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Established 1940

November 13, 2013

 

 

 

 The Concord Bookshop

65 Main Street

Concord, MA  01742

 

978-369-2405


 
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
 
 
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Upcoming Events

 


We welcome Doris Kearns Goodwin, signing The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

Marcella Pixley presents Freak

We welcome Michael Goodwin, coordinator of CCHS's "Rivers & Revolutions" program, as profiled by Katrina Fried in American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom

Harvard professor Lawrence Buell presents The Dream of the Great American Novel

We welcome Susan Minot with Thirty Girls

Sarah Brannen and Melissa Stewart present Feathers, a nonfiction book for young readers

Terry Golson joins us with The Farmstead Egg Guide & Cookbook

 

 
Greetings from Main Street!

The next visitor in our Fall Author Series is Andre Dubus III with his book of four linked novellas, Dirty Love. See the complete list of events in our left sidebar; as always, if you're unable to attend an event, but would like a signed copy of the featured book, please call or email us to arrange personalization. 

When you're in the bookshop, be sure to take a look at our Author of the Month display - November features John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee mysteries.
 
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."

  

Comments are always welcome via email to

Our next event - 

Sunday, November 17 at 3pm

Andre Dubus III presents Dirty Love

 

In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. 

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty"- tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. 

 

Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

 
Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last DaysHouse of Sand and Fog (a finalist for the National Book Award), and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family north of Boston.

Upcoming event - 

Sunday, November 24 at 3pm

Doris Kearns Goodwin signs The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

 

After Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin wields her magic on another larger-than-life president, and another momentous and raucous American time period as she brings Theodore Roosevelt, the muckraking journalists, and the Progressive Era to life.

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the "muckraking" press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture between the two led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that resulted in the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the diminishment of Theodore Roosevelt's progressive wing of the Republican Party.

The Bully Pulpit describes a time in our history that enlightened and changed the country, ushered in the modern age, and produced some unforgettable men and women.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and an oft-seen political commentator. She is the author of biographies of several U.S. Presidents, including Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which was made into the movie Lincoln.
 

Gorgeous slip-cased Updike collection from Library of America

John Updike: The Collected Stories by John Updike

edited by Christopher Carduff

 
From his first collection, The Same Door, released in 1959, to his last, My Father's Tears, published fifty years later, John Updike was America's reigning master of the short story, "our second Hawthorne," as Philip Roth described him. 

His evocations of small-town Pennsylvania life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual awakening, transfixed readers; Updike displayed the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was his signature.
 
This slip-cased two-volume set includes 186 unforgettable stories. Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time. 

Newly discovered journal from a young Flannery O'Connor

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor

 

The inspiring devotional journal of a young Flannery O'Connor, which contains the key to her life and work.

 

"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this recently discovered prayer journal. Written from 1946 to 1947, when O'Connor was far from home and a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, this journal is an extraordinary portal into the interior life of the great writer. 

 

Not only does it reveal the deeply entwined nature of O'Connor's yearning for God and literary inspiration but it also shows her carefully working out a singular relationship to God. "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to you."

 

O'Connor's prayers are so intensely imaginative that she seems to will God into existence - it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during these years. 

 

Profoundly moving and original, A Prayer Journal is a record of a brilliant young woman's coming of age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

 

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.

Essential Duke Ellington biography

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout

 

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in jazz, African American history, or modern American culture.   

 

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century-and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some fifteen hundred compositions, many of which, like "Mood Indigo" and "Sophisticated Lady," remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers and concealed his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm.

Terry Teachout, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man play about Armstrong's life and times. 

New in our Signed Books Gallery

The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick

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Heather Vogel Frederick, author of the popular Mother-Daughter Book Club series for middle grade readers stopped in and signed books for us. The books are set in Concord, and focus on the joy of fiction, friends, and family.  

 

We have signed editions of all books in the series, a great gift!

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The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom

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A new novel from the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet In Heaven

 

The First Phone Call From Heaven is a heart-racing page-turner and a soul-fulfilling tale of hope, love and the power of belief

 

Signed editions are on our shelves!

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 The Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan


Award-winning investigative reporter and author Hank Phillippi Ryan has penned another stellar mystery featuring "Jane Ryland."

The Wrong Girl is a riveting novel of familial relationships - both known and unknown - vile greed, senseless murder, and the ultimate in deception. What if you didn't know the truth about your own family?

We have signed editions of The Wrong Girl.

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Coal The Cape Cod Bear by Kathleen Madaus

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Coal the Cape Cod Bear is a true story, written in rhyme, about a black bear who swam across the Cape Cod canal and wandered the Cape (until safely captured and returned to a better environment). 

 

A very sweet story with captivating photographs, Coal is perfect for young readers who enjoy animals, the Cape, or stories in rhyme.

 

Signed editions of Coal the Cape Cod Bear are on our shelves.

Kids pick: Definitive edition of a beloved seasonal classic

Over the River and Through the Wood: The New England Boy's Song About Thanksgiving Day 

written by L. Maria Child, illustrated by Matt Tavares

  

over the river  With his keen eye for detail, fresh and surprising perspectives, and all the warmth and coziness of a big holiday dinner, Matt Tavares illuminates the original text of Lydia Maria Child's verse about Thanksgiving Day, which has marked the start of the holiday season for generations of children.


Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was an activist and writer of novels, pamphlets, and works for children. She often used her writing to advocate for slaves, women, and Native Americans. Lydia Maria Child was born in Medford, Mass., where her grandfather's house, which she celebrates in her poem, still stands.

Matt Tavares is the illustrator of many books for children, including 'Twas the Night before Christmas and Kristin Kladstrup's The Gingerbread Pirates. He is also the author-illustrator of several books about baseball: Zachary's Ball, Oliver's Game, Mudball, and Henry Aaron's Dream. Mr. Tavares lives in Ogunquit.

Author of the Month

John D. MacDonald

 
John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) was an American novelist and short-story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear.

 

In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980, he won a National Book Award.

 

MacDonald's protagonists were often intelligent and introspective men, sometimes with a hard cynical streak. Travis McGee made his living by recovering the loot from thefts and swindles, keeping half to finance his "retirement," which he took in pieces as he went along. He first appeared in the 1964 novel The Deep Blue Good-by and was last seen in The Lonely Silver Rain in 1985.

 

All titles in the 21-volume series include a color, a mnemonic device which was suggested by his publisher so that when harried travelers in airports looked to buy a book, they could at once see those MacDonald titles they had not yet read.

 

We are pleased to offer the Travis McGee novels, in every color of the rainbow!

 

(sources: randomhouse.com, wikipedia.org)


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