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Store Hours
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Mon - Wed 9:30 - 6:00
Thursday 9:30 - 9:00
Friday 9:30 - 6:00
Sat 9:30 - 5:00
Sun Noon - 5:00
Open Thursdays until 9!
Open 24/7 online at:
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Greetings!
Baby, it's cold outside! It's warm in here - comfy chairs to sit in while you browse, pleasant holiday music playing in the background, and booksellers happy to help you find the perfect book for yourself, or for a gift - come on in out of the cold!
Mark you calendars for upcoming events - the next two authors to visit are George Howe Colt - the author of The Big House returns with Brothers, a look at his own family relationships and brothers throughout history - including the John and Henry Thoreau; also, Eve LaPlante, critically acclaimed author of Salem Witch Judge and American Jezebel, returns with Marmee & Louisa, a book which explores the relationship between these two Alcott women.
We're co-hosting a special off-site event next Tuesday, December 4, held at Farfalle Italian Market. Meet the authors of a favorite book club cookbook, sample some treats prepared by Farfallle, and pick up a copy of the book for members of your book discussion group. Easy and fun holiday shopping! Details, including RSVP information, are below.
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.
We've added to our Signed Books Gallery - first editions of Calvin Trillin's poetic verses about the 2012 election, and a beautiful book that pairs a local artist's photographs with reflections from Thoreau.
This week's newsletter picks include two art books - Winslow Homer's Weatherbeaten Maine, and John Updike's essays on art; and two books that examine who and what influences authors - specifically, Julian Barnes and Proust.
The community window highlights the upcoming holiday events sponsored by the Concord Chamber of Commerce.
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: National Book Award finalist discusses Brothers
Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History
by George Howe Colt
Event Date: Thursday, November 29 at 7pm
Please join us on Thursday, November 29 at 7pm, as George Howe Colt presents his new nonfiction, Brothers, which looks at his own siblings and brothers throughout history - including John and Henry David Thoreau.
The Big House, George Howe Colt's memoir of life at the Colt family vacation compound, was a runaway bestseller and 2003 National Book Award finalist. Now, Colt has returned to his beloved family, this time focusing on brothers.
Part memoir, part history, Brothers traces the relationships among the four Colt brothers while providing alternating chapters on famous brothers in history to illuminate concepts of brotherhood more broadly. Readers will learn about the Booth brothers, one the greatest stage actor of the 19th century, the other the assassin of a president; about how Henry David Thoreau's masterpieces were written under the shadow of his adored older brother John; and about the Marx Brothers, famous for their onscreen collaboration and camaraderie, competed bitterly behind the scenes.
In alternating chapters, readers hear about the Colt brothers, and the fraternal relationships that frame each of their lives. As in The Big House, the Colts steal the show: responsible but distant oldest brother Harry; cautious, artistic George; rebellious matinee idol Ned; and baby Mark have adventures that anyone who's ever had a sibling will find resonant.
Illuminating, affecting, and full of surprises, Brothers will be revelatory for any mother or father of sons, any brother or sister, anyone curious about how thoroughly a man's life can be molded by his brothers.
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Upcoming event: new research explores Louisa May Alcott and "Marmee"
Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante
Event Date: Sunday, December 2 at 3pm
Based on newly uncovered family papers, this groundbreaking and intensely moving portrait of Louisa May Alcott's relationship with her mother will completely transform our understanding of one of America's most beloved authors.
Since its release nearly 150 years ago, Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women has been a mainstay in American literature, while passionate Jo March and her calm, beloved "Marmee" have shaped generations of young women. Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa's professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.
But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, showing that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her unconventional path. Abigail, long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing companion to her famous husband and daughter, is revealed here as a politically active feminist firebrand, a fascinating thinker in her own right.
Examining family papers, archival documents, and diaries thought to have been destroyed, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time - and the fiercely independent daughter who was both inspired and restricted by her mother's dreams of freedom.
Marmee & Louisa is a gorgeously written and deeply felt biography of two extraordinary women and a key to our understanding of Louisa May Alcott's life and work.
Author Eve LaPlante will be at the Bookshop on Sunday, December 2 at 3pm, to read from, take questions, and sign her books -- please join us!
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Upcoming event: at Farfalle Italian Market
The Book Club Cookbook: Recipes and Food for Thought from Your Book Club's Favorite Books and Authors
by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp
Event Date: Tuesday, December 4 at 7pm
*** This event takes place at Farfalle Italian Market and Café, 26 Concord Crossing (across from Crosby's, in the Chang An plaza) ***
"Part cookbook, part celebration of the written word, [The Book Club Cookbook] illustrates how books and ideas can bring people together."
-Publishers Weekly
Meet Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, authors of The Book Club Cookbook, enjoy food tasting and wine samplings inspired by the cookbook, and learn how the authors selected these menus - designed to "spice up" your book group discussions.
The authors will be happy to personally inscribe copies of the book -- perfect for holiday gift giving for members of your book group and the bakers, cooks, and readers in your life.
Whether it's Roman Punch for The Age of Innocence, or Sabzi Challow (spinach and rice) with Lamb for The Kite Runner, or Swedish Meatballs and Glögg for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, nothing spices up a book club meeting like great eats. The Book Club Cookbook features recipes and discussion ideas from bestselling authors and book clubs across the country, and guides readers in selecting and preparing culinary masterpieces that blend perfectly with the literary masterpieces their club is reading. Also includes contributions from a host of today's bestselling authors including Kathryn Stockett, Sara Gruen, Jodi Picoult, Abraham Verghese, Annie Barrows, and Lisa See. A $20 pre-paid reservation includes Farfalle's food tasting and wine sampling. Please call Gina at 978-369-2900 to RSVP.
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Literary themes in Proust's work
Monsieur Proust's Library by Anka Muhlstein
"With Monsieur Proust's Library, Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. ... intellectual refinement, subtle understanding and deep literary culture ..."
--Wall Street Journal
Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a character without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations.
Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.
In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac's Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.
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Posthumous collection of Updike's art essays
Always Looking: Essays on Art by John Updike,
edited by Christopher Carduff
This posthumous collection of John Updike's art writings is a companion volume to the acclaimed Just Looking (1989 - out of print) and Still Looking (2005).
Always Looking opens with "The Clarity of Things," the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically "American" in American art.
This talk is followed by fourteen essays on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein.
The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.
John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, including twenty-three novels and dozens of collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.
Christopher Carduff is a member of the staff of The Library of America and the editor of John Updike's Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism.
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Celebrating Winslow Homer's legacy at Prouts Neck, Maine
Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine
edited by Thomas Andrew Denenberg; with essays by Kenyon Bolton, Erica E. Hirshler, James F. O'Gorman, and Marc Simpson
Weatherbeaten is a gorgeous companion to the Homer exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art (through December 30).
In 1883 American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) moved his studio from New York City to Prouts Neck, a slip of coastline just south of Portland, Maine. Here, over the course of twenty-five years, Homer produced his most celebrated and emotionally powerful paintings, which often depicted the dramatic views and storm-strewn skies around his home. Homer's influence and the Prouts Neck area would have a profound effect on the rise of a new American modernism, inspiring the artists who followed him.
This beautifully illustrated catalogue celebrates Homer's legacy at Prouts Neck, and documents the Portland Museum of Art's six-year conservation project to preserve the Winslow Homer Studio, the former carriage house in which Homer lived and worked. Photographs of the studio and site, never before open to the public, highlight views that are recognizable as the subject of so many of Homer's paintings. Essays by leading scholars examine his iconic masterpieces; his artistic development in Prouts Neck; the architecture of his studio; his relationship to French painting; and the full range of his marine paintings.
Editor Thomas A. Denenberg is director of the Shelburne Museum and has authored/edited several high quality art books. Kenyon Bolton is principal of Kenyon C. Bolton & Associates Architects. Erica E. Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at Boston's MFA. James F. O'Gorman is Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emeritus of the History of American Art, Wellesley College. Marc Simpson is associate director of the graduate program in the history of art, Williams College.
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Julian Barnes on his writing influences
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
by Julian Barnes
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain's greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career.
In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, "A Life with Books"), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures.
From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, "Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it."
Julian Barnes is the author of ten previous novels, three books of short stories, and three collections of journalism. In addition to the Booker Prize, his other honors include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.
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New in our Signed Books Gallery
Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse
by Calvin Trillin
In his latest laugh-out-loud book of political verse, Calvin Trillin provides a riotous depiction of the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Dogfight is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other poems and occasionally by what the author calls a pause for prose.
With the same barbed wit he displayed in the bestsellers Deciding the Next Decider, Obliviously On He Sails, and A Heckuva Job, America's deadline poet trains his sights on the Tea Party ("These folks were quick to vocally condemn/All handouts but the ones that went to them") and the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican nomination ("Though first-tier candidates were mostly out,/Republicans were asking, "What about/The second tier or what about the third?/Has nothing from those other tiers been heard?").
There is an ode to Michele Bachmann, sung to the tune of a Beatles classic and passages on the exit of candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum. On its way to the November 6 finale, Trillin's narrative takes us through such highlights as the January caucuses in frigid Iowa and the Republican convention.
Walden Pond by Bonnie McGrath
We were delighted when local artist Bonnie McGrath stopped in to sign copies of Walden Pond.
In the book, Bonnie McGrath's photos of Walden Pond are paired with reflections from Thoreau's Walden.
This book is a lovely gift for a visitor to the area, for someone who has fond memories of Walden, and for anyone who appreciates the beauty of nature and the wisdom of Thoreau's observations.
Signed editions are here!
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In our window
Holiday events sponsored by the Concord Chamber of Commerce
** Ack! Technical difficulties prevent us from including a photo of this week's community window - a gorgeous display from the Concord Chamber of Commerce. Stroll down Main Street, if you're in town, or visit our Facebook page to see the festive and wintry highlights.**
42nd annual Holiday Parade and Tree Lighting, Sunday,
December 2, beginning at 4:45pm:
- Parade begins at 4:45pm at the corner of Sudbury Road and Thoreau Street
- tree lighting at approximately 5:15pm
- Enjoy this annual event with the family
- See Frosty, the Gingerbread Man, Mrs. Claus, Louisa May Alcott and more with Santa arriving by Fire Engine
- Music under the tree by Sounds of Concord
- Free
Holiday Shopping Night, Thursday, December 13 5-8pm:
- Shops on Main Street and Walden Street, Concord Center are open for holiday shopping with refreshments, holiday specials, and entertainment
- Strolling carolers
- Special drawings for prizes and Gift of Concord gift certificates
For more information about The Concord Chamber of Commerce, visit their website or "like" them on Facebook.
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