The Readable Feast (thereadablefeast.com) is excited to host A Taste of Boston Food Writing along with co-sponsors, Santé Magazine (isantemagazine.com), and Pangyrus Literary Magazine (pangyrus.com). This session will celebrate the one thing every person on the planet has in common: food. While our panel of writers share short essays, attendees will sample morsels to add a tasty dimension to the stories. Anyone inspired to write their own story can submit to Pangyrus Literary Magazine for their first-ever food-writing contest.
Four Stories is a literary series bridging Greater Boston’s nightlife and arts community (and now Tokyo's, too!). Each event is held in a club, bar, or lounge, and features appearances from some of the most acclaimed authors in the nation, reading their work under a unified theme and answering joke questions from the audience. In this special installment for Lit Crawl, we will be featuring Olivia Kate Cerrone, author of The Hunger Saint, a historical novella about the child miners of Sicily; E. Dolores Johnson, an essayist who focuses on inter-racialism; Whitney Scharer, whose forthcoming debut novel, The Age of Light, is based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller; and Courtney Sender, whose fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, American Short Fiction, and The Georgia Review. So come experience Four Stories. It’s like a nineteenth-century salon ― socializing, witty banter, corsets optional.
Have you ever hankered to hear a football-playing astronaut read his own poetry? Or dreamed of learning to draw from a prize-winning illustrator? Come let our talented authors perform and entertain you at this literary variety show featuring music, monologues, and more! You'll see acts from poet and performer Krysten Hill, actress and author Marianne Leone, former NFL player and astronaut Leland Melvin, Guggenheim fellow and artist Eileen Myles, illustrator and native Mainer Chris Van Dusen, and other special guests. You won't want to miss this one-night-only special event, hosted by Love Letters advice columnist and entertainment reporter Meredith Goldstein. The Book Revue is made possible by the Boston Globe.
Did you know that the way we celebrate Halloween in America today has its roots in Ireland? It’s true! When more than a million Irish natives migrated to the United States during the nineteenth-century potato famine, they brought their customs with them—and that includes many of their Celtic traditions. Cultured Kids will guide participants through the origins of many of our Halloween traditions, from trick-or-treating to carving spooky . . . potatoes? Find out much more, and decorate your very own Halloween spud, in this fascinating exploration of history, migration, and everyone’s favorite holiday.
Author Christopher Castellani will perform the first page of YOUR unpublished manuscript for the audience and a panel of three established agent judges who specialize in literary and commercial fiction as well as narrative nonfiction: Esmond Harmsworth, Ann Collette, and Amaryah Orenstein. When an agent hears a line that would prompt her to stop reading, he or she will raise a hand. Castellani will keep reading until a second agent raises a hand. The agents will then discuss why the lines gave them pause and offer suggestions to the author. All excerpts are read and evaluated anonymously. At the end, a winner will be crowned and win a prize. Note to participants: Please bring THE FIRST 250 WORDS of your manuscript double-spaced, titled, with its genre (fiction or nonfiction only, please) marked clearly at the top. Given the volume of submissions, we can’t guarantee that yours will be read aloud. This session is not for the thin-skinned! Sponsored by GrubStreet.
It’s Waldo’s thirtieth birthday, and he just keeps getting better at hiding! This time he’s hiding at the Boston Public Library, and we need your help to find him. Pick up an entry form from one of our volunteers in Guastavino Hall, find the three Waldos hidden throughout the Boston Public Library, and return your completed form for a chance to win an amazing prize from Candlewick Press!
The short story form isn’t just a springboard to longer-form writing; for many authors, it’s the perfect small canvas on which to explore, experiment, and let imaginations run wild. In this session, we’ll hear from three skilled practitioners of the genre. Noy Holland has been perfecting her short story craft for the past two decades. Her new collection, I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like, gathers a dozen previously published stories with thirty new ones, ranging in length from a single page to a novella, with lyrical language walking the line between poetry and prose. Debut author K. L. Pereira is also interested in the spaces between; her collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers, uses the tropes of fairy and folk tales to illuminate the experiences of those who inhabit the edges and the dark places. And Edie Meidav, the author of three novels, ranges widely in her collection Kingdom of the Young, which “glides among an impressive breadth of storytelling modes with warmth and easy brilliance,” according to a starred review from Kirkus. Our host for this session is Marjan Kamali, author of the novel Together Tea and one of the curators of the Arlington Author Salon.
Illuminate your imagination! Puppet Showplace Theater artists will demonstrate the many amazing ways you can bring classic stories and characters to life using light, shadow, and everyday materials. Visitors can drop in, make your own puppet character and bring it to life on stage!
Ages 5+ with an adult
Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed? Or just gotten a case of the crabbies? Anyone who’s ever been in a bad mood (and that’s pretty much everybody) can relate to Curly, who’s at the center of Lemony Snicket’s new picture book The Bad Mood and the Stick. When Curly’s bad mood prompts her to pick up a stick and poke her little brother with it, she sets into motion a whole series of events (which is something Snicket knows a lot about!) that vividly illustrates the sometimes surprising reverberations of a seemingly small action. Featuring Matthew Forsythe’s rainbow-hued watercolor illustrations, Snicket’s new book for young readers (and listeners!) is full of the humor and heart Snicket is famous for. We’re pleased to welcome back Lemony Snicket as this year’s BBF kids’ keynote, and we can’t wait for what’s sure to be a lively and unexpected start to families’ day at the Boston Book Festival!
Small presses offer unique advantages and challenges for writers. This panel seeks to help writers successfully navigate the world of indie publishing across genres, especially as additional work falls on writers’ shoulders, from hiring outside editors to generating publicity. Building and maintaining relationships with literary magazines can also serve as a crucial factor in establishing oneself as a professional author. Moderator Catherine Parnell, senior associate editor of Consequence magazine, will lead a conversation with novelist Olivia Kate Cerrone (The Hunger Saint), travel memoirist Jennifer Crystal (Et Voilà), short story author Courtney McDermott (How They Spend Their Sundays), and poet and publisher Enzo Silon Surin (A Letter of Resignation). These indie publishing experts will discuss the practices that helped them foster high-quality books and connect with readers while addressing the limitations of the small press world.
You solve problems every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how to finish your homework before bedtime. The kids in the books we read face problems, too—from everyday hurdles like these to huge obstacles we hope we’ll never encounter. In this session, we’ll hear from four authors whose characters tackle problems—and we might even learn about what challenges the authors faced while writing about them! In The Perfect Score, school story specialist Rob Buyea writes about how a group of students approach a familiar predicament: taking standardized tests. In her latest middle grade novel, Saturdays with Hitchcock, Printz Award–winning author Ellen Wittlinger writes about Maisie, a tween facing a pair of problems: her grandma’s growing dementia and her own messy love triangle—something she’s not sure she even wants. Norah, the heroine of Barbara Dee’s Halfway Normal, just wants to put her big problem (overcoming leukemia) behind her and start middle school like a normal kid. And in Michelle Cuevas’s wildly inventive The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole, Stella’s problems of loss and grief take on cosmic significance, manifesting as a black hole named Larry. Do you have a problem—in writing or in life—you’d like a creative solution to? Bring your questions to this session, hosted by educator and former BPL writer-in-residence Jennifer De Leon.
Ages 7–12
Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017, Somerville-based independent children’s publisher Candlewick Press has become an industry leader in producing high-quality books for young readers. President and Publisher Karen Lotz and Creative Director and Associate Publisher Chris Paul will be in conversation with some of their acclaimed authors and illustrators. Ekua Holmes was already a celebrated visual artist, curator, and arts educator before illustrating her first picture book. Voice of Freedom (words by Carole Boston Weatherford) went on to win a John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award and was recognized with a Caldecott Honor. Holmes has continued to develop her mixed-media illustrations in Kwame Alexander’s Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets. Mira Bartók has also pivoted toward children’s books, having previously published a memoir, The Memory Palace, before penning the new middle-grade fantasy novel The Wonderling. Baseball-loving Matt Tavares has written and illustrated picture book biographies of Babe Ruth, Pedro Martinez, and Hank Aaron, but his latest project is Red and Lulu, an illustrated love story about cardinals (the birds, not the baseball team!) and Christmas miracles. Book lovers will get a behind the scenes look at the publishing process, from editorial and design collaboration all the way through to the finished bound books you see on store and library shelves. Here is a chance to ask some of the most talented creators in the children’s book industry about how they craft the incredible stories and books that become the fabric of our childhood. Sponsored by Candlewick Press.
We plan on having some culinary fun with three top chefs and cookbook authors—each of whom influences the food world in her own way. Avid cyclist Joanne Chang is beloved for her Flour Bakery and restaurant Myers+Chang, which turns ten this year. To celebrate, Myers+Chang at Home: Recipes from the Beloved Boston Eatery combines recipes with gorgeous photos that are almost good enough to eat. Chang will share the stage with her coauthor and restaurant executive chef/partner Karen Akunowicz, whom the James Beard Foundation has nominated three times for best chef in the Northeast. Akunowicz also competed in Season 13 of Bravo’s TV series Top Chef and was included by Marie Claire magazine among “21 Badass Women Changing the Food World.” Finally, award-winning baker and Serious Eats editor Stella Parks is a CIA- (that’s Culinary Institute of America) trained pastry chef whose new cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, shares the secrets to baking classics like cherry pie, angel food cake, and lemon meringue pie. But also Snickers, Cracker Jack, and Fauxreos. The book is filled with food lore, photos of food, and vintage food ads, not to mention a forward by past BBF presenter Kenji Lopez-Alt. Come meet the cookbook authors, hear their stories, and salivate over their food photos. Your culinary host is Steve Holt, a food writer whose work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Edible Boston, and Best Food Writing 2011 and whose food politics writing appears at Civil Eats.
Growing up is all about making choices and dealing with the fallout, but for the protagonists in the latest novels by these three YA rockstars, the stakes are incredibly high. In A Line in the Dark, the latest novel by Morris Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist Malinda Lo, a young woman finds herself enmeshed in tangled loyalties and knotty secrets...and then the murders begin. In Printz Award and National Book Award finalist E. Lockhart’s cinematic thriller Genuine Fraud, a young woman decides to reclaim the roles available to her, no matter the personal toll her choices take. And Andre Norton and Morris Award finalist Kristin Cashore’s inventive, genre-defying standalone Jane, Unlimited is all about choices, taking its inspiration from classic Choose Your Own Adventure novels. If you choose to attend this session (and trust us, you should!), you’ll hear a lively conversation moderated by Simmons College’s Lauren Rizzuto. Sponsored by Simmons College.
Journalist and author Christophe Boltanski will discuss his latest novel, The Safe House,which draws heavily on Boltanski’s family history and the legacy of the Paris mansion where they sheltered during the Nazi occupation. Newly translated into English, The Safe House (La Cache) won the Prix Femina in 2015. Boltanski will be interviewed by Côme de la Bouillerie of the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Harvard University.
Stop by the portable recording booth of The Drum Literary Magazine and tell us how you answer this question. Is it about your vision of today's world? Is it about your vision for today's world? Or is it about that place in the world where you find your truest self? Step into The Drum's blue booth to add your voice to the conversation.
Here’s a great way to see the sights at the BBF! Pick up a Passport to Imagination at the BBF Pavilion and travel through Copley Square taking part in fun activities. Have your passport stamped at each participating exhibitor, and return the completed passport to the BBF Pavilion. Kids who return a completed passport will get a prize, donated by Candlewick Press, while supplies last!
Ages 5+
Guilt and innocence. Virtue and vice. Truth and lies. The story of Adam and Eve has it all. Harvard professor, Shakespeare scholar, Pulitzer Prize winner, and founder of the school of literary studies known as New Historicism Stephen Greenblatt gives a riveting analysis of one of the foundational myths of Western civilization. In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Greenblatt shows how historical figures, from Augustine to Milton to Darwin, grappled with the story’s meaning and traces its journey from allegory to revealed truth before its ultimate debunking by Darwin. After his talk, Greenblatt will be interviewed by human rights expert, law professor, and former dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow. Stephen Greenblatt has described his lifelong goal as “opening literary studies to the historical, cultural, and, in the broadest sense, anthropological energies that course through great works of art.” Don’t miss this chance to hear one of the world’s leading scholars of literature and the Renaissance discuss the amazing history of Adam and Eve. This session is brought to you by the Plymouth Rock Foundation and Jim and Cathy Stone.
Three debut novelists will read from their recently published works, all of which focus on the turbulence and transformation endemic to growing up and coming of age. In Cottonmouths, Kelly J. Ford’s protagonist has a bit rockier journey than most, contending with meth labs, intolerance, and unrequited love following a return to Arkansas after dropping out of college. The title character in Gabe Habash’s novel Stephen Florida is, if anything, too driven by his desire to become an NCAA wrestling champion during his senior year of college. Habash’s novel, according to the Atlantic, “captures how competitiveness and masculinity can unravel those who blindly follow its codes.” And Simeon Marsalis’s As Lie Is to Grin, which was recently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, also uses college as the backdrop for his protagonist’s self-discovery, as he attempts to find his place at the largely white University of Vermont while immersing himself in black literary history. Our host for this session of fiction readings is Whitney Scharer, one of the curators of the Arlington Author Salon.
Eileen Myles is a renowned, prolific, and award-winning poet, novelist, performer, and memoirist. Poems written by—and a character based on—Myles appeared on the Emmy Award–winning show Transparent. Myles’s new memoir, Afterglow, is a portrait of their relationship with Rosie, a pit bull chosen by Myles from a litter on the street. The memoir, experimental in substance (Myles offers Rosie’s thoughts as well as their own) and structure, is an exploration of what it means to be a dog, but also what it means to grieve for a pet who becomes central to the owner’s life. According to the the starred review in Kirkus, “Myles’ work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism.” Myles will give a brief talk, followed by a conversation with Boston Public Library president and dog owner David Leonard.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, a group of American writers took a field trip to observe the tragic consequences of Israel becoming an “occupier.” The volume of essays that resulted, The Kingdom of Olives and Ash, offers a moving and personal account of the daily humiliations, violence, and hopelessness of the Palestinians living in the occupied territories and the distrust and hatred that exists on both sides. Ayelet Waldman and her husband, Michael Chabon, edited the volume in partnership with Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO. Waldman, author of several novels including the Mommy-Track Mysteries and, most recently, the memoir A Really Good Day, was born in Jerusalem. She is joined today by two other contributors to the volume, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks, and Newbery Medalist and author of Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson. Libby Lenkinski, Vice President for Public Engagement at the New Israel Fund, will moderate the discussion around this difficult and seemingly intractable situation.
Watch a panel of agents, editors, and authors reveal their literary achievements and faux pas as they play the popular game, “Never Have I Ever.” Join host Stephanie Gayle (Idyll Fears, Idyll Threats) and a panel composed of literary agent Ann Collette (Rees Literary Agency), YA author Mackenzi Lee (The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue), New York Times–bestselling author B.A. Shapiro (The Art Forger and The Muralist), and Houghton Mifflin editor Timothy Mudie as they divulge whether a romantic partner’s book taste has given them second thoughts or if they’ve ever claimed to read a classic that, in truth, they have not. With a bonus audience participation round at the end! Learn, laugh, and play along!
Migration between cultures, countries, and continents has for centuries defined individual life stories and shaped the narratives of human history. Climate change and environmental disasters, genocide and civil war, and political debates and policies have brought renewed attention to real-life stories of migration; in this session, three fiction writers will share work that vividly captures the struggles of rootlessness and the desire for home. Leading off the session will be a presentation by architect, engineer, artist, and Twitter phenom Jonny Sun, whose graphic novel Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur an Aliebn Too follows the adventures of a gentle alien among the animal and plant life of Earth. Joining Sun in conversation are novelists Hala Alyan and Lisa Ko. Alyan is a psychologist and acclaimed poet whose debut novel, Salt Houses, traces the legacy of displacement through the stories of a single Palestinian family in exile since the Six-Day War. Ko, whose debut novel The Leavers won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction and is a finalist for the National Book Award, also delves into issues of identity, reinvention, and instability in her story of a mother and son separated by heart-wrenching circumstances. This all-too-relevant session will be hosted by WBUR’s Simón Rios, a newsroom reporter who has covered immigration, business, and the environment.
Ever wonder how pop-up books are made? Do you like to color? How would you like to take your coloring project and make it pop off the page? Join us for a hands-on interactive workshop where we will color and create a charming pop-up project for you to take home. It might inspire you to transform your (or your child’s) written stories by adding the interactive magic of pop-ups. Sponsored and conducted by Denise Price, award-winning paper engineer, book artist, and author of Boston’s only pop-up book, The Freedom Trail Pop Up Book of Boston. Appropriate for all age levels, from kids to coloring connoisseurs.
Ages 7+
What qualities constitute a good leader? Are leaders born or made? In Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, historian, Harvard Business School professor, and frequent television commentator Nancy Koehn looks at five wildly different leaders: Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson. One of the things they have in common? The ability to inspire others to do good. Entrepreneur and CEO of The Cue Ball Group, Tony Tjan draws on his own experience as well as on interviews with almost one hundred executives, innovators, artists, academics, and teachers to determine what’s important in leadership. His conclusion, for leaders and the people they choose to work with, is goodness itself. In Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters, Tjan argues that competence is necessary but not sufficient; values and character matter just as much, if not more. Anthony Brooks, senior political reporter at WBUR, will moderate. Join the discussion in this timely session on leadership.
Do you love romance novels and wish they were more feminist? Do you hate romance novels and think they can’t be feminist? Do you write or want to write romance novels and need to know how to make them more feminist? Boston area–based Jackie Horne has been running the blog Romance Novels for Feminists since 2012 and is the president of the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America. She is joined by Aya de Leon, author of the Justice Hustlers feminist heist series of urban romances to discuss what qualifies and disqualifies a book from being feminist and how writers can dig deeper into making the books they want to see in the world.
Three novelists whose writing vividly brings the past to life will read from their work. Crystal King takes readers all the way back to ancient Rome in Feast of Sorrow, her debut novel that whisks together an irresistible blend of power, intrigue, and sensuous descriptions of opulent food. Julie Lekstrom Himes offers a glimpse of more recent history in Mikhail and Margarita, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Against the backdrop of 1930s USSR and its hostility to art and artists, Himes traces the real-life genesis of satirical novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous work. Finally, Ellen Herrick sets Forbidden Garden, a sequel to The Sparrow Sisters, in the present day, but her protagonist soon recognizes echoes of the past in her own life and work when she is assigned to restore a walled Shakespeare garden. This session of fiction readings will be hosted by Robin Kall, curator of the Point Street Reading Series and host of the radio program Reading with Robin.
Twenty-four students from Lowell High School in Massachusetts set out to understand the meaning of diversity and equity in America. They wrote Defining Diversity, a book of essays, charting a concise journey through a century and a half of seminal moments in American history. The students’ hope is to help peers across the country understand key ideas, federal laws, constitutional amendments, and Supreme Court decisions that have shaped our society. Defining Diversity has special resonance—Lowell High was the first integrated high school in the U.S.—open to all from its founding in the 1830s. Today, it is one of the most diverse in the nation with students from sixty-six countries across five continents. Defining Diversity has been shared with schools in all fifty states. Teacher Jessica Lander, author of Powerful Partnerships and Driving Backwards, will be accompanied by her students Carla Duran, Monineth Hang, Jackson Kokeh, Onotse Omoyeni, Sam Ramsden, and Stephane Silva. The student authors will speak about writing the book and their ideas about engaging young people in conversations about diversity and equity. Lecturer, documentary filmmaker, and diversity champion Teja Arboleda will host this inspiring session about engaging young people in our democracy.
It’s fun to make up stories out of thin air, but it can be even more fun to start with an existing story and ask yourself “what if this happened instead?” That may be how the three authors in this session started their latest books—but then they let their own imaginations run wild! Elizabeth Eulberg, in The Great Shelby Holmes Meets Her Match, imagines what might happen if Sherlock Holmes was a nine-year-old girl solving mysteries in her Harlem neighborhood. Debut novelist Karuna Riazi, in The Gauntlet, takes her Bangladeshi American heroine on a magical steampunk board game adventure inspired by Jumanji. And in Kekla Magoon’s latest Robyn Hoodlum adventure, Reign of Outlaws, a merry band of outlaws—led by a girl named Robyn—rebels against social injustice in a futuristic society. What story would you reimagine—why and how? Bring your ideas to this session, hosted by Elissa Gershowitz, executive editor of the Horn Book.
Ages 7–12
In this session, three memoirists investigate the destructive impulses that reside in the human psyche and the tremendous toll they exact. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, was hailed by Vogue Magazine as a “true-crime masterpiece” for its “moments of profound revelation” in exploring twin events in the author’s life: working as a law student on the death penalty case of a pedophile and her own molestation at the hands of her grandfather. The stories become entwined, and the results are riveting. Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, recounts the painful history of her beloved cousin, Michael, whose fateful entanglement with gangs, drugs, and the federal prison system eventually led to his murder. Allen’s book, Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A, is a cri de coeur over her cousin’s tragic life and her inability to help him. In After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, Sarah Perry describes how, as a twelve-year-old, her own life was shattered by her mother’s murder and how she struggled to understand her mother’s life and death. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly calls Perry’s memoir a “fascinating small-town mystery with breathtaking revelations at the end.” This not-to-be missed discussion will be moderated by author and critic Ethan Gilsdorf, whose essay entitled “The Day My Mother Became a Stranger to Me” was included in The Best American Essays for 2016.
Whether your travels take you to the far reaches of the globe or are more of the armchair variety, Atlas Obscura is your essential traveling companion. Begun as a collaborative online project and “guide to the world’s wondrous and curious places,” Atlas Obscura has since engendered an Obscura Society with chapters nationwide (and coming soon to Boston!) that organize real-world events and explorations, as well as a gorgeously illustrated book and newly released Explorer’s Journal. Ella Morton, senior editor for Atlas Obscura and one of the coeditors of the book, will be our guide through some of the world’s most incredible, often awe-inspiring (although sometimes cringe-inducing) places. She’ll highlight some of her favorite Obscura tidbits from our own backyard (perhaps including the Boston Public Library’s “car wash” for books or the Boston Athenaeum’s anthropodermic volume—look it up) and also share some quirky and spectacular sites worldwide, complete with the stunning photography for which the website and book are renowned. This session will open your eyes to the world’s wonders—and maybe provide inspiration for your own adventures and discoveries. The session will be introduced by Zeninjor Enwemeka, digital reporter at WBUR. Sponsored by the Boston Public Library.
Will machines replace humans? Are our brains being colonized by tech companies? Is the pace of technological change outstripping our ability to adapt? Are we harnessing our digital future or merely surviving it? These questions crop up more and more these days, and we want answers. Jeff Howe, coauthor with Joi Ito of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, is the program coordinator for Media Innovation at Northeastern University, a long-time contributing editor at Wired magazine, and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab. Andrew McAfee is the codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and coauthor of the bestselling Second Machine Age. Of his new book, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, The Economist declared, “for an astute romp through important digital trends, (it’s) hard to beat.” They will be joined by Nicholas Negroponte, author of the classic book on the digital future, Being Digital. Bring your questions and concerns for a penetrating conversation about our digital future hosted by WBUR’s Asma Khalid, who leads BostonomixX, covering the people and companies driving the innovation economy.
Have you ever wondered how an author chose details to bring a place to life, why she chose her narrative’s point(s) of view, or how he selected just the right word to create an unforgettable poetic moment? In these four sessions, writers will open up about the nuts and bolts of their craft. Our host for each session will lead an audience discussion of a very short excerpt from each author’s work before bringing the author into the conversation to contextualize the excerpt, discuss her or his choices, and answer questions from the audience. A unique alternative to traditional readings, these sessions will appeal not only to aspiring fiction writers but also to readers looking to enrich their reading experience. This session will consist of three twenty-minute guided explorations of poetry, in conversation with the poets themselves: Stephanie Burt (Advice from the Lights), Myronn Hardy (Radioactive Starlings), and Erika L. Sánchez (Lessons in Expulsion). Our host is Alicia Anstead, associate director at the Office for the Arts at Harvard.
Édouard Louis will present his bestselling book, The End of Eddy—an autobiographical novel that captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Louis will be interviewed by Bruno Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at MIT.
Two of America’s most perceptive observers of the political scene join us today for a look at the election that was and the mess that is. For more than two decades, Maureen Dowd has been skewering the political class as a New York Times op-ed columnist, and her keen observations, rapier wit, and penchant for psychologizing earned her a Pulitzer Prize. In The Year of Voting Dangerously, she chronicles what is undoubtedly the most bizarre presidential election and post-election period in history. Journalist and political correspondent Jared Yates Sexton’s coverage of Trump campaign rallies reveals something entirely new in modern American politics: raw, unfiltered, and aggressive rage. Sexton’s own background is not different from that of the average Trump supporter, and his book, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore, has been called a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy. Post-election, Sexton uncovered the anti-Semitic source of Donald Trump’s animated CNN tweet and received numerous death threats when the source was revealed. This unparallelled insider view of our rapidly disintegrating political culture and the dangers that could ensue will be moderated by Tom Ashbrook, host of WBUR’s On Point, which airs on more than 290 NPR stations. This session is generously sponsored by G. Barrie Landry.
If anyone could write a satirical science fiction novel (for teens!) that draws its inspiration from (the shortcomings of) free market economics and the scathing absurdities of economic inequality, it would be M. T. Anderson. Winner of the National Book Award, Anderson has also received numerous Printz Honors as well as Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards and Honors, and his books for children and teens have tackled topics as diverse as Revolutionary War–era race relations, Shostakovich’s resilience during the Siege of Leningrad, the wacky worlds of 1950s sci-fi novels, and a dystopian vision of a future governed by consumerism and nonstop connectivity. Anderson’s latest, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is a slim novel but is nevertheless packed full of ideas, all delivered with Anderson’s precision and sly wit. He explores what happens when Adam, an aspiring artist, attempts to depict the truth about life under the vuvvs, Earth’s new alien overlords, even as the new economic realities are literally destroying him from the inside out. Like the best speculative fiction writers, Anderson uses a seemingly outlandish premise to comment on current realities; hear about his inspirations and influences in a presentation and conversation with Cathryn Mercier, director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College.
The richness, complexity, and evolution of human relationships are the stuff of most fiction, of course, but the three novelists featured in this session place complicated relationships at the very heart of their work. In Sarah Healy’s The Sisters Chase, the bonds of sisterhood take on new urgency when two newly homeless young women embark on a cross-country road trip in the wake of their mother’s death. More than fifteen years ago, Sylvia Brownrigg traced the heady course of a first love affair in her Lambda Award–winning Pages for You; now in Pages for Her, two women who feel like they’ve lived a lifetime since they last met have the opportunity to rekindle their relationship. Finally, if there’s ever a time when family relationships loom large, it’s Thanksgiving; in his latest novel, Start Without Me, Joshua Max Feldman imagines a Thanksgiving-morning encounter between two strangers en route to potentially fraught family gatherings. This session of fiction readings will be hosted by Robin Kall, curator of the Point Street Reading Series and host of the radio program Reading with Robin.
In fabulous graphic novel adventures like Lowriders to the Center of the Earth, Raúl Gonzalez (aka Raúl III) conjures up creative characters and takes them up into space and down to the underworld—all with just the power of his imagination and a few ballpoint pens. In this workshop, Raúl III will help kids find the stories they already have inside them, and guide them through the process of creating a character or scene that will get them started on their own wild storytelling ride.
Ages 8+
“Home” is a loaded word, a complex idea. Imagining home, creating home, staying home, and leaving home—whether to go to work for the day or leaving a household or homeland for good—are all political acts for women. And the choices we make about the homes we create define us as women, mothers, partners, and citizens. In This Is the Place, thirty women writers explore the theme in personal essays about neighbors, marriage, kids, sentimental objects, homelessness, domestic violence, solitude, space, immigration, gentrification, geography, and more. In this session, select contributors will read from their essays and discuss the question that runs throughout the book: What makes a home? Margot Kahn, coeditor, is the author of the biography Horses That Buck. Kelly McMasters, coeditor, is the author of the memoir Welcome to Shirley and is an assistant professor of English at Hofstra University. Jennifer De Leon is the editor of Wise Latinas and was the One City One Story pick for the 2015 Boston Book Festival; she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University. Sonya Chung is the author of the novels The Loved Ones and Long for This World; she teaches at Skidmore College. Is home the place where you “find” yourself? Join in the discussion with contributors to This Is the Place.
Ecological writing is both a process aimed at learning to connect with our voice, stories, and truth and a means to create authentic work. The notion of the ecological model is inspired by the life of a forest (relational, chaotic, intertwined, inside-out, ever-changing) as opposed to the more standard “architectural” model of writing (pre-designed, outside-in, concrete, static, finite, separate). The architectural model of writing focuses almost exclusively on writing skills and creating product. The ecological model of writing focuses on skills, but also works to empower writers to locate and write in their own voices, from their own lives. Through a process of working with text, prompts, questions, and conversation, facilitators Katie Mather and Tamara Ellis Smith hope to access participants’ creative ecosystem (experience, memory, people, text, art, life) —connecting with each other and, ultimately, ourselves.
We are excited to pair two captivating storytellers for an exploration of life’s arrivals and departures. Beloved New Yorker magazine writer and bestselling author of Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik chronicles his early days in NYC his latest work, At the Stranger’s Gate. Gopnik transports readers to New York in the 1980s, when the ascent of greed colored everything, including and especially the art world, where Gopnik and his soon-to-be wife hoped to make their mark. His memoir, called “incandescent” by Booklist in its starred review, discusses creativity, character, style, and the ethics of ambition. Kristen Radtke, managing editor of Sarabande Books and film and video editor of TriQuarterly Magazine, will present her beautiful visual memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, a meditation on loss, grief, and the impermanence of life told through the exploration of abandoned ruins from the American Midwest to an Icelandic town covered in ash. Praised for both her astounding illustrations and her masterful prose, Radtke’s debut has been heralded by starred reviews in Kirkus, Library Journal, and elsewhere. Join these masters of memoir for a presentation and conversation with the host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, the effervescent Meghna Chakrabarti.
Time for a dance break! We’re not just about exercising our minds here at the Boston Book Festival. In this fun and free intro class, the award-winning teaching artists of Urbanity Dance in the South End will introduce children to the fundamentals of hip hop, ballet, and modern dance.
Ages 5+The Boston Book Festival and Boston By Foot were meant to be together! These two BBFs are teaming up to offer a free walking tour of Copley Square’s literary neighborhood. This mini-tour dips briefly into the Back Bay neighborhood to taste Boston’s rich literary heritage. From the filling of the actual back bay about 1860 through today, connections with literature and writers of all flavors have flourished here. This sampling aims to whet your appetite for more!
It’s time to really unleash the power of your words! If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at spoken word poetry or rapping, here’s your chance to do so in a friendly, fun, positive environment. Hip hop emcee and break dancer Oliver “SydeSho” Arias will offer a brief presentation on the art of spoken word performance. Then attendees will participate in team rhyme-making on "Why Words Matter,” and finally, they’ll get inspired by a freestyle rap demo by two diverse spoken word artists. The session will be hosted by Michele Simos, executive director of the Dignity Institute, which teaches kids and teens values like authenticity, respect, trust, and empathy by coupling those concepts with positive hip hop.
For better or for worse, stories of wartime are inherently dramatic. In this session, we’ll hear from three novelists who consider war’s repercussions even on those who might be thousands of miles away from the front lines. Stephen P. Kiernan and Jessica Shattuck set their novels during and after World War II. The titular heroine of Kiernan’s The Baker’s Secret uses her vocation to sustain her fellow villagers in German-occupied Normandy and to enact her own quiet but effective form of resistance. Shattuck’s novel, The Women in the Castle, also explores the legacy of resistance, as a group of resistance widows, women whose overlapping stories exemplify the moral costs of war, come cautiously together in the wake of the conflict that killed their husbands. Finally, playwright and novelist Laura Harrington’s A Catalog of Birds brings to light the wounds—both seen and unseen—that devastate not only a Vietnam veteran but also the family and rural community to which he returns. Guiding their conversation is moderator Catherine Parnell, senior associate editor of Consequence, a literary magazine focusing on the culture of war.
Have you ever wondered how an author chose details to bring a place to life, why she chose her narrative’s point(s) of view, or how he selected just the right word to create an unforgettable poetic moment? In these four sessions, writers will open up about the nuts and bolts of their craft. Our host for each session will lead an audience discussion of a very short excerpt from each author’s work before bringing the author into the conversation to contextualize the excerpt, discuss her or his choices, and answer questions from the audience. A unique alternative to traditional readings, these sessions will appeal not only to aspiring fiction writers but also to readers looking to enrich their reading experience. This session will consist of three twenty-minute guided explorations of the work of debut novelists: Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg (Eden), Annie Hartnett (Rabbit Cake), and Weike Wang (Chemistry). Our host is Michelle Hoover, author most recently of the novel Bottomland and facilitator of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program.
One of the world’s top art historians, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and an accomplished painter will team up for an enthralling exploration of art and the extreme conditions of life. Renowned art historian and Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard Joseph Koerner’s latest is Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. This gorgeous work has been described as magisterial, gripping, erudite, and shatteringly poetic by a variety of enthusiastic critics. Koerner argues that Bosch, whose paintings depict contempt for the world and the apocalyptic folly of human existence, conceived of everyday life as “enemy territory.” Bruegel portrays all the same pitfalls, but shows the enemy isn’t diabolical. It’s human folly that undoes us. These two artists invented “genre” painting and paved the way for modern art. Koerner packs his work with details that underscore the social and political relevance of art in his analysis of painting in a “state of emergency.” Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor Jorie Graham will begin this session with a piece from her new volume of poems, Fast, which, while deeply personal, also reminds us of our interconnectedness in the face of environmental, social, and political crisis. Moderator Peter Sacks, professor of English at Harvard, author of five books of poetry, and an internationally recognized painter whose work blends myth, memory, and history, will tie together a fascinating session on art and meaning-making in the extreme conditions of life. This session is generously sponsored by the John and Cynthia Reed Foundation.
Authors don’t create fantasy worlds in a vacuum; they draw from centuries of history and tradition to devise new and original premises or whole fantastic realms. In this session, three authors of fantasy novels for young adults will discuss their stories’ origins and inspirations. Tochi Onyebuchi draws on Nigerian folklore and hero legends in his BEA Buzz Book debut, Beasts Made of Night, which Kirkus calls “a paean to an emerging black legend.” In her debut, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, Julie C. Dao reinterprets a character inspired by Snow White’s evil queen, setting her rise in an East Asian landscape. And YA fantasy juggernaut and Printz Award winner Libba Bray looks to the Roaring Twenties in New York City as the backdrop for the thrilling third installment in her Diviners quartet, Before the Devil Breaks You. Their conversation will be moderated by literary agent and debut YA novelist Lana Popović, whose Wicked Like a Wildfire is a magic-laden story set in Montenegro.
“At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory,” writes National Book Award–winning author Jacqueline Woodson at the end of her novel Another Brooklyn. “Someday I’ll look back and ‘then’ will be a speck on the horizon,” notes the narrator of bestselling novelist Claire Messud’s latest book, The Burning Girl. The mutability of memory, the swift passage of time, the use of stories to make sense of experience, the treacherous landscape of female adolescence, and the simultaneous vitality and volatility of teenage girls’ friendships—these are common threads that run through these narratives, as both writers draw perceptive, unsentimental portraits of young women growing up and growing apart. This year’s unconventional take on the BBF’s annual fiction keynote brings these two visionary artists together in conversation about their latest work, in a session hosted by UMass Boston English professor Sari Edelstein, whose research addresses the literature of coming of age.
In this astounding session, two authors will each tell a very different but equally incredible story about the natural world. Kathryn Miles’s latest, Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake, was referred to by Time magazine as the “the fall book that will take your mind off politics.” She travelled across the country to investigate the risk of seismic disasters. Her conclusions? We’ll let her tell you herself. Ben Mezrich has an even weirder story to tell. His latest, already snapped up by Hollywood and coming to a screen near you in the not-too-distant future, is Woolly: The True Story of the De-Extinction of One of History’s Most Iconic Creatures. Mezrich’s tale focuses on two scientists, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. George Church, who is attempting to genetically engineer synthetically sequenced woolly mammoth genes, and Dr. Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist who studies the Arctic permafrost. The scientists hope to recreate the ecology of the late Pleistocene and help save the world from ecological disaster. These presentations will keep you on the edge of your seat. The session will be emceed by Vicki Croke, cohost of The Wild Life on WBUR and author of the bestseller Elephant Company.
Novelist, short story writer, and playwright Christine Angot’s most recent novel, Un amour impossible (newly available in English translation with the title Incest) was awarded the Prix Décembre 2015, was successfully adapted for the stage in 2017, and is currently in pre-production as a film. Angot will discuss the book with moderator Annabel Kim, an assistant professor of French at Harvard University.
The loss of family is a theme uniting the three recent memoirs we’ll hear in this session. At the age of twenty-six, Jessica Berger Gross made the courageous decision to cut ties with her family, which was publicly perfect but secretly abusive. She chronicles the events leading up to her difficult choice, as well as the inspiring new beginning it brought about, in Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home. Similarly, in her memoir The Book of Separation, the novelist Tova Mirvis recounts the frightening, exhilarating first year following her decision to leave not only her marriage but also her lifelong Orthodox Jewish faith that had previously guided all her decisions. Finally, sociologist Mindy Fried writes thoughtfully and compassionately about serving as her elderly father’s long-distance caregiver in her memoir Caring for Red, which tells her father’s colorful life story and also offers fellow caregivers strength and practical advice. The host for this session of heartfelt memoir readings is BBF board member Christine Mastrangelo.
Life’s a journey for all of us, but these memoirists have found themselves on some very unusual travels indeed. Holly FitzGerald describes her honeymoon trip from hell in Ruthless River. After their plane crashed in Peru, the newlyweds saw no other option but to build a raft to ride the fast-moving Rio Madre de Dios to Brazil. They lived to tell the tale...but only barely. Leland Melvin’s first career involved catching passes as an NFL wide receiver, but he had loftier ambitions. He went on to serve as mission specialist on the space shuttle Atlantis and on the International Space Station. His journey to outer space is thrillingly described in Chasing Space. Andrew Forsthoefel, upon graduating from college, decided to walk across the United States as a “graduate program in the human experience.” Carrying little money and a sign reading Walking to Listen (also the title of his book), Andrew encountered incredible kindness from strangers. His walk served as a journey of discovery through the stories told to him by others and the radical acceptance that he receives and learns to give. Novelist Ayelet Waldman’s efforts to heal herself involve taking a different kind of trip. In A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, she describes using tiny doses of LSD in an effort to treat drastic mood swings after all other therapies fail. Her fascinating and at times hilarious memoir chronicles her journey down the rabbit hole of LSD use, as well as the history and mythology of the drug. These extraordinary memoirists will amaze you with their tales. Moderated by WBUR ARTery reporter Maria Garcia.
Who are you? Where do you come from? What are your dreams? What do you want the world to look like—today and in the future? In this activity, Boston-based social justice project Wee the People will provide collage materials and inspiration for kids to create crowns and/or shields that reflect, celebrate, and elevate their identity, culture, community, and hopes for change in the world.
Join the incredibly erudite and engaging MSNBC host and editor-at-large of the Nation, Chris Hayes, for an important conversation about inequality in America. In his book, A Colony in a Nation, Hayes describes how black and brown people (and, increasingly, working-class whites) live in a territory that is not free, but rather is controlled from outside, where the law is a tool for constraint and limitation rather than a foundation for freedom and prosperity. The American criminal justice system, he argues, is not one system applied differently to different people, but two distinct systems. Hayes will be joined by two powerhouse voices whose recent work highlights the structural issues underpinning racial inequality. Yale Law School professor and former public defender James Forman Jr.’s book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was described by the New York Times as “superb and shattering.” Carol Anderson’s shocking and timely White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, describes the disturbing efforts throughout American history to disadvantage blacks and the shameful failure of the courts, including the Supreme Court, to remedy those efforts. This essential discussion of where we are on race in America will be moderated by Kim McLarin, novelist and frequent guest on WGBH’s Basic Black.
The Boston Book Festival and Boston By Foot were meant to be together! These two BBFs are teaming up to offer a free walking tour of Copley Square’s literary neighborhood. This mini-tour dips briefly into the Back Bay neighborhood to taste Boston’s rich literary heritage. From the filling of the actual back bay about 1860 through today, connections with literature and writers of all flavors have flourished here. This sampling aims to whet your appetite for more!
The number of people who have left their homeland, either by necessity or choice, has reached its highest level since World War II. As the numbers continue to grow, the process of settling in new environments, both friendly and unfriendly, has never been more challenging. What happens to families and individuals who forsake all that is familiar? What is it like to try to make a home in unfamiliar territory and language? How long does it take before a new country feels like home? The Christian Science Monitor is bringing together contemporary novelists and memoirists who have tackled these challenges in their work. Writer and educator Grace Talusan immigrated to the United States from the Philippines as a child, and she recounts that experience—and other aftershocks of trauma—in her forthcoming memoir The Body Papers, which won the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Ha Jin, recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his 1999 novel Waiting, immigrated to the United States from China as an adult and is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University. His most recent novel is The Boat Rocker, which Kirkus called “laugh-out-loud funny while being as illuminating as ever.” And Marjan Kamali, whose family immigrated to the United States from Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, addresses generational attitudes toward tradition and assimilation in her novel Together Tea, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. Their conversation will be moderated by the Monitor’s Simon Montlake. Sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
From crocodile-like Crystal Palace monsters to our modern birdlike pals, our idea of what dinosaurs looked like has changed a lot since we first dug them up. In this hands-on workshop, led by cartoonist and author of the new book Dinosaur Empire! Abby Howard, you'll learn all about the fossils that changed the face of dinosaurs, learn how paleontologists decide what these animals looked like using old bones, and draw your own interpretation of an ancient beast using a skeleton and your own imagination!
Ages 7–12
Have you ever wondered how an author chose details to bring a place to life, why she chose her narrative’s point(s) of view, or how he selected just the right word to create an unforgettable poetic moment? In these four sessions, writers will open up about the nuts and bolts of their craft. Our host for each session will lead an audience discussion of a very short excerpt from each author’s work before bringing the author into the conversation to contextualize the excerpt, discuss her or his choices, and answer questions from the audience. A unique alternative to traditional readings, these sessions will appeal not only to aspiring fiction writers but also to readers looking to enrich their reading experience. This session will consist of three twenty-minute guided explorations of the work of authors whose recent fiction conjures up a particularly evocative sense of place: Brunonia Barry (The Fifth Petal, which is set in Salem), Jessie Chaffee (Florence in Ecstasy, set in Florence and Boston), and Erica Ferencik (The River at Night, set in the Maine wilderness). Our host is Henriette Lazaridis, whose novel The Clover House is set largely in Greece.
Dialogue is the jewel in the crown of much fiction. Why is it so hard to make that jewel shine? Drawing on her most recent book, The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, the novelist Margot Livesey will discuss the difficulties of writing natural seeming dialogue that both reveals character and advances plot, and she’ll suggest some strategies for making scenes more resonant. Good dialogue shows the reader what cannot be told, but how do authors make the choice to dramatize, or summarize? Bring a scene from something you’ve written to re-examine in the light of her suggestions.
Don’t worry about being quiet in the library! Everyone—from babies to big kids to grownups—gets to raise their voices in this fun event! Participants will sing and use their bodies for dancing and body percussion. Children will also explore some hand-held instruments, finger plays, and much more. Children will even have a chance to play Ms. Wyndy’s djembe drum and strum Cindy, her guitar.
This session of readings brings together three authors whose works celebrate the vitality and sheer variety of writings drawn from real life. Native New Englanders love to talk about the weather; Boston writer Will Dowd likes to write about it, too, in his debut essay collection Areas of Fog, which also offers allusive meditations on history, literature, and the changing seasons. In Landslide, writer and translator Minna Zallman Proctor employs interconnected personal essays to make sense of her life’s relationships, from the complicated one with her mother to her own marriages and motherhood. Writer and artist Leslie Stein, whose comics diary regularly appears on Vice.com, collects her perceptive and bittersweet observations of life in New York in the beautiful and delicately illustrated collection Present. Our host for this session of thoughtful and eclectic essays is Anjali Mitter Duva, author of the novel Faint Promise of Rain and one of the curators of the Arlington Author Salon.
After the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Toni Morrison wrote in the New Yorker that “the comfort of being 'naturally better than,' of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.” So what does it mean to write from a position of privilege? How should white writers navigate their privileged positions? Are writers-of-colors exempt, or are all writers inherently privileged by way of having the opportunities to pursue a literary career? In this panel, writers of a diversity of backgrounds and formats will discuss the question of who has permission to write what, and how it influences their willingness to write outside the confines of their race, gender, economic class, and so on. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, author of the memoir Fact of a Body, Shuchi Saraswat, whose essays combine photography and prose, Laura van den Berg, author most recently of the novel Find Me, and Hasanthika Sirisena, author of the short story collection The Other Ones, will discuss these pressing issues with moderator Kaitlin Solimine, author of the debut novel Empire of Glass. Whether you’re a writer yourself or just want to think more deeply and critically about the roles and responsibilities of writers, these session will offer opportunities for reflection and debate.
Their wildly popular podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, has been described variously as Prairie Home Companion crossed with Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone, or the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have proved that the peculiar happenings of the fictional desert town of Night Vale can play out on the book page as well. Their first Night Vale novel became an instant bestseller, and this fall, they’re publishing its eagerly awaited follow-up: It Devours! When an aspiring scientist and Night Vale newcomer investigates a religious sect on the outskirts of town, her growing attraction to one of the movement’s adherents sets off a personal and philosophical crisis, as they jointly investigate the intersections of faith and reason. In a starred review, Kirkus calls It Devours! “a compelling drama that shows people coming together in a world that feels like it’s coming apart—which isn’t the worst message to broadcast these days.” Leading the conversation with Fink and Cranor is journalist and fellow podcaster Virginia Prescott, who hosts Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio. Come with your own burning questions about podcasting, audio storytelling, and what’s next for the intrepid citizens of Night Vale.
In a time when doubt is cast on people with expertise in their given field, and “fake news” is on the rise, what value do facts still have in our society? The answer: a lot. Books have always stood as a bulwark of truth in a world that sometimes abuses facts. University press publishers stand at the forefront of the fight against fake news—believing in the value of accurate, peer-reviewed knowledge and publishing approximately fourteen thousand books each year from the world’s leading thinkers, writers, and scholars. As our world seeks to understand what is at stake in daily confrontations of politics, culture, and personal values, historians and other scholars provide the documentation and expert analysis that helps shape our public debate. This panel—made up of authors Tom Nichols (The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press) and Marilynn Johnson (The New Bostonians, UMass Press), along with Brian Halley of UMass Press and moderator Amy Brand, director of MIT Press—will discuss why scholarship and research are more important than ever before in book publishing, how following the facts as an author or scholar might lead you to different conclusions than you expected, and why these qualities are being questioned by some today. Join us for a dialogue in conjunction with the Association of American University Presses and University Press Week (November 6–11) and share your thoughts using the hashtag #LookItUP.
Fiction can be a means of escape...or it can serve to illuminate real-world events and engage readers with issues that affect their lives. In this session, we’ll hear from four writers who ingeniously incorporate contemporary issues in their novels while also telling stirring stories. In Shadowhouse Fall, the followup to his bestselling novel Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older examines gentrification and state-sponsored violence through the prism of urban fantasy. In her debut novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Award, Erika L. Sánchez writes about the tensions between her protagonist’s ambitions and her undocumented Mexican parents’ expectations. In her buzzworthy debut, Dear Martin, Nic Stone experiments with form and honors Civil Rights Movement history while fearlessly addressing issues of police violence and social injustice. Finally, former Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr turns his pen to YA with Trell, a hard-hitting narrative inspired by Lehr’s journalistic background and a Roxbury murder and wrongful conviction that has stayed with him since he reported on the story decades ago. These books—and this discussion, moderated by the Boston Public Library’s Laura Koenig—will inspire new ways of thinking about the real world we live in.
“Only connect,” E. M. Forster famously wrote as the epigraph to his novel Howards End. The imperative to connect and the challenges of doing so meaningfully are perhaps even more crucial today. In this session, we’ll hear from three astute novelists who write with urgency about the interconnectedness of human lives. Celeste Ng, whose second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is a New York Times bestseller, examines the uneasy tensions between an affluent community and the disruptive newcomers in their midst, in a novel Kirkus calls “mesmerizing.” In Three Floors Up, bestselling Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo employs a Tel Aviv apartment building as a microcosm of wider society, by profiling its inhabitants and their struggles to form genuine relationships. And in National Book Award winner Lily Tuck’s slight but intense novel Sisters, she portrays a narrator who feels an oppressive connection to her husband’s first wife, despite her desires for a fresh start. Connecting these three insightful authors is moderator and novelist Dawn Tripp, author most recently of the national bestseller Georgia.
When most people show up to work, they don’t expect to receive a meatloaf. But for Robert, that’s just par for the course. Through Robert’s job as an end-of-life care provider for Holocaust survivors, and the recent death of his daughter, Somerville author Daphne Kalotay explores themes of loss, community, and rejuvenation in this year’s One City One Story selection, “Relativity.” Kalotay, who currently teaches at Princeton, is the author of two novels and a short story collection. The session will be hosted by associate director for programming at Harvard’s Office for the Arts and facilitator extraordinaire Alicia Anstead. Tweet her your questions and thoughts ahead of time at @1city1story! If you haven't already, be sure to pick up your copy of this touching story at the information tent. Sponsored by BookBub.
Three acclaimed memoirists tackle the subject of relationships: husbands, lovers, parents, children, love, and loss. And through it all, the project of finding oneself. Amy Dickinson, known for her advice column, “Ask Amy,” uses wry humor to chronicle her experiences with marriage, step-parenting, divorce, the loss of a parent, and finding love again in Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home. Melissa Febos’s new memoir, Abandon Me, is a follow-up to her first memoir, Whip Smart. In Abandon Me, Febos examines her history with addiction and recovery, her work as a dominatrix, and her origins as the child of two fathers: her birth father, a Native American, and the one who raised her, a sea captain. Bestselling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro turns her attention to her marriage in Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage. In this poignant memoir, Shapiro reflects on the shapeshifting nature of love in a marriage that survives the traumas of a child’s life-threatening illness, the loss of parents, and the more mundane but no less stressful day-to-day challenges of financial solvency and home repair. Our discussion of the ties that bind and those that break will be led by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, author of Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir about the generational reverberations of the Holocaust.
Martin Tamisier is a singer, songwriter and drummer from a very small town close to the ocean in France. His music is a blend of pop, jazz, and African music with French lyrics inspired by society, self-understanding, and the nature that surrounded him in his early life.
Muhammad Ali was the greatest. He was a sports icon who stood up for his beliefs at a time when being an outspoken black man was not acceptable. One can imagine that the athletes who have taken a knee this season have been inspired by Ali’s example. The authors of two new, groundbreaking books about Ali join us to examine the life of a courageous fighter. Jonathan Eig, bestselling author of books about Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, used conversations with Ali’s former wives, new material gleaned from thousands of pages of FBI and Justice Department files, and hours of recently discovered audiotaped interviews to write Muhammad Ali: A Life. Eig is working with Ken Burns to turn his book into a documentary. Former Boston Globe columnist and senior writer at Sports Illustrated Leigh Montville focuses on Ali’s refusal to serve in the US military during the Vietnam War and the social and cultural implications of that decision in Sting Like a Bee: Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America, 1966–1971, which Kirkus Reviews referred to as a “dramatic, pleasing tale of a sports iconoclast fighting for his rights." The inimitable Bill Littlefield, commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition, host of Only a Game on WBUR, and author of Take Me Out, will moderate.
There are wonderful programs for Anglophone writers in France, particularly in Paris, with several originating from the Boston area. In this session, we’ll hear about the lure of French travel for writers and the benefits of immersing in a writing project in Paris from some writers who've done just that: novelist Lauren Grodstein, author most recently of Our Short History; journalist and author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go Marcia DeSanctis; and frequent writer-in-Paris Stacey Resnikoff. And if this session sparks your own esprit d'aventure, they'll share some resources, too! Moderated by writer/comedian Kelly MacFarland.
Literary critic, poet, and former Granta editor John Freeman embarked on a new project recently, an eponymous biannual anthology publication bringing together fresh perspectives from established names and new voices. Prior issues of Freeman’s have focused on themes of “Arrival,” “Home,” and “Family,” but in the newly released fourth issue, instead of focusing on a theme, Freeman instead turned to recommendations from editors, critics, translators, and authors worldwide to compile a list of 29 international authors whose works embody “The Future of New Writing.” Freeman likens the selection process to “the fashion by which literature travels in general...hitchhiking from one fellow-traveler to another.” The BBF is pleased to host one of the launch events for this exciting new issue of Freeman’s, featuring Freeman himself in conversation with three contributors to the issue: Garnette Cadogan, an essayist at work on a book on walking; Édouard Louis, author of the bestselling novels The End of Eddy and History of Violence; and Tania James, author most recently of the novel The Tusk that Did the Damage. Come get to know these authors and more whose work will sustain—and perhaps even define—the future of literature.
Esther Perel’s first book, Mating in Captivity, her podcast Where Should We Begin?, and her 2013 TED talk entitled “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship” (which was viewed by two million people in the first two weeks it was posted) have catapulted her to the status of couples therapist rock star. Now, Perel has turned her attention to infidelity in her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. When it comes to desire within marriage, she notes that when there’s nothing left to hide, there’s nothing left to seek, and that can lead to people straying. Perel points out that people often cheat not because they are looking for another person, but because they are looking for another self. She wants to change the discourse around infidelity in America from one that emphasizes betrayal and trauma to one that emphasizes healing. You won’t want to miss this remarkable, compelling talk by Esther Perel. After her talk, Esther will be interviewed by award-winning documentary filmmaker and cohost of WBUR’s Here & Now, Robin Young.
Wind down your day at the BBF by kicking back with a frosty beverage or two and a heaping helping of poetry. Join fellow poetry fans at Copley Square Hotel’s cozy and convivial XHALE Lounge to hear new work by three terrific poets: Rebecca Morgan Frank, editor of Memorious.org and author most recently of the collection Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country; Krysten Hill, a poet and performer who was the recipient of a 2016 St. Botolph Club Award; and Natalie Shapero, whose latest collection is entitled Hard Child. This laid-back evening of poetry is sponsored by Mass Poetry.