Upcoming Author Events & Readings
7 upcoming author events and readings from Boston Athenaeum, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All readings in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 6:00pm
Regina Mason, William Grimes’s third great-granddaughter, tells of finding an inscription in Grimes’s own hand in the Athenaeum’s copy of his 1825 narrative, the first fugitive slave narrative published in the United States, showing he presented the book to President John Quincy Adams in 1826. Mason co-edited the Oxford University Press edition of Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave with William L. Andrews.
$20
Wed Oct 7 · 6:00pm
Dylan Gottlieb discusses Yuppies, his history of how the rise of Wall Street in the 1980s “lured a generation of young upstarts to New York, unleashing a political and cultural transformation whose national repercussions are still felt today.” Gottlieb is assistant professor of history at Bentley University and cohosts Who Makes Cents, a history-of-capitalism podcast. Joel Suarez, who teaches history and social studies at Harvard, joins him.
$20
Wed Oct 14 · 6:00pm
Adrian Tinniswood discusses The Houses of Guinness, his history of the brewing family told through more than a dozen of its houses, from Farmleigh and Luggala in Ireland to Elveden in Suffolk and Kenwood on Hampstead Heath. The book was published to coincide with the Netflix series House of Guinness. Tinniswood, an OBE, directs graduate programmes in country house studies at the University of Buckingham; the Irish Georgian Society co-presents.
Mon Oct 19 · 6:00pm
Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster, tells the history of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the bestselling hardcover after the Bible, and how its new Twelfth Edition was revised using two decades of online data on which words are looked up most and least. Sokolowski writes definitions and has served as a spelling-bee pronouncer worldwide; his forthcoming book is By Definition: The Surprising History of the English Dictionary.
$20
Mon Oct 26 · 6:00pm
Ted Widmer discusses The Living Declaration: A Biography of America's Founding Text, a Library of America anthology that traces how the Declaration of Independence has shaped democratic aspirations, through sixty-eight writings by figures including John Locke, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Arendt and Ho Chi Minh. Widmer, a former speechwriter and senior adviser to Bill Clinton, is the author of Lincoln on the Verge.
$20
Tue Oct 27 · 6:30pm
Becca Freeman discusses her second novel, Back Where We Started, a second-chance romance in which a Hollywood actress returns to her Pennsylvania hometown for Christmas and keeps running into Drew, her first love. Freeman, author of The Christmas Orphans Club, co-hosts the podcast Bad on Paper. She is joined by Emma Brodie, the New York Times bestselling author of Songs in Ursa Major. Tickets include the book.
$20
Wed Oct 28 · 6:00pm
Lindsey Fitzharris discusses Sleuth-Hound, the story of Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon Arthur Conan Doyle credited as the model for Sherlock Holmes, whose work as a medical detective drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper. Fitzharris, who holds an Oxford doctorate in the history of science and medicine, wrote The Butchering Art and The Facemaker. Catherine Prendergast, author of The Gilded Edge, joins her.
$20
