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Greetings!
As always, our newsletter contains information about upcoming events. The next two authors to visit are William Kuhn with a fun and thoughtful novel about Queen Elizabeth's "day off" and Barbara Shapiro with her contemporary mystery set around 1990's heist at the Gardner Museum.
Further in this newsletter you'll find more information about these upcoming events, and view our complete schedule in the left sidebar of this newsletter. If you're unable to attend an event, but would like a signed book, just call us to have it a copy personalized and we'll hold it for your pick-up or arrange to have it shipped.
This week's newsletter picks include a new biography about the life and work of Paul Cézanne, and three featured non-fiction paperbacks. How long has the phrase "to have and to hold from this day forward" been part of our marriage ceremonies? Scroll down to the anniversary edition of The Book of Common Prayer to find out!
The community window highlights the work and programs of the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest.
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" and let us know what you're reading now.
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event: clever and fun novel finds the heart of Queen Elizabeth
Mrs Queen Takes the Train by William Kuhn
Event date: Thursday, October 25 at 7pm
"This book is the perfect cup of tea for the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Give it to lovers of all things British. It's also a good bet for fans of Alexander McCall Smith."
-- Booklist
Britain's Queen is beginning to feel her age, and needs some proper cheering up. Perhaps she'll find relief in an impromptu visit to a place that holds happy memories -- the former royal yacht, "Britannia," now moored near Edinburgh.
Hidden beneath a hoodie, Elizabeth walks out of Buckingham Palace into the freedom of a rainy London day and heads for King's Cross to catch a train to Scotland. But a characterful cast of royal attendants has discovered her missing. In uneasy alliance a lady-in-waiting, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the stables, a dresser, and a clerk from the shop that supplies Her Majesty's cheese set out to find her and bring her back before her absence becomes a national scandal.
Mrs Queen Takes the Train is a clever novel, offering a fresh look at a woman who wonders if she, like "Britannia" herself, has, too, become a relic of the past. William Kuhn paints a charming yet biting portrait of British social, political, and generational rivalries -- between upstairs and downstairs, the monarchy and the government, the old and the young. Comic and poignant, fast paced and clever, this delightful debut tweaks the pomp of the monarchy, going beneath its rigid formality to reveal the human heart of the woman at its center.
William Kuhn is a Boston-based biographer and historian, and the author, most recently, of Reading Jackie, a look at the personality of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through the books she chose to edit. He has written three previous books: Democratic Royalism; Henry and Mary Ponsonby; and The Politics of Pleasure.
Please join us on Thursday, October 25 at 7pm, as William Kuhn presents Mrs. Queen Takes the Train.
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Upcoming event:
contemporary mystery involving Gardner Museum heist
The Art Forger by B.A. (Barbara) Shapiro
Event Date: Sunday, October 28 at 3pm
"... a clever, twisty novel about art, authenticity, love, and betrayal. B. A. Shapiro knows about Degas, and she knows about art theft and forgery, and she also knows how to tell a gripping story."
-- author Tom Perrotta
B.A. (Barbara) Shapiro's new novel centers around the 1990 art heist from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In March of that year, thirteen works of art - worth over $500 million today - were stolen; this remains the largest unsolved art heist in history.
The protagonist of The Art Forger is Claire Roth, a struggling young artist who is about to discover that there's more to this crime than meets the eye.
Claire makes her living reproducing famous works of art for a popular online retailer. Desperate to improve her situation, she lets herself be lured into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner. After she agrees to reproduce a painting that was taken in the heist, she is led to wonder about the fine line between a reproduction and a forgery, and questions the painting's origins, taking her further into a labyrinth of deceit and hidden secrets.
B. A. Shapiro's razor-sharp writing and rich plot twists make The Art Forger an absorbing mystery that treats us to three centuries of forgers, art thieves, and obsessive collectors. It's a dazzling novel about seeing - and not seeing - the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.
Shapiro is the author of five suspense novels, as well a a non-fiction book. She lives in Boston and teaches fiction writing at Northeastern University.
Please join us on Sunday, October 28 at 3pm, when Barbara Shapiro reads from, takes questions, and signs The Art Forger.
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The work and life of Paul Cézanne
Cézanne: A Life by Alex Danchev
One of the most influential painters of his time and beyond, Cézanne was the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age who changed the way we see the world.
Alex Danchev tells the story of an artist who was originally considered a madman, a barbarian, and a sociopath. Beginning with the unsettled teenager in Aix, Danchev takes us through the trials of a painter who believed that art must be an expression of temperament but was tormented by self-doubt, who was rejected by the Salon for forty years, who sold nothing outside his immediate circle until his thirties, who had a family that he kept secret from his father until his forties, who had his first exhibition at the age of fifty-six - but who fiercely maintained his revolutionary beliefs.
Danchev shows us how the beliefs Cézanne held and the life he led became the obsession and inspiration of artists, writers, poets, and philosophers from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg.
A special feature of the book is a remarkable series of Cézanne's self-portraits, reproduced in full color. The book is written with brisk intellect, rich documentation, and eighty-eight color and fifty-two black-and-white illustrations.
Cézanne is not only the fascinating life of a visionary artist and extraordinary human being but also a searching assessment of his ongoing influence in the artistic imagination of our time.
Alex Danchev was educated at University College, Oxford; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and King's College London. He is the author of several highly acclaimed biographies, including Georges Braque. His most recent book is a collection of essays, On Art and War and Terror. He writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement and Times Higher Education. He is a professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham.
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Deluxe paperback anniversary edition
The Book of Common Prayer
with an Introduction by James Wood
This edition of the Anglican prayer book and literary masterpiece commemorates the 350th anniversary of the 1662 edition intimately familiar to our most enduring writers (Austen, Donne, Swift, the Brontës).
As essential to the canon as the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, The Book of Common Prayer has been in daily use for centuries.
Originally produced for the Church of England in the sixteenth century by Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake upon the accession to the throne of the ardently Catholic Queen Mary, it contains the entire liturgy as first presented in English - as well as some of the oldest phrases to be used by modern English speakers.
Here are the daily prayers, scripture readings, psalm recitals, and the services marking such religious milestones as baptism, confirmation, and marriage, all from the 1662 edition, whose words live on to this day in figures of speech, ceremonial vows and benedictions, and in the work of some of the greatest writers in English literature.
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and the author of the national bestseller How Fiction Works and the novel The Book Against God. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Wood himself will visit the Concord Bookshop on Sunday, November 4 at 3pm to discuss and sign a new book of essays, The Fun Stuff.
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"Oh, how the French love love!"
How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance by Marilyn Yalom
"[An] enchanting tour of French literature-from Abelard and Heloise in the 12th century to Marguerite Duras in the 20th and Philippe Sollers in the 21st."
-- Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
For hundreds of years, the French have championed themselves as guides to the art de l'amour through their literature, paintings, songs, and cinema. A French man or woman without amorous desire is considered defective, like someone missing the sense of smell or taste. Now revered scholar Marilyn Yalom intimately examines the tenets of this culture's enduring gospel of romance.
How the French Invented Love is an entertaining and masterful history of love à la française. Spanning the Middle Ages to the present, Yalom explores a love-obsessed culture through its great works of literature - from Moliere's comic love to the tragic love of Racine, from the existential love of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to the romanticism of George Sand and Alfred de Musset. A thoroughly engaging homage to French culture and literature interlaced with the author's delicious personal anecdotes; this is ideal for fans of Alain de Botton, Adam Gopnik, and Simon Schama.
Marilyn Yalom is a former professor of French and presently a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of widely acclaimed books such as A History of the Breast, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen, as well as The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds, which includes a portfolio of photographs by her son Reid S. Yalom. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, the psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.
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Bravery, survival, and the power of friendship
A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France by Caroline Moorehead
A staff favorite, and New York Times Notable Book of 2011, A Train in Winter is now available in paperback.
They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives; a singer at the Paris Opera; a midwife; a dental surgeon. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of sixteen, who scrawled "V" (for victory) on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped Allied airmen. Strangers to one another, hailing from villages and cities across France - 230 brave women united in defiance of their Nazi occupiers - they were eventually hunted down by the Gestapo. Separated from home and loved ones, imprisoned in a fort outside Paris, they found solace and strength in their deep affection and camaraderie.
In January 1943, they were sent to their final destination: Auschwitz. Only forty-nine would return to France.
Drawing on interviews with these women and their families, and on documents in German, French, and Polish archives, A Train in Winter is a remarkable account of the extraordinary courage of ordinary people - a story of bravery, survival, and the enduring power of female friendship.
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and an acclaimed book about refugees, Human Cargo. Her previous book was Dancing to the Precipice, a biography of Lucie de la Tour du Pin. She lives in London and Italy.
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In our window
Concord-Carlisle Community Chest
Since 1947, the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest has been following its mission: to meet the evolving needs of our communities and our donors by raising funds and giving responsibly to a broad range of human service and other organizations that strengthen Concord and Carlisle.
Peek in our window to learn more about the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest and their programs, including the upcoming "Rolls for Good" Pumpkin Roll and Family Fest, Sunday, October 28, 2-4pm at Emerson Field.
You may visit their website or phone 978-369-5250 for more information.
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