Upcoming Author Events & Readings
34 upcoming author events and readings from Brookline Booksmith, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All readings in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 7:00pm
Marcia Chatelain, who won the Pulitzer for Franchise, discusses How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington, recovering the Black women artists and organisers "seen, but barely heard" at the 1963 march. Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley joins her.
Wed Oct 7 · 7:30pm
Jennifer Welch, "a progressive atheist from a Bible Belt red state," discusses Not Today, Fascists, on how the far right has used religion, and especially the Evangelical prosperity gospel, to consolidate power and reinforce economic inequality. Every ticket includes a copy.
Ticketed; ticket includes a copy of the book
Thu Oct 8 · 7:00pm
Intan Paramaditha discusses her novel Night of a Thousand Hells, translated by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao, about three sisters left to grapple with grief and family secrets after the youngest, Annisa, straps a bomb to her chest. Paramaditha, an Indonesian author and Harvard Radcliffe Fellow, wrote The Wandering, longlisted for the Stella Prize. Mariana Enriquez calls the book “an unforgiving tale of political horror and womanhood.”
Sun Oct 11 · 10:30am
A story hour for H is for Hanukkah, Adina Oberman's alphabet board book of the holiday's foods, symbols and traditions — A is for applesauce, B is for biscochos, L for latkes — illustrated by Volha Kaliaha and aimed at the youngest readers.
Sun Oct 11
Raina Telgemeier talks about her career, from mini-comics and her graphic novel adaptations of The Baby-Sitters Club to autobiographical books such as Smile and Sisters, and signs afterwards, with a limit of two books per person. Her work helped carry children’s graphic novels out of comics shops and into bookstores, libraries and schools. The Boston Comic Arts Foundation presents the afternoon with Boston University and Brookline Booksmith.
Mon Oct 12 · 7:30pm
Becky Chambers reads from As You Wake, Break the Shell, the first of a new duology set on the resource-poor planet of Fortune, where a reclusive botanist and a pilot bonded to a living ship are pulled together by the danger her work invites. Chambers won the Hugo for her Wayfarers series; every ticket includes a copy.
Tue Oct 13 · 6:00pm
Stephen Graham Jones discusses Off the Reservation, in which a survivor of his bestseller The Only Good Indians joins three older Blackfeet to repatriate the bones of a boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and something terrible escapes with them. Paul Tremblay, the horror novelist, joins him.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:00pm
Annalee Newitz discusses A Wall Is Also a Road, "a thought-provoking science fiction adventure" narrated by an amoeba grad student who shape-shifts to study the multicellular creatures of a backwater planet and befriends one in a city called Pompeii. Cecilia Tan joins them.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:30pm
Erin French discusses Seize the Supper, the third cookbook from her Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine — seasonal main dishes, bright salads and spiced desserts built around dining outside and in the moment. Dan Souza of America's Test Kitchen joins her; every ticket includes a copy.
Thu Oct 15 · 7:00pm
Palestinian American poet George Abraham, a two-time Arab American Book Award winner, wrote Birthright and the forthcoming When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America. Jess Rizkallah's the magic my body becomes won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize; Jess Yuan's Slow Render won the Airlie Prize; leena aboutaleb's debut collection Thalassa traces a descent into the Underworld in search of her brother.
Sat Oct 17 · 7:00pm
Georgi Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel discuss The Man With Many Names: Stories, forty tales gathered over three decades and set in and around Bulgaria, among them a drifter convinced he is on television and a girl whose two eyes see only the past and only the future. Gospodinov and Rodel shared the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter; he has also won the Premio Strega Europeo.
Mon Oct 19 · 7:00pm
Nichole Accettola discusses her second cookbook, Scandinavian Everyday, more than 85 recipes for bowls, salads, soups and desserts drawn from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Accettola, who cooked in Copenhagen for more than fifteen years, owns San Francisco's Kantine; her first book, Scandinavian from Scratch (2023), won an IACP Award. Jennifer Aaronson, formerly in charge of food and entertaining at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, joins her.
Tue Oct 20 · 7:00pm
Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women, discusses Damned if She Does, on the sixteen million American women who have left the church in the past decade — asking, as the book puts it, "why they leave--and where they land." Robby Robinson joins her.
Thu Oct 22 · 7:00pm
Joanne Chang, the James Beard-winning founder of Boston's Flour bakeries, discusses The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share, with Rachel Leah Blumenthal. Signed copies remain available; Chang and Booksmith return to WBUR CitySpace on December 1.
Fri Oct 23 · 7:00pm
Maria DiLorenzo, a crime journalist, discusses Confessions of the Green River Killer, built from the hundreds of phone calls Gary Ridgway made to her over several years from prison, "the closest depiction of Gary Ridgway ever seen" and of what earning a serial killer's trust cost her. Dave Wedge joins her.
Sun Oct 25 · 10:30am
An all-ages story hour for Robin and the Moon, the author-illustrator E.B. Goodale's picture book in which a small child, worried the moon is tangled in a tree's branches, drifts into a dreamy nighttime adventure. Goodale, a Salem printmaker, holds an Ezra Jack Keats Illustration Honor.
Mon Oct 26 · 7:00pm
Heather Morris discusses her new novel The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, in which eleven-year-old Josephine flees the 1942 arrest of her Jewish family in occupied Paris to her piano teacher, André Levallois, a secret Resistance operative. Morris, a New Zealander living in Australia, wrote The Tattooist of Auschwitz, adapted as a 2024 miniseries; her books have sold over nineteen million copies. Tickets include a copy of the book.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Kojo Koram, a legal scholar, discusses The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs, "a gripping global investigation" tracking how criminalized drugs are being rebranded into a billion-dollar industry, from Louisiana's Angola prison to Silicon Valley's psychedelics boom. Historian Quinn Slobodian and Shaleen Title join him.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, whose story collection Heads of the Colored People was longlisted for the National Book Award, discusses her debut novel The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, "a sly, spry, tall tale" about the murder of an infamous Oklahoma moonshiner and the competing stories a small town tells about it.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Petra Hůlová and Carolina Pihelgas discuss two feminist novels. In Hůlová’s The Long Version, a Czech author in her fifties faces her daughter’s discovery of a youthful affair with an older writer; Pihelgas’s The Cut Line follows a woman ending a toxic fourteen-year relationship on a farmstead near a NATO base on the Russian border. Hůlová has won the Magnesia Litera; Pihelgas was named Tartu’s City Writer Laureate.
Sun Nov 1 · 10:30am
A story hour for What Marcel Found: The Incredible Discovery of the Lascaux Cave Paintings, Cedar Pruitt's nonfiction picture book about the boy who, in occupied France in 1940, found a tunnel leading to cave paintings made seventeen thousand years ago. Pruitt is a local author.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Joey Clift, a Peabody- and Emmy-nominated comedian of the Cowlitz tribe, discusses his debut We've Been Here the Whole Time!: A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America, a comic, illustrated tour through Native history, people and culture, from Pocahontas to the Land Back movement. Vanessa Lillie joins him.
Sun Nov 8 · 10:30am
An all-ages story time for Animals of the Chinese Zodiac: An Illustrated Guide to the 12 Signs, with its illustrator Ping Zhu — a hand-painted introduction to the twelve animals for readers six to nine, with a flowchart quiz to find your match and a fold-out retelling of the Great Race.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:00pm
Tom Drury, the award-winning author of The End of Vandalism, discusses West of Loveland, his fourth novel set in Midwestern Grouse County across four decades, "a warm and polyphonic portrait" of a community assembled by a roadside discovery. Jayne Anne Phillips, who won the Pulitzer for Night Watch, joins him.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Amanda Foody and C.L. Herman, the bestselling authors of All of Us Villains, discuss A Destiny So Cruel, "the heart-wrenching epic finale" to the fantasy duology begun in A Fate So Cold, in which a Chosen One and the boy she killed are resurrected into a second, destined duel.
Wed Nov 11
Rachel Maddow discusses The Department of Fate, a history of the Justice Department that finds “heroism and treachery in equal measure” and ends with the case for rebuilding what it calls “our battered democracy.” Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show on MS NOW and is the author of Prequel, Blowout and Drift. Each ticket includes an unsigned copy of the book.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:00pm
Sofia Franklyn created Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper in 2018 and left two years later, after which Cooper took the show on alone in a deal reported at $60 million. Franklyn now runs Sofia with an F; Daddy Issues: A Memoir is her account of what happened.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm
Trisha Paytas, one of the internet's first influencers, discusses her memoir Crying on the Kitchen Floor, "a raw and uproarious" account of a career of reinventions, feuds and reality-TV cameos and the search for identity behind them. Ticketed, with a copy included.
Fri Nov 13 · 7:00pm
Emerson Whitney, author of Heaven and Daddy Boy, launches O Mother — written out of a return home they had not planned to make, to a childhood shaped by their mother's addiction. RSVP requested and, if the room fills, required.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:00pm
Andrew Janjigian launches Breaducation: The Science and Practice of Baking Bread at Home, a guide to baking bread in a home kitchen. Janjigian, a former editor at Cook's Illustrated, writes Wordloaf, a newsletter devoted to bread. Dan Souza of America's Test Kitchen joins him in conversation. RSVP is requested, and becomes required if the room fills.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Allison King launches Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, her official novelisation of the new animated film. King is a Cambridge writer and software engineer who writes code for the MBTA; her novel The Phoenix Pencil Company was a 2025 Reese's Book Club pick, and her stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine and LeVar Burton Reads. The event is held in the library's Hunneman Hall rather than the shop.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Askold Melnyczuk's With Madonna in Kyiv collects essays, reviews and remembrances, among them recollections of Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; Mary Cappello's Frost Will Come: Essays from the Bardo is a memoir in lyric essays about caring for her poet mother through terminal cancer. Cappello is a Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow; P. Carl, who teaches at Emerson and wrote the memoir Becoming a Man, joins them in conversation.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
Dr. Barak Benaryeh discusses The Vet Will See You Now, pitched as "Kitchen Confidential meets All Creatures Great and Small" — irreverent stories from inside a fast-changing veterinary profession, threaded with practical advice for pet owners. Indu Mani joins him.
Mon Nov 30 · 7:00pm
Anderson launches Stealing Saint Nick, which traces Nicholas of Myra “from his humble origins as a child born into a fringe Jewish cult” in the third century through sainthood to his transformation into an icon of capitalism. The book grew out of research for Nicked, his adult debut. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party won the National Book Award, and Feed the LA Times Book Prize.
