Back to newsletter listDate:
Fri, February 01, 2008 05:15:57 PMFrom:
Porter Square Books
Subject:
February @ Porter Square Books
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| Jenny White |
The Abyssinian Proof: A Kamil Pasha Novel
In Istanbul, magistrate Kamil Pasha is under pressure to break
the smuggling ring that is plaguing the Ottoman empire with
thefts of antiquities from mosques and churches . White has
created a page-turner about a conspiracy to steal an ancient
reliquary whose secret could change the world.
Jenny White lived in Turkey for three years after college. She then did graduate work in anthropology at the University of Texas where she specialized in Turkish culture. She now teaches social anthropology at BU and has published two scholarly books on contemporary Turkey. |
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| Peniel Joseph |
Waiting til the Midnight Hour
Peniel Joseph is gaining a reputation as a leading young
scholar of African American history. He currently teaches in the
Dept. of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis where
he is developing a subfield of historical and Africana Studies
that he has named "Black Power Studies". Waiting til the
Midnight Hour is one of two books published by Joseph in
2006 and examines the decade before and after Stokely
Carmichael's historic call for Black Power.
Joseph earned his doctorate in American history at Temple University and has been a prolific book reviewer, essayist, and commentator on issues related to African American social, political, intellectual, and cultural history. |
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| Jeffrey Harrison at the Hotel Marlowe |
Incomplete Knowledge
Harrison's latest collection consists at its core of a sequence of
poems that speak to the loss of the writer's brother to suicide.
Please note: This event is off site at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge. It is part of the monthly PEN/NE reading series held the first Wednesday of each month. Please check our website for details and directions. |
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| Sylvia Sellers-Garcia |
When the Ground Turns in its Sleep
Born in Guatemala, raised in the US, Nitido Aman never asked
his immigrant parents about his homeland as a child-and they
never talked about it. He travels to Guatemala, against his
mother's wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself. What
he finds in the tiny town of Rio Roto is a place shrouded in
silence and secrets. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia delivers a story of
divergent cultures and divided identities, of conflicts between
generations and civilizations, of mourning, and, finally, of
healing.
Sylvia Sellers-Garcia was born in Boston and grew up in the United States and Central America. She has interned at Harper's and worked at The New Yorker; her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at the University of California, Berkeley. This is her debut novel. |
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| James McBride at St. James Episcopal Church |
Song Yet Sung
James McBride is an accomplished musician and author of the
New York Times bestseller, The Color of Water.
McBride's latest is a "powerful page-turner" about a runaway
slave and a determined slave catcher. Set in the swamps of
Maryland's eastern shore, Liz Spocott, a young runaway, flees
into the nefarious world of the underground railroad with its
double meanings and unspoken clues known to the
slaves of Dorchester County as "The Code." Told in McBride's
signature lyrical storytelling style.
Please note: This event is being held across the street in the sanctuary of St. James Episcopal Church. The church is on the corner of Beech St. and Mass Ave. The address is 1991 Mass Ave. McBride's books will be for sale at the event. |
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| Karen Chase |
Land of Stone
While she was poet-in-residence at a large psychiatric hospital
Chase met Ben. He did not speak. Over the course of two years
Chase and he met weekly, passing a pad and pencil back and
forth, alternating writing lines of peoms. Gradually, Ben began
to speak. This book, Land of Stone, is the story of that
experience.
Chase's poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Southwest Review. She lives in the Berkshires. |
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| Chris Bohjalian |
Double Bind
The New York Times has said, "Few writers can
manipulate a plot with Bohjalian's grace and power." Now he
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back with an ambitious new novel that travels between Jay
Gatsby's Long Island and rural New England, between the
Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century.
Chris Bohjalian is the critically acclaimed author of ten novels, including Midwives and his most recent New York Times bestseller, Before You Know Kindness. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in twenty-one countries. He lives with his wife and daughter in Vermont. |
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| Lynne Cox |
Grayson
Famed long distance swimmer and inspirational figure Lynne
Cox will be here for the paperback release of Grayson.
This is her bestseller that tells the true story of a miraculous
encounter between a teenaged girl and a baby gray whale off
the coast of California.
Cox is also the author of Swimming to Antarctica. She has set records all over the world for open-water swimming. She was named an LA Times Woman of the Year, was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame and honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Univ of CA. Grayson makes a great little gift for Valentine's Day and don't forget to come and hear her as well!! |
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| Charles Barber |
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation
The United States accounts for 66% of the global
antidepressant market. That is just one of the shocking statistics
revealed in Barber's new book, Comfortably Numb. He
explores the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first
create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it. The
increasing pressure Americans are under to medicate and the
resultant use of psychiatric drugs has had an enormous impact
on American culture.
Barber was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in NYC shelters for the homeless mentally ill. He won a Pushcart Prize for an essay in his first book, Songs from the Black Chair. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Univ School of Medicine. |
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| Merle Bachman |
Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature
According to traditional narratives of immigrant assimilation,
Jews freely surrendered Yiddish language and culture in their
desire for an American identity. In
Recovering "Yiddishland", Bachman offers a challenge
to this conventional literary history, returning readers to a
threshold where Americanization also meant ambivalence and
resistance. The book spotlights significant works by Yiddish
immigrant writers that reveal unexpected and illuminating
critiques of Americanization.
Bachman is assistant professor of English at Spalding University. Her articles and poetry have been published in such journals as Shofar, Bridges, and Five Fingers Review. |
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