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Store Hours
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Mon - Wed 9:30 - 6:00
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Greetings!
As always, our newsletter contains information about upcoming events. The next two authors to visit are children's author/illustrator Nancy Poydar with her read-aloud picture book about a favorite toy, and a award-winning journalist Brian McGrory with his memoir of "love, acceptance, and change."
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 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo's memoir, another fantastic selection from the New York Review of Books, and an immersive look at medieval history.
We have a bonanza of books new to our Signed Books Gallery - memoir, fiction, science, literary criticism, and a short fiction collection from Pulitzer Prize winner (and MacArthur "Genius"!) Junot Díaz. Perfect gifts for the holidays, or to add to your own collection.
The community window highlights the Concord Children's Center, their Open House, and bookshop fundraiser.
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: Children's author/illustrator Nancy Poydar
Bus Driver written and illustrated by Nancy Poydar
Event date: Saturday, November 10 at 1pm
Nancy Poydar's most recent book for children is Bus Driver, a charming read-aloud picture book about the joy of having a favorite toy. Bus Driver, written and illustrated by Poydar - a local area resident - is sure to find its way into the hearts of preschoolers, early readers, and their parents and caregivers.
Did you have a favorite toy? One you wouldn't leave home without? Do you remember what it felt like, what it smelled like, or how it made you feel? Bus Driver is the story of how Max finds a toy bus driver. It becomes his most prized possession. Since he takes it everywhere, he misplaces it constantly. Is Max ever able to find Bus Driver by himself? What happens when Max finds another toy?
Author/illustrator Nancy Poydar grew up in eastern Massachusetts. After earning degrees in English and education from Tufts University, Nancy studied art at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, and the Boston Museum School. She taught sixth grade in Concord for fourteen years.
The author will talk about her books, read Bus Driver, and sign copies of her book at an author program at the Concord Bookshop on Saturday, November 10 at 1pm. This is a special event time, in conjunction with the Concord Children's Center book fair, which is being held at the Bookshop that day.
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Upcoming event: Award-winning Boston Globe journalist with Buddy
Buddy: How a Rooster Made Me a Family Man by Brian McGrory
Event Date: Sunday, November 18 at 7pm
Award-winning journalist Brian McGrory goes head to beak in a battle royale with another male for a top-spot in his home, vying for dominance with the family's pet rooster.
Brian McGrory's life changed drastically after the death of his beloved dog, Harry: he fell in love with Pam, Harry's veterinarian. Though Brian's only responsibility used to be his adored Harry, Pam came with accessories that could not have been more exotic to the city-loving bachelor: a home in suburbia, two young daughters, two dogs, two cats, two rabbits, and a portly, snow white, red-crowned-and-wattled step-rooster named Buddy.
While Buddy loves the women of the house, he takes Brian's presence as an affront, doing everything he can to drive out his rival. Initially resistant to elements of his new life and to the loud, aggressive rooster, Brian eventually sees that Buddy shares the kind of extraordinary relationship with Pam and her two girls that he wants for himself. This is an inherently human story of love, acceptance, and change.
In the tradition of bestsellers like Marley and Me, Dewey, and The Tender Bar comes a heartwarming and wise tale of finding love in life's second chapter - and how it means all the more when you have to fight for it. Brian McGrory is a longtime newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist, and has written for and edited the Boston Globe since 1989. He has a twice weekly column that appears on the front of the metro section, for which he has won the Scripps Howard journalism award, and is the author of four novels. He lives in Massachusetts with his entire family.
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Memoir from Pulitzer Prize winner
Elsewhere: A memoir by Richard Russo
"Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown."
--Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.
Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.
A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.
Author Richard Russo lives with his wife in Camden, Maine, and Boston. In 2002 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls.
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The charm of Voltaire
Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford; Introduction by Adam Gopnik
"Voltaire in Love is Nancy Mitford's most searching book. On the surface it is all polish and wit: underneath it is solid history."
-- Time
Voltaire in Love is another nicely packaged New York Review of Books Classic - the inimitable Nancy Mitford's account of Voltaire's sixteen-year affair with the comely Marquise du Châtelet - in her own right a renowned mathematician and original expositor of Newtonian ideas - is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment.
The lusty and algebra-obsessed marquise, it so happens, was also in love with another mathematician, Maupertuis, and devoted to gambling besides. She had a rival for Voltaire's affections in the future Frederick the Great of Prussia, and later in the scampish philosophe's own niece.
In this supremely entertaining popular biography, Mitford places Voltaire and the Marquise in the Château de Cirey, where the lovers, equipped with experimental laboratories, a darkroom, and an immense library of more than twenty-one thousand volumes, pursued their amours philosophiques. This is a supremely entertaining popular biography.
Author Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) was born into the British aristocracy and, by her own account, brought up without an education, except in riding and French. She managed a London bookshop during the Second World War, then moved to Paris, where she began to write her celebrated and successful novels, among them The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, about the foibles of the English upper class. Mitford was also the author of three additional biographies: Madame de Pompadour, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great.
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, writing often on French life and literature. His many books include Paris to the Moon, an anthropology of modern French manners, and The Table Comes First, an essay on the philosophy of eating. He has also written introductions to new editions of works by authors such as Balzac, Alain-Fournier, Hugo, and Maupassant. In 2012, Gopnik was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
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Living social history
The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer
"Mortimer addresses every aspect of medieval life, from the mundane to the bizarre"
--The Washington Post
The past is a foreign country. This is your guidebook. A time machine has just transported you back into the fourteenth century. What do you see? How do you dress? How do you earn a living and how much are you paid? What sort of food will you be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord? And more important, where will you stay?
The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England is not your typical look at a historical period. This radical new approach shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived.
Through the use of daily chronicles, letters, household accounts, and poems of the day, Mortimer transports you back in time, providing answers to questions typically ignored by traditional historians. You will learn how to greet people on the street, what to use as toilet paper, why a physician might want to taste your blood, and how to know whether you are coming down with leprosy.
The result is the most astonishing social history book you're ever likely to read: revolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail, and startling for its portrayal of humanity in an age of violence, exuberance, and fear.
Author Ian Mortimer is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was awarded the Alexander Prize in 2004 for his work on the social history of medicine. He holds a Ph.D. in history and a higher doctorate from the University of Exeter. He has penned five other medieval books, most recently the revolutionary study Medieval Intrigue: Decoding Royal Conspiracies. He has also worked for several archive and historical research organizations in the UK, where he lives with his wife and children.
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New in our Signed Books Gallery
Driving the Saudis by Jayne Amelia Larson
 What an evening! Jayne Amelia Larson took on the roles of two characters from her memoir, as she performed parts of Driving the Saudis.
Larson was the only female driver in a fleet of 40 who were on call 24/7 during the royal family's 7-week visit to Beverly Hills.
She experienced a slice of life she never expected, and learned that - despite our differences - the are universal traits and truths common to all of us.
Signed books are on our shelves!
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The Shortest Way Home by Juliette Fay 
Publisher's Weekly calls Juliette Fay's third novel (after Shelter Me and Deep Down True) "a touching exploration of a damaged family working to repair itself, with universal appeal."
We were delighted when Ms. Fay stopped in the bookshop to sign copies of her most recent novel - they're on our shelves, ready for you and your book group!
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Hallucinations by Dr. Oliver Sacks
Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks had both a personal and a professional interest in psychedelics. These, along with his early migraine experiences, launched a lifelong investigation into the varieties of hallucinatory experience.
Here, with his usual elegance, curiosity, and compassion, Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.
Signed first editions of Hallucinations are in the bookshop!
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The Fun Stuff by James Wood
It was fun, indeed, when James Wood visited with his most recent collection of essays.
Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works - books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation - The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel.
Signed first editions are on our shelves - a thoughtful gift for the reader in your life.
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This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
When Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award), was in town for the Concord Festival of Authors, and generously signed copies of This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.
He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT.
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In our window
Concord Children's Center Open House
This week's window display was created by The Concord Children's Center, highlighting their Open House on November 17. The Concord Children's Center is hosting a fundraiser at the bookshop on Saturday, November 10 -- a percentage of all sales from the day will benefit CCC.
The Concord Children's Center provides quality year-round care and early childhood education for over 200 children starting at ten weeks of age. Our programs serve infants, toddlers, preschoolers and after kindergartners at three locations in Concord.
We offer children experiences that foster a positive self-image and help build the skills needed for growth in all aspects of development. Parents can be confident that their children are secure in a nurturing and stimulating environment.
For more information about The Concord Children's Center, visit their website. And, come on in to the bookshop on Saturday when author Nancy Poydar visits as part of the CCC book fair.
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