Boswell and The Milwaukee Rep present a conversation and preview of Of Mice and Men, one of the most celebrated works in American literature, which runs in the Quadracci Powerhouse from January 19 to February 21, 2016. At this exclusive talk and preview, we will feature James Pickering, who is celebrating his forty-second season with The Rep. This year, Mr. Pickering will play Candy; this is his third production of the show with The Rep.

One of the most celebrated works in American literature, Of Mice and Men is a compelling tale of friendship and survival. George and Lennie are migrant workers who dream of settling down on a farm where the land stretches on forever and the soft rabbits need tending. This classic drama is a touching portrait of two underdogs in pursuit of the American dream. Mark Clements remounts his critically-acclaimed production using Milwaukee Rep favorites after a record-setting production in Philadelphia, where it won 8 Barrymore Awards (including Best Production).

We're excited to host Rebecca Scherm at Boswell for a reading and signing of her latest novel, Unbecoming, an intricately plotted, delicately nuanced heist novel that's won praise from writers such as Kate Atkinson, Karen Joy Fowler, and Elizabeth George. Unbecoming is a major debut novel of literary suspense about a small-town girl who dabbles in self-forgery even before being swept into the world of international art fraud-but then makes herself at home in a dangerous, dare-devil milieu far from everything she once knew.

Here's what Daniel Goldin says about Unbecoming: "An American émigré, Julie restores porcelain and jewelry in a small Paris studio, or well, that's what it appears they are doing. And Julie? She's actually Grace, on the run from an art heist back in Tennessee. Her boyfriend Riley and two of their friends Alls and Greg tried to rob a historic home and were caught. Now their sentence is up and they're out, but why should Grace care? Well, for one thing, Riley is secretly her husband and he and Alls might know a little more than Grace lets on. Rebecca Scherm's first novel pulls back the layers of a life filled with cover ups. It may seem like I've given too much away, but honestly, that's just the setup. It might be a bit quieter than some literary thrillers, but when I say that the novel is a character study, it's meant in a Hitchcockian way; the question at the end of the day is whether Grace is a good person who makes bad choices or a sociopath in training."

Milwaukee poet Mark Zimmermann is coming to Boswell to read from and sign copies of his latest poetry collection, Impersonations. Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Impersonations is comprised of first-person lipogram poems narrated by a cast of literary characters, historical figures, and authors-from Sir John Falstaff to Mildred Ratched, from Grigory Rasputin to Lady Diana, from Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga. All poems in Impersonations are written in a form, the lipogram, in which any number of letters of the alphabet are deliberately excluded from a work;

In Impersonations, Zimmermann combines subject and form in poems written by using words made only from letters that appear in a title subject's name. For instance, "Grigory Rasputin" uses only words drawn from the letter pool a-i-o-u-g-n-p-r-s-t-y; "Moby Dick" uses only i-o-b-c-d-k-m-y, and so forth.