Signing.

Now you see him, now your don't! This month we will be reading H.G. Well's classic science fiction novel, the Invisible Man and watching James Whale's B&W film version starring Claude Rains. After which will be discussing both the novel and the film!

"...emotionally authentic...a ravishing novel of the mystery of death and life’s assertion."Bookslist (starred review) "Deeply touching and absorbing..."Publisher's Weekly Francine Prose is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for ... (more)the National Book Award, and the nonfiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. She is the president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.

Xujun Eberlein, winner of 2007 Tartt Fiction Award, and author of "APOLOGIES FORTHCOMING" (June 2008 Livingston Press) will visit the Chelmsford Public Library on Tuesday, September 23, 2008. Four decades ago China was embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, a period that turned the country on end ... (more)and defined the generation of Chinese now coming to power. This collection of stories, departing from the usual "victim literature," provides an apolitical and humanistic view onto life during and after that time.

"[This book] is a lively, informative, readable, and enlightening perspective, to be both enjoyed for its literary merits and digested for its insights."Zbigniew Brzezinski author of Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower "With a keen eye for detail and a deep sensitivity ... (more)towards his subject, Daniloff has written a rich and rewarding account of his years covering the Soviet Union."Marvin Kalb Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at Harvard Nicholas Daniloff is Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University. His previous books include The Kremlin and the Cosmos and Two Lives, One Russia.

. A reviewer for “Library Journal” said Haydon ” blends Celtic lore with Asian myth to produce a world both strange and hauntingly familiar.” Haydon is a harpist, herbalist and madrigal singer as well as an author. Save a seat in the Shattuck Street Multipurpose Room by going to the Events Calendar ... (more)at www.littletonlibrary.org. Haydon’s books include the Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme series for young adults and the Symphony of Ages series for adults. Multiple copies of “The Floating Island” are available at the library. Request other titles through the MVLC catalog when the library’s display has been depleted. This program is funded by a grant from the U. S. Institute of Museum and Library Services through the MA Board of Library Commissioners.

Join these authors as they discuss their book NICE GUYS GET THE CORNER OFFICE.

We are pleased to host a special evening event Thursday, September 25th with Stona Fitch, local author and former director of Gaining Ground. Stona Fitch is now with the Concord Free Press, and will be reading from his latest (and their first) book, "Give and Take".

From Watergate and the Pentagon Papers to Iran-Contra and Abu Ghraib, journalists have used information from confidential sources to reveal illegal conduct by our government. It is vital to our democracy that we protect the people who are the sources for the exposes that are reported in newspapers, ... (more)magazines and books and broadcast in news programs on television and radio. Please join us as Jonath bano, named “Leading Lawyer in First Amendment Law and Media Law” (2005–2008) by The Best Lawyers in America, leads a discussion on this important Constitutional issue. Jonathan Albano is a Partner at Bingham. This event is co-sponsored by The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the Medial Law Resource Center Institute.

The annual Friends of the Library Book Sale is a significant source of funding for library programming, museum passes and many extras for Chelmsford patrons. The community's support through donations and volunteer hours is greatly appreciated.

"A surprising and gracefully written exploration of Boston's true nature. If you love this city, you will love this book."Eric Jay Dolin author of Leviathan "A wonderful piece of work: lively, thought-provoking, and totally absorbing. The city of Boston has been chopped to pieces, riddled with tunnels, ... (more)and surrounded by fill, but as Mitchell reveals in [this book] it is still a place of wonder."Nathaniel Philbrick author of Mayflower John Hanson Mitchell concentrated much of his earlier early work, including, most famously, Ceremonial Time, on a square-mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located thirty-five miles northwest of Boston. He is the author of numerous books and editor of the award-winning magazine Sanctuary, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Mitchell lives in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Join the acclaimed author of HAWTHORNE Brenda Wineapple as she reads from WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

The annual Friends of the Library Book Sale is a significant source of funding for library programming, museum passes and many extras for Chelmsford patrons. The community's support through donations and volunteer hours is greatly appreciated.

Cornerstone favorite Kristy Kiernan returns with her new novel Matter of Faith, an Indie Bound Notable Pick for September. At age twelve, Marshall Tobias saw his best friend killed by a train. It was then that he began his search for faith—delving into one tradition, then discarding it for another. ... (more)His parents, however, have little time for spiritual contemplation. Their focus has been on his little sister Megan, who suffers from severe food allergies. Now Marshall is home from college with his first real girlfriend, but there is more to Ada than meets the eye—including her beliefs about the evils of medical intervention. What fol