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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
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Greetings!
Hello from Main Street!
After a hiatus for the holidays, our Author Series starts up again this weekend, with an anthology of short mysteries. Join us on Sunday for a panel with five of the authors featured in the 2013 edition of Best New England Crime Stories: Blood Moon.
As with all our events, if you can't visit us in person to purchase a signed copy of the featured book, you're welcome to call or email before the event - we'll ask the author to personally inscribe the book to your specifications, and will arrange to ship the book or hold it for pick up.
New in hardcover this week is George Saunders hot-off-the-presses collection of short fiction, Tenth of December. Our newsletter also features four fiction picks that are new in paperback editions - thrillers, suspense, and mysteries.
Our community window highlights books with wonderful graphic and pop-art covers. From graphic novels to art books to classics encased in eye-catching designs, it's a feast for the eyes and mind!
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: mystery anthology
Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon
Anthology featuring local mystery authors
Level Best Books' annual crime wave continues with release of Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon, its new anthology of original tales of cons, capers, subterfuge, suspense and, of course, murder and mayhem.
Featuring thirty-one of New England's most acclaimed mystery and crime writers, along with several compelling new voices, this anthology takes its readers on a sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious, walk down the region's dark side.
Participants in the panel include:
Katherine Fast aka Kat is focusing on fiction writing, watercolor, handwriting analysis, and is doing her level best as a design and production editor. She and her husband live in Weston, Massachusetts.
Ruth M. McCarty's short mysteries have appeared in all Level Best Books' anthologies. She received honorable mentions in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for her flash fiction and won the 2009 Derringer award for Best Flash Story for "No Flowers for Stacey" published in Deadfall: Crime Stories by New England Writers. She lives in Leominster, Massachusetts with her family.
Ben and Beth Oak, both Connecticut natives, met in a literature course at Boston University and have been enthralled with Henry David Thoreau (and each other) ever since. As B. B. Oak they have created a mystery series featuring Thoreau as "the Sherlock Holmes of Walden Pond," and the first book is slated for publication by Kensington in 2013.
A co-editor at Level Best Books and the author of three Miranda Lewis "living history" mysteries, Leslie Wheeler of Cambridge is now working on a new series. She is Speakers Bureau Coordinator of Sisters in Crime/New England, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake Committee.
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Short fiction collection from MacArthur fellow
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.
In the taut opener, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act?
In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned.
And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is.
The unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders's signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.
MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow George Saunders is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, including Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a collection of essays and a book for children. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
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Literary thriller - now in paperback
Alys, Always by Harriet Lane
"Harriet Lane writes with style, wrapping her suspenseful debut in lovely bits of gently creepy description, as well as delicious social critique...a fast, sharp read."
-- Boston Globe
On a bitter winter's night, Frances Thorpe comes upon the aftermath of a car crash and, while comforting the dying driver, Alys Kyte, hears her final words.
The wife of a celebrated novelist, Alys moved in rarefied circles, and when Frances agrees to meet the bereaved family, she glimpses a world entirely foreign to her: cultured, wealthy, and privileged. While slowly forging a friendship with Alys's carelessly charismatic daughter, Frances finds her own life takes a dramatic turn, propelling her from an anonymous existence as an assistant editor for the books section of a newspaper to the dizzying heights of literary society.
Transfixing, insightful, and unsettling, Alys, Always drops us into the mind of an enigmatic young woman whose perspective on a glamorous world also shines a light on those on the outside who would risk all to become part of it.
Author Harriet Lane has worked as an editor and writer at Tatler and the Observer. She has also written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and Vogue. She lives in London.
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Gripping thriller - now in paperback
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
"A gripping thriller . . . Kunzru uses his extraordinary gifts as a storyteller-his brightly textured prose, his empathetic understanding of his characters, his narrative flair-to turn a tabloidy tale into a genuinely moving portrait of a marriage and the difficulties of parenthood."
--Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times
Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed - but not unchanged - the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them.
Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shape-shifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe.
Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, and My Revolutions, and is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize from the Society of Authors, a British Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Granta has named him one of its twenty best young British novelists, and he was a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications.
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The cost of survival and deception - now in paperback
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan
Grace Winter, 22, is both a newlywed and a widow. She is also on trial for her life.
In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying Grace and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize has exceeded capacity. For any to live, some must die.
As the castaways battle the elements and each other, Grace recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met, and the new life of privilege she thought she'd found. Will she pay any price to keep it?
The Lifeboat is a page-turning novel of hard choices and survival, narrated by a woman as unforgettable and complex as the events she describes.
Author Charlotte Rogan studied at Princeton University; she lives in Westport, Connecticut.
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Latest Inspector Lynley novel -
now in paperback
Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George
Elizabeth George returns with the 17th "Inspector Lynley" novel, now in paperback!
Inspector Thomas Lynley is mystified when he's sent undercover to investigate the death of Ian Cresswell at the request of the man's uncle, the wealthy and influential Bernard Fairclough. The death has been ruled an accidental drowning, and nothing on the surface indicates otherwise.
But digging soon reveals that the Fairclough clan is awash in secrets, lies, and motives. As the investigation escalates, the Fairclough family's veneer cracks, with deception and self-delusion threatening to destroy everyone and everything in its path.
Elizabeth George is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen suspense novels, one book of nonfiction, two short-story collections, and has made a recent foray into young adult books. Her work has been honored with the Anthony and Agatha awards, as well as several other prestigious prizes.
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In our window
Pop Art! Graphic Covers!
 
We've pulled some of our favorite graphic and eye-popping covers and put them in the community window this week. Take a walk down Main Street and feast your eyes on this dazzling display!
Then, come on in and peek between the covers; you'll be just as pleased with what you find inside the pages.
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