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Store Hours
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Mon - Fri 9:30 - 6:00
Sat 9:30 - 5:00
Sun Noon - 5:00
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Upcoming Events
1/29 (Sunday) 3pm-
John Matteson returns to the Bookshop with his hot-off-the-presses biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller
2/5 (Sunday) 3pm-
Alan Lightman returns to the Bookshop with his latest novel, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation
2/9 (Thursday) 2pm-
Visit with Theodora Goss, author of the unique and beautifully formatted The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story
2/12 (Sunday) 3pm -
We welcome Toby Lester with his newest book, Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
2/19 (Sunday) 3pm -
We welcome Sarah McCoy with The Baker's Daughter
2/26 (Sunday) 3pm -
Award-winning author Margot Livesey presents The Flight of Gemma Hardy
3/11 (Sunday) 3pm -
Kate Flora returns to the Bookshop with her latest novel, Redemption
3/18 (Sunday) 3pm -
We welcome Madeline Miller with Song of Achilles
3/22 (Thursday) 7pm-
Howard Frank Mosher returns to the Bookshop with The Great Northern Express
3/25 (Sunday) 3pm -
Natalie Dykstra presents Clover Adams
4/1 (Sunday) 3pm -
Two authors present their non-fiction books: Deborah Kops with The Great Molasses Flood, and Heather Lang with Queen of the Track
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Greetings!
Our next event is Sunday, January 29, when Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John Matteson returns to the Bookshop with his new work, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography.
Following this, on February 5, Alan Lightman returns to the Bookshop with his most recent novel, Mr. g.
And on the afternoon of Thursday, February 9, we'll have a visit with Theodora Goss and The Thorn and the Blossom. See below for photos of this unique novel, a lovely and thoughtful Valentine's gift.
The left sidebar of this note contains our complete events calendar; you can also check details on our website and/or rsvp on our Facebook page.
If you're unable to attend an event, but would like a signed copy of the book, simply call us to pre-order. We'll ask the author to inscribe it to your specifications, then hold it for pick up or arrange to have it shipped.
This week we feature Susan Cain's Quiet, an exploration of the introvert and extrovert personalities; The House at Tyneford, an atmospheric novel set in a manor house between the Wars; and three selections from the New York Review of Books collection.
Newbury and Caldecott Medal winners were announced this week. Scroll down for details, and find the books on the shelves of our children's section.
As always, we look forward to chatting with you in the Bookshop! When you come in to take a closer look at an item mentioned here, please tell us "I saw it in the newsletter!"
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event - Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson on January 29
John Matteson and The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography
Please join us at the Bookshop Sunday, January 29th at 3pm as John Matteson returns to the Bookshop with his most recent work, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography.
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was one of the most famous-and most controversial-figures of her era, yet her incredible life and strong impact on American culture have been all but forgotten. With The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson explores the many facets of this complex and charismatic woman, illuminating her ambitions, her successes, and her enduring legacy.
Author John Matteson was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Eden's Outcasts. He holds a law degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from Columbia University. He is a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City, where he lives.
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Upcoming event - Alan Lightman on Sunday, February 5
Alan Lightman and Mr. G: A Novel About the Creation
Please join us at the Bookshop Sunday, February 5th at 3pm as local author Alan Lightman returns with his most recent work, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation.
"As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe." So begins Alan Lightman's playful and profound new novel, Mr g, the story of Creation as told by God. Barraged by the constant advisements and bickerings of Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, who live with their Nephew in the shimmering Void, Mr g proceeds to create time, space, and matter. Then come stars, planets, animate matter, consciousness, and finally intelligent beings with moral dilemmas. Mr g is all powerful but not all knowing and does much of his invention by trial and error.
Even the best-laid plans can go awry, and Mr g discovers that with his creation of space and time come some unforeseen consequences-especially in the form of the mysterious Belhor, a clever and devious rival. An intellectual equal to Mr g, Belhor delights in provoking him: Belhor demands an explanation for the inexplicable, requests that the newly creatred intelligent creatures not be subject to rational laws, and maintains the necessity of evil. As Mr g watches his favorite universe grow into maturity, he begins to understand how the act of creation can change himself, the Creator.
With echoes of Calvino, Rushdie, and Saramago, combining science, theology, and moral philosophy, Mr g is a stunningly imaginative work that celebrates the tragic and joyous nature of existence on the grandest possible scale.
A theoretical physicist and a writer, Alan Lightman's novels include The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award, Ghost, and the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams.
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Save the Date - Pre-Valentine's Day event with a special love story
Theodora Goss and The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story
Please join us at the Bookshop Thursday, February 9th at 2pm for a "meet and greet" with Thoedora Goss and her novel(s)The Thorn and the Blossom.
A novel about lovers who meet in a bookstore - how fabulous! This uniquely-bound book is packaged in a slipcase and printed on accordion-folded paper - start at one end to read Evelyn's story; when you reach the end, turn it over to read Brendan's story.
If you're unable to attend the event,
please call to pre-order a personally inscribed volume ... The Thorn and the Blossom is a lovely Valentine's Day gift.
Ms. Goss is also a writer of poems, short stories, and essays. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University.
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New non-fiction to talk - or to think - about
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Are you an introvert? extrovert? closet introvert? pretend extrovert?
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society - from van Gogh's sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.
Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. And she draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to reveal the surprising differences between extroverts and introverts. She introduces us to successful introverts and offers invaluable advice on everything from how to better negotiate differences in introvert-extrovert relationships to how to empower an introverted child to when it makes sense to be a "pretend extrovert." This book has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how introverts see themselves. In the first pages of Quiet, Cain refers to the "quiet strength" of Rosa Parks, asking the reader: "Why shouldn't quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don't give it credit for?" Whether you ponder this book on your own, or discuss it with a group, Quiet may change the way you see yourself and others.
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Atmospheric fiction
The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons
"A deeply touching and blissfully romantic elegy for a lost world."
- The Times (London)
It's the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave her glittering life of parties and champagne to become a parlor maid in England. She arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay, where servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn. But war is coming, and the world is changing. When the master of Tyneford's young son, Kit, returns home, he and Elise strike up an unlikely friendship that will transform Tyneford - and Elise - forever.
Kristin Hannah (author of Home Front) calls The House at Tyneford "a lovely, atmospheric novel full of charming characters and good, old fashioned storytelling. Fans of Downton Abbey and Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden will absolutely adore The House at Tyneford."
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Favorites from the
New York Review of Books
Three recent favorites from our NYRB table:
 Walkabout by James Vance Marshall
A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness, and yet, for all that, Mary is filled with distrust.
On the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter's innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary's half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost - and may be saved - when different worlds meet.
James Vance Marshall is the pseudonym of Donald Payne. Walkabout, which has been made into a film, has been out of print for many years; we're happy to see it now with NYRB.
 The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
selected and introduced by Roxana Robinson
In honor of Edith Wharton's birth - January 24, 1862:
Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops' nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, the widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own.
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton's career. This collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged.
by William Dean Howells
One of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies in American literature, William Dean Howells's Indian Summer tells of a season in the life of Theodore Colville. Colville, just turned forty, has left the midwest for Italy, where he fell in love when he was a young man. In Florence, Colville runs into Lina Bowen, sometime best friend of the woman who jilted him and the vivacious survivor of an unhappy marriage. He also meets her young visitor, twenty-year-old Imogene Graham - lovely, earnest to a fault, and brimming with the excitement of her first encounter with the great world. The drama that plays out among these three gifted and well-meaning people against the backdrop of Florence, the brilliance of their repartee, and the accumulating burden of their mutual misunderstandings make for a comedy of errors that is as winning as it is wise. |
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Children's award winners!
2012 Newbury and Caldecott winners
Earlier this week, the The American Library Association (ALA) announced the top books for children and young adults.
 Jack Gantos' Dead End in Norvelt is the 2012 Newbery Medal winner for "the most outstanding contribution to children's literature."
Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, this is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. Endlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air.
2012 Newbury Honor books are:
 Chris Raschka's A Ball for Daisy is the 2012 Caldecott Medal winner for the "most distinguished American picture book for children."
Any child who has ever had a beloved toy break will relate to Daisy's anguish when her favorite ball is destroyed by a bigger dog. In this wordless book, Chris Raschka explores in pictures the joy and sadness that having a special toy can bring. Raschka's signature swirling, impressionistic illustrations and his affectionate story will particularly appeal to young dog lovers and teachers and parents who have children dealing with the loss of something special. Raschka's The Hello, Goodbye Window won the 2006 Caldecott Medal.
2012 Caldecott Honor Books are:
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Indian Summer