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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! This Thursday (February 28) two novelists visit with their most recent works - Randy Susan Meyers presents The Comfort of Lies, and Juliette Fay presents The Shortest Way Home. On Sunday, March 3, Dick Lehr discusses and signs Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss. He co-authored both Whitey and Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal with Gerard O'Neill. This past weekend's event with memoirists Katrina Kenison and Margaret Roach was postponed due to weather-related travel issues; save the date of Sunday, April 28 at 3pm for their rescheduled visit!
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.
We have several wonderful paperback picks to share with you this week: a culinary travel memoir of France pairs well with a primer on the vital role of mushrooms; memoirist Terry Tempest Williams's mediation on art, voice, and expression and Jon Gertner's look at the innovation of Bell Labs are additional featured nonfiction books.
Our fiction pick this week is a historical novel set in the early 20th century, focusing on the Romanov family.
New in our Signed Books Gallery is Benediction from novelist Kent Haruf.
Scroll down to take a peek at this weeks community window, from The Nature Connection.
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: A conversation with novelists Randy Susan Meyers and Juliette Fay
Thursday, February 28 at 7pm
Please join us at the Bookshop on Thursday evening, February 28th, as we welcome Juliette Fay, author of The Shortest Way Home, and Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Comfort of Lies, in a joint reading and conversation.
With The Murderer's Daughters, Randy Susan Meyers established herself as an author to watch, garnering critical praise, award nominations, and passionate reader response. An international bestseller, the powerful first novel was called an "an impressively executed novel, disturbing and convincing" by the Boston Globe.
Now she brings us The Comfort of Lies, a compelling novel about three women caught in the aftermath of infidelity. 
Julliette Fay's first novel, Shelter Me, was a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award "Book of the Year;" her second novel, Deep Down True, was short-listed for the Women's Fiction award by the American Library Association.
She returns with The Shortest Way Home, a novel full of humor and hope for finding yourself where you least expected. This is another perfect serving of a slice of life!
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Upcoming event: Dick Lehr and
Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss
Sunday, March 3 at 3pm
From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss since Al Capone.
Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material, Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. "Whitey" Bulger, the crime boss and killer who brought the FBI to its knees. He is an American original - a psychopath who fostered a following with a frightening mix of terror, deadly intimidation and the deft touch of a politician who often helped a family in need meet their monthly rent. But the history shows that despite the early false myths portraying him as a Robin Hood figure, Whitey was a supreme narcissist, and everything - every interaction with family and his politician brother Bill Bulger, with underworld cohorts, with law enforcement, with his South Boston neighbors, and with his victims - was always about him. In an Irish-American neighborhood where loyalty has always been rule one, the Bulger brand was loyalty to oneself.
Whitey deconstructs Bulger's insatiable hunger for power and control. Building on their years of reporting and uncovering new Bulger family records, letters and prison files, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill examine and reveal the factors and forces that created the monster. This is a deeply rendered portrait of evil that spans nearly a century, taking Whitey from the streets of his boyhood Southie in the 1940s to his cell in Alcatraz in the 1950s to his cunning, corrupt pact with the FBI in the 1970s and, finally, to Santa Monica, California where for fifteen years he was hiding in plain sight as one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. In a lifetime of crime and murder that ended with his arrest in June 2011, Whitey Bulger became one of the most powerful and deadly crime bosses of the twentieth century. This is his story.
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Culinary travel memoir of France - *new* in paperback
The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France
by John Baxter
"Delightful. ... This is one of those delicious books that tickles the psyche, seduces the senses, and effortlessly enlarges the intellect simultaneously."
-- Publishers Weekly
This is a charming culinary travel memoir - part grand tour of France, part history of French cuisine - taking readers on a journey to discover and savor some of the world's great cultural achievements before they disappear completely.
Some of the most revered and complex elements of French cuisine are in danger of disappearing as old ways of agriculture, butchering, and cooking fade and are forgotten. John Baxter follows up his bestselling The Most Beautiful Walk in the World by taking his readers on the hunt for some of the most delicious and bizarre endangered foods of France.
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The vital role of mushrooms -
now in paperback
Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms
by Eugenia Bone
This is THE book to give to people interested in mushrooms, whether they are beginners, longtime mushroom hunters, or professional mycologists."
In Mycophilia, accomplished food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone examines the role of fungi as exotic delicacy, curative, poison, and hallucinogen, and ultimately discovers that a greater understanding of fungi is key to facing challenges of the 21st century.
Whether one's interest in mushrooms is culinary, scientific, recreational, or entrepreneurial, Mycophilia will open a reader's eyes to the vast and bizarre world of fungi and their role in the deeply complex yet profoundly graceful interplay of life on earth.
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A meditation on art, voice, expression - now in paperback
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
by Terry Tempest Williams
"Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder."
-- Ann Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds
Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her: "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone."
Readers of Williams's iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.
"They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother's journals were blank." What did Williams's mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question "What does it mean to have a voice?"
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Innovation and the next great idea -
now in paperback
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
"Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?"
-- Walter Isaacson
The New York Times Book Review
* The definitive history of America's greatest incubator of technological innovation *
In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, journalist Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history. Officially the research and development wing of AT&T, Bell Labs made seminal breakthroughs from the 1920s to the 1980s in everything from lasers to cellular elephony, becoming arguably the best laboratory for new ideas in the world. Gertner's riveting narrative traces the intersections between science, business, and society that allowed a cadre of eccentric geniuses to lay the foundations of the information age, offering lessons in management and innovation that are as vital today as they were a generation ago.
Jon Gertner grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, just a few hundred yards away from Bell Labs. He has been a writer for the New York Times Magazine since 2004 and is an editor at Fast Company magazine. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his family. |
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Historical fiction - now in paperback
Enchantments: A novel of Rasputin's daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison
"Bewitching . . . Harrison sets historic facts like jewels in this intricately fashioned work of exalted empathy and imagination, a literary Fabergé egg. . . . [A] dazzling return to historical fiction."
--Booklist (starred review)
St. Petersburg, 1917.
After Rasputin's body is pulled from the icy waters of the Neva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin's healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to her son, the headstrong prince Alyosha, who suffers from hemophilia. Soon after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and the Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest.
As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha find solace in each other's company. To escape the confinement of the palace, and to distract the prince from the pain she cannot heal, Masha tells him stories - some embellished and others entirely imagined - about Nikolay and Alexandra's courtship, Rasputin's exploits, and their wild and wonderful country, now on the brink of an irrevocable transformation.
In the worlds of their imagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future that will never come to pass feels close at hand.
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New in our Signed Books Gallery
Benediction by Kent Haruf
From the beloved and best-selling author of Plainsong and Eventide comes a story of life and death, and the ties that bind, once again set out on the High Plains in Holt, Colorado.
Despite the travails faced by each of the central families in Benediction - illness, estrangement, painful memories, and strained relationships - together they form bonds strong enough to carry them through the most difficult of times.
Bracing, sad and deeply illuminating, Benediction captures the fullness of life by representing every stage of it, including its extinction, as well as the hopes and dreams that sustain us along the way. Kent Haruf gives us his most indelible portrait yet of this small town and reveals, with grace and insight, the compassion, the suffering and, above all, the humanity of its inhabitants.
Author Kent Haruf's honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation; he has also been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He lives with his wife, Cathy, in their native Colorado. Signed copies of Benediction are on our shelves! |
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In our window
The Nature Connection:
Bringing Nature, Animals & the Arts to People
 The mission of The Nature Connection is "to support the human spirit by building connections between people and the natural world."
The Nature Connection brings animal and nature programs to people with limited access to the natural world. Founded over 25 years ago, we connect individuals with nature's capacity to heal and to teach.
The Nature Connection serves at-risk youth, people with disabilities and elders. We use a unique methodology that brings together seasonal natural materials, live animals, storytelling, music and other expressive arts.
Visiting each site once a month, or more, The Nature Connection brings educational and therapeutic nature programs to hospitals, residential programs, special needs schools, and nursing homes.
For more information, visit The Nature Connection website, or phone 978-369-2585.
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