| | |
Store Hours
| |
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 24/7 online at:
|
|
Greetings! Mark your calendars for these upcoming author events: - Sunday, April 21 - Tatiana Holway presents The Flower of Empire
- Thursday, April 25 - Henriette Lazaridis Power presents The Clover House
- Sunday, April 28 - memoirists Katrina Kittle (Magical Journey) and Margaret Roach (The Backyard Parables)
Pulitzer Prize winners were announced earlier this week; scroll down for a list of winners and finalists in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography, History, and Poetry.
Our newsletter features the third installment of Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy; a fun-to-read book about dinosaurs (exploring myths and finding facts); and two great read-aloud children's picture books.
Take a peek in the community window highlights the Concord Museum's exhibit, "Early Spring: Henry Thoreau and Climate Change." Look for books for all ages - children's books about recycling and Planet Earth, the writing of H.D. Thoreau, and the work of Bill McKibben.
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
|
|
|
Sunday's event: An examination of Victorian cultural history, via the horticultural craze
The Flower of Empire by Tatiana Holway
Join us on Sunday, April 21 at 3pm, as Tatiana Holway reads from and takes questions on this narrative account of an astonishing flower and its sweeping impact on Victorian culture.
In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder" - a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal.
The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.
|
|
Upcoming event: novel spans contemporary Boston and wartime Greece
The Clover House by Henriette Lazaridis Power
Join us on Thursday, April 25 at 7pm, when Henriette Lazaridis Power reads from and signs The Clover House. This is a powerful debut novel about a woman shuttling between America and Greece to solve the mystery surrounding her family's past and claim an identity of her own.
This paperback original is sure to be a hit with book groups, perfect for fans of The Island and Sarah's Key.
Calliope Notaris Brown travels from Boston to the Greek city of Patras to sort through an inheritance from her uncle. She arrives during the wild abandon of Carnival, when the world is turned upside down and things are not as they seem. Digging through the keepsakes left to her, Callie stumbles upon clues to the wartime disappearance of the family's fortune and to the mystery of her estranged mother's chronic unhappiness.
Author Henriette Lazaridis, a Boston-area first generation Greek American, who has degrees in English literature from Middlebury College; Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar; and the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at Harvard for ten years, serving as an academic dean for four of those. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing exclusively in audio form. A competitive rower, Power trains regularly on the Charles River.
|
|
2013 Pulitzer Prizes
The 2013 winners were announced on Monday; winners and finalists in the Letters categories are listed below, with descriptions from the Pulitzer website:
|
|
Third book in the Old Filth trilogy
Last Friends by Jane Gardam
Last Friends will surprise and delight Gardam fans and appeal to new readers as it concludes a portrait of a marriage equal to any in the English language.
Edward Feathers, a.k.a. Old Filth (which stands for Failed in London Try Hong Kong), is a successful barrister who has spent most of his career practicing law in Southeast Asia. He met his wife, Betty, after she was released from an internment camp at the close of World War II. The first two books in this series - Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat - told the story of their life together first from Edward's perspective, and then from Betty's. Last Friends is Edward's longtime nemesis and Betty's sometime lover, Terry Veneering's turn and with its telling a magnificent and deeply moving story comes to its satisfying final pages.
Jane Gardam is the only author to have twice been awarded Britain's prestigious Costa (formally Whitbread Award) for Best Novel. She has also been a Booker Prize finalist. Her novel Old Filth was a finalist for the Orange Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in the south of England near the sea.
|
|
Scientific American explores facts and fiction about dinosaurs
My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs by Brian Switek
Paleontology meets pop culture in a talented young author's journey into the lives of dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs haunt museum halls, stomp across movie screens, and adorn just about any product you can name. Despite groundbreaking discoveries, the dinosaurs of our childhood are entrenched in our minds, and new science struggles to overcome the inaccurate monsters of Jurassic Park.
In My Beloved Brontosaurus, Brian Switek investigates the tension between dinosaurs as scientific objects and pop-culture icons as he introduces us to the latest theories in paleontology, from how dinosaurs had sex to what colors they were and just how they got so big. To understand why they died - after 150 million years of success - we need to know how they lived. With infectious enthusiasm, Switek explains that these giant beasts left behind a wealth of information in their bones - and it's only by piecing together these clues that we can begin to understand ourselves.
Switek visits excavation sites, museums, and high-tech labs to question what we've long held true about these creatures. My Beloved Brontosaurus is endearing, surprising, and essential to our understanding of our place on Earth.
|
|
Fun with wordplay
I Scream! Ice Cream!: A Book of Wordles
written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal; illustrated by Serge Bloch
What do "I Scream!" and "Ice Cream!" have in common? Nothing - besides the fact that they sound the same! The ever-surprising Amy Krouse Rosenthal unleashes her prolific wit in this silly and smart book of wordplay. Perfectly complemented by equally clever illustrations from the talented and internationally renowned Serge Bloch, this mind-bending book will have young readers thinking about words in an entirely new way!
|
|
Read-aloud (again and again!)
Again! by Emily Gravett
A little dragon and his favorite book make for a combustible combination in this clever picture book with a surprise ending.
It's nearly Cedric the dragon's bedtime, and for Cedric, bedtime means storytime! When his mother reads him his favorite book, he likes the story so much that he wants to hear it again...and again...and again!
Cedric's mom understands that the best stories are ripe for repetition, and she tries very hard to be patient. But sometimes dragons will be dragons - which is why this bedtime tale ends with an incendiary surprise!
Emily Gravett is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including the Kate Greenaway Award-winning Wolves and Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears. She is also the author and illustrator of Wolf Won't Bite, Blue Chameleon, The Rabbit Problem, Dogs, Spells, The Odd Egg, Monkey and Me, Orange Pear Apple Bear, and Meerkat Mail. She lives in Brighton, England, with her family.
|
|
In our window
The Concord Museum:
"Early Spring: Henry Thoreau and Climate Change"
"Early Spring: Henry Thoreau and Climate Change", a ground-breaking exhibition at the Concord Museum from April 12 through September 15, 2013, explores three centuries of careful observation of seasonal natural phenomena in Concord, a pool of data on the relationship between climate and biology that is essentially without parallel in North America. The exhibition also provides an extraordinary opportunity to examine the Concord Museum's renowned Thoreau collection that includes the desk on which Thoreau wrote Walden, together with examples of his original field notes, journal recordings, seasonal charts, and botanical specimens.
|
|
|
History Winner:
Poetry Winner: