Author Readings & Book Talks in Greater Boston
Tue Nov 3 · 7pm
Danielle L. Jensen, a #1 New York Times bestselling author known for the Bridge Kingdom series, marks release day for Defy the Dusk, set in the Sundered world, "where there are two options: ride the dawn, or face what rises in the night." She is in conversation with Elise Kova, also a #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books include A Deal with the Elf King.
Sat Oct 24 · 7:00pm
Bonnie Garmus discusses her new novel Peck & Peck, "an irresistible, delightful, and tender literary novel set in the publishing world of 1980s New York City." Garmus wrote Lessons in Chemistry, which won sixteen international awards and became an Apple TV series.
Ticketed
Sat Oct 24 · 11:00am
Award-winning creators Hayley Rocco and John Rocco share their new picture book A Book for Everyone, in which the chipmunk Piper Waterstone returns to celebrate the joy of reading. Hayley wrote All the Books and How to Send a Hug; John is a Caldecott Honor recipient for Blackout. A family reading.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
Humphries discusses her new book on what a warming climate means for Boston: several feet of sea level rise this century on higher-emissions paths, tidal and storm flooding across low-lying neighbourhoods, heavier rainfall, and summers with most days above ninety degrees. She sets the city's mitigation and adaptation efforts against four hundred years of filling and building its shoreline.
Sat Oct 24 · 4:00pm
Jannie Ho signs Pumpkin and Beetle: Super Secret Garden, an early graphic novel about two vampire cats who sleep by day, eat only red foods and go to school at night. Here Beetle finds a mysterious treasure; they bury it, and soon their whole town is covered in hungry vines. Ho, who lives in Boston, worked as a designer and art director at Nickelodeon, Scholastic and TIME for Kids.
Sat Oct 24 · 8:30am
The Friends of the Library’s festival breakfast is a panel of novelists over a full buffet, moderated by Suzanne Koven, a Mass General primary-care physician and author of Letter to a Young Female Physician. Panelists include Christopher Castellani, whose novel Leading Men is being adapted for film by Searchlight Pictures; Gish Jen, whose sixth novel is Bad Bad Girl; and Hester Kaplan, author of Twice Born.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
Poets Nate Klug and Catherine Stearns read and take questions on their inspirations and craft. Klug, a Congregationalist minister at First Parish in Lincoln, reads from Hosts and Guests (Princeton, 2020) and has translated Virgil’s Eclogues as Rude Woods. Stearns, who headed the English department at Belmont Hill School, has a new collection, Out Toward Morning; her first book, The Transparency of Skin, was a Minnesota Book Awards finalist.
Sat Oct 24 · 1:00pm
Elin Hilderbrand signs The Thoroughbreds, a novel written with her daughter Shelby Cunningham and set at Tiffin Academy, where the senior class is in a season of college applications and "last hurrahs," and questions hang over an email a student sent before she died. Hilderbrand, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, is best known for her Nantucket novels. Tickets include a signed, personalized copy.
Sat Oct 24 · 3:00pm
Adam Wallenta signs and personalises copies of Punk Taco Adventures! Vol. 2: Big Problems, the second volume of his comics series about a sentient space-taco. Wallenta is an author, illustrator and publisher and the Senior Editor at Papercutz, where he oversees titles including Herobear and the Kid!, Three Thieves and The Smurfs. Preorders placed by October 20 come with a free original drawing at the signing.
Oct 21/24 · 6:00pm/2:00pm
Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
David Kruh discusses Little Mister Victory, the true story of a daughter’s search for the woman who abandoned her father on Boston Common on VJ Day, August 15, 1945. Kruh, a writer, historian and playwright, is best known for his two books on Scollay Square, Boston’s former entertainment district; he also wrote a musical about the Red Sox “Curse” that premiered at the Lyric Stage in 2001.
Sat Oct 24 · 7:00pm
Porter Square Books' third annual horror night pairs signing tables for five authors (Gretchen Felker-Martin, Nicky Gonzalez, Eric LaRocca, Rebecca Mahoney and Aaron Mahnke, creator of the Lore podcast) with a costume contest, a screening of Creature From the Black Lagoon and horror trivia. Each ticket includes a raffle entry for a poster signed by all five and $5 off a purchase that night.
Sat Oct 24 · 11:00am
Mary E. Cronin, the daughter of a firefighter, shares Trucks, Boots, and Bells: Firehouse Poems, a picture book of eighteen poems and fun facts in which firefighters pull on their boots and race through the city. The poems, in ballads, haiku and other forms with titles like "Pole Slider" and "Attack Hose," are illustrated by Aaron Marin. The storytime is aimed at children fascinated by firefighting.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
Sandy Bailey, a local author, reads from her new sapphic thriller She’s On to Something, in which SEC prosecutor Jaye Brannigan “stumbles onto a church-based investment scam draining millions from working-class families.” Queer, outspoken and already targeted by a hostile administration, Jaye follows the money from Boston to New Mexico, uncovering religious patriarchy, financial fraud and offshore secrets as a magnetic woman draws her toward connection.
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.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 11am
Sat Oct 24 / Sun Oct 25 · 11am
Author Cynthia Centerbar reads her Halloween-themed picture book, Poor Farm Meadow, at Hummingbird Books' spooky Sunday Storytime. She appears in the Chestnut Hill store across both weekend days to share the book with young listeners and their families. No RSVP is required and the reading is free.
Sun Oct 25 · 2:00pm
Susan Mara Bregman shares stories from New England Sweets: Doughnuts, Bonbons, and Whoopie Pies, which traces the region’s confections from a late-1700s chocolate mill on the Neponset River to Necco Wafers and Fluffernutters. Bregman has also written New England Neon and New England Candlepin Bowling for Arcadia Publishing; her most recent title is Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The Belmont Historical Society co-presents.
Sun Oct 25 · 2:00pm
Kevin Gallagher, a Greater Boston poet and publisher who edits the annual spoke, reads from his latest collection, Diving at the Moon. Claire Conroy, Beat Poet Laureate of Maine for 2024–2026, published her third book, Inlets, this year. Eileen P. Kennedy’s Dread and Splendor: Paintings and Poems for a New Earth was a finalist for the International Book Awards. The reading is free; museum admission is separate.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
Scott Magoon, the New York Times bestselling illustrator whose own picture books include Breathe, The Boy Who Cried Bigfoot and Linus the Little Yellow Pencil, leads an afternoon story time. His newest book is The Bats on the Bus, Alison Jackson's Halloween reworking of “The Wheels on the Bus” with a busload of witches, ghosts and skeletons. He also illustrated Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Spoon and Ame Dyckman's Misunderstood Shark.
Sun Oct 25 · 6pm
Amra Brooks launches her memoir Mother Is a Place, published by Dopamine Books in September, in conversation with the poet Danielle Vogel. Brooks directs the Creative Writing Program at Stonehill College, where she curates the Raymo Literary Series, and wrote the novella California (2008). Vogel, author of four hybrid poetry collections including the lyric memoir A Library of Light, teaches at Wesleyan University.
Sun Oct 25 · 11:00am
Author David A. Kelly and illustrator Bob Thibeault present their Football Mysteries series for young readers, in which Mike and Kate take on cases around NFL teams including the Dallas Cowboys, the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. Kelly also writes the Ballpark Mysteries, the baseball series that introduced the pair, and Thibeault shares his own book, Luna Lily and the Lunar Park.
Mon Oct 26 · 6:00pm
Emily St. John Mandel discusses her new novel Exit Party. Mandel has written six novels, among them Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility. Allegra Goodman joins her. Note the venue: moved from the Brattle Theatre to First Parish Church to accommodate more ticket holders.
Ticketed
Mon Oct 26 · 7:00pm
Thomas Frank discusses The Creativity Con, "a bold indictment of America's chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, tracing how these beloved ideas came to dominate our political and economic conversation while serving to mask inequality." Frank founded The Baffler and wrote What's the Matter with Kansas?
Mon Oct 26 · 6:30pm
Launch celebration for Malavika Kannan's Unprecedented Times, a novel on friendship, family, and self-narrative for young American women. Kannan reads and appears in conversation with author Laura van den Berg, followed by an audience Q&A and a signing by both. Begins 6:30 PM.
Mon Oct 26 · 6:30pm
Ariel Lawhon discusses The Pirate Queen, historical fiction built on the life of Grace O'Malley, the sixteenth-century Irish chieftain and seafarer who negotiated with Elizabeth I in Latin. Lawhon is a New York Times bestselling novelist whose previous books include The Frozen River. Parkside Bookshop presents the event at Arlington Street Church.
Mon Oct 26 · 8:00pm
Robert Clinton reads from Wasteland Honey alongside Roland Pease, whose most recent collection is The Song(s) of Roland. Pease also spent years as an editor and publisher of poetry in the Boston area. The Blacksmith House series pairs two poets each Monday evening at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
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.
Mon Oct 26 · 6:00pm
Julie Carrick Dalton discusses her novel The Forest Becomes Her, set in Concord, where “a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development” and three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak. Dalton, a former organic farmer and forest manager, also wrote The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, and teaches in Drexel University’s creative writing MFA program.
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
Mon Oct 26 · 12:30pm
JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine launch Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry, on tech worker activism, Silicon Valley's shifting labour politics and the rise of today's tech oligarchs. It argues that workers, "when united," can build the leverage to push back. Tan is a doctoral student in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Four contributors to The Practice of Wisdom, a collection on what wisdom might mean across different fields, discuss the book: Davíd Carrasco, a Harvard historian of religion in Latin America; the medical anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman; Stephanie Paulsell, who teaches Christian studies at Harvard Divinity School; and Michael Puett, who teaches Chinese history and anthropology at Harvard. The event is free with an RSVP.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Taylor Grothe discusses their adult debut Lethal Kiss, "a blood-soaked love story of rage, revenge, and belonging" and "a sapphic horror/romance that's as grotesque as it is beautiful." Grothe writes horror and dark fantasy and studies medieval literature and Norse saga. Christa Carmen joins them.
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.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Levitt, a sociologist at Wellesley College, discusses Move Over, Mona Lisa, which asks why museums, libraries and classrooms change so slowly when audiences are asking for a wider range of work. She calls the obstacles an “inequality pipeline,” and reports from Argentina, Lebanon and South Korea on people building alternative routes rather than waiting. A signing follows.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Kathleen Carr Foster launches her debut novel The Jewel of Corlivo on its publication day; it sends a runaway courtesan and her disgraced suitor hunting treasure through a reimagined Byzantine empire. Carr Foster teaches writing at UMass Boston. She holds an MFA from Boston University, where she won the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize, and has an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Four local novelists — Jenna Blum (Murder Your Darlings), Elizabeth Searle (Lock Her Up), Jessica Treadway (Lacy Eye) and Erica Ferencik (The Blooming) — read briefly, then argue out what a literary thriller actually is, how a literary novelist crosses into the genre, and what the hybrid offers a reader. At Porter Square's Boston Edition inside GrubStreet.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Two decades of clinical practice and a pile of relationship science behind her, Dr Schonbrun traces the hidden forces that bend what we perceive, how we read it, and why we keep defending our version of an argument long after it stops holding up — then says what to do instead. In conversation with Lindsay Gibson.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Novelists Jenn Bouchard and Kathleen Reidy read from new books with New England settings and talk about how place shapes their fiction. Bouchard wrote Palms on the Cape, about a Cape Cod beach-bar owner whose business is threatened by a visiting business-school group. Reidy, a Concord librarian, sets her first novel, Engineering a Love Story, among software engineers at the end of the dot-com boom.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Rebecca Podos leads a book-club discussion of Homeward for a Spell, a cozy queer romantic fantasy in which a ranger leading her first adventuring party and a bard escaping an arranged marriage fall for each other on a winter quest. The shop credits the book to Podos and Jamie Pacton. Podos, a Lambda Literary Award winner for her YA novels, is also a literary agent.
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
Tue Oct 27 · 7pm
Carla Vass discusses her novel The Rally, in which a young tech entrepreneur, ousted from the dating app she built, escapes on a European car rally where “she must contend with the excesses of the über-rich, betrayal, and love.” Vass worked at Goldman Sachs, Uber and Waymo before founding the startup Civi. Emily Everett, author of the Reese’s Book Club pick All That Life Can Afford, moderates.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:00pm
Anne Habiby discusses Daring to Hope: Witness From Gaza, which chronicles the war on Gaza through thousands of real-time messages between her and Mohammed Balah, the footballer known as the "Ronaldo of Gaza," who moved his family of fifteen between shelters in 2023–24. Habiby, a Palestinian American economist, co-founded AllWorld Network and spent a decade as economist to the Royal Commission for Riyadh City.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:30pm
The Moth’s monthly Boston StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition: anyone may put their name in to tell a true five-minute story on the night’s theme. October’s theme is “Frenemies,” about “the razor-thin line between friend and foe” — besties turned competitors, siblings who keep the score. PRX and WBUR are the media sponsors, and seating is first-come, first-served.
Tue Oct 27 · 5pm
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute launches The Face of Fire, Oleksii Nikitin’s novel of Kyiv in 1941, translated by Catherine O’Neil and Dominique Hoffman for the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature. After the Holodomor and Stalin’s purges, the Jewish boxer Ilya Goldinov and his wife Feliksa, a track star, look to a brighter future until the Nazi invasion. It draws on declassified NKVD files and the author’s family archive.
Tue Oct 27 · 12pm
Olga V. Mack, CEO of TermScout, Linsey Krolik, senior director of AI governance and product at Credo AI, and Tessa Manuello, founder of Legal Creatives, discuss Visual Literacy for Lawyers: A Guide to Enhancing Your Contracts and Practice, on how “visual communication can strengthen legal analysis, advocacy, and client understanding.” Dan Jackson of the NuLawLab and Ashley Treni of Art + Design at CAMD join them.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Wendy S. Walters discusses A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, "an impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing fine arts, design and architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society." Walters teaches nonfiction at Columbia and wrote Multiply/Divide.
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.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Clinical psychologist Yael Schonbrun discusses Why Don't You Understand Me?, examining the science of miscommunication from intimate relationships to geopolitical conflict. A Brown University clinical assistant professor and co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off the Clock, Schonbrun previously wrote Work, Parent, Thrive. A talk grounded in behavioral-science research on human connection.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Lu discusses her fantasy novel Mortal Things, in which Rose Lin Fairchild is bound as Harbinger to Raven, the god of Death, and is thrust forward as his heir when a murder unsettles the immortal realm — with a rival Harbinger, Étienne Beauchard, set to test her. Lu wrote the Legend and Young Elites series. Fin Leary joins her.
Wed Oct 28 · 6:00pm
Boggs discusses Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin, which won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and which Time and The Atlantic named among the ten best books of 2025. Programmed for LGBTQ+ History Month; a signing with Trident Booksellers follows.
Wed Oct 28 · 6:30pm
Martin Swirko discusses and signs All Routes Are Amber: A Soldier's Experience in the Iraq War, which starts with his first days in the Army Reserves in the 1980s and follows the slow administrative process by which he was mobilised into the regular army and sent out. The Next Chapter hosts in Quincy.
Wed Oct 28 · 11:30am
Historian Brooke Barbier discusses Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution, which argues that the colonists’ culture of drink and taverns helped foster the rebellion against Britain. The library’s monthly nonfiction book club, Fowler in Fact, moves from the branch to the Wright Tavern for this festival session; copies can be borrowed beforehand, and bought and signed at the event.
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
Wed Oct 28 · 7pm
Cole Brauer discusses First Light, her memoir of the 130 days she spent alone at sea in 2024, when she became the first American woman to race solo around the world, finishing second in a forty-foot boat through mechanical breakdowns, food poisoning and the Southern Ocean’s cold. She is interviewed by the yacht racer David Southwell, winner of the 2024 Original Single-handed Transatlantic Race.
Wed Oct 28 · 7pm
An evening to meet Kat Gonso, named the library’s 2026–2028 Dr. Herb Voigt Writer-in-Residence, who will offer workshops and events throughout her residency. Gonso’s short prose has won the Gover Flash Fiction Prize and The Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest and made the Wigleaf Top 50. She is a Professor of the Practice in English at Boston College and teaches in Emerson College’s graduate creative writing program.
Wed Oct 28 · 6:30pm
Steven A. Holmes discusses Black Messiahs, which follows two Black American soldiers and a young Jewish Holocaust survivor whose lives intersect during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, asking "what happens when the struggle against fascism abroad collides with the fight for equality at home?" Holmes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked as a reporter and editor at Time, the New York Times and CNN.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Photographer Roger Farrington and Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack launch Starting Over with John and Yoko: The Photographs, on the August 1980 session where Farrington was hired to get “the shot” announcing Lennon and Ono's return to the studio. ChaChi Loprete of New England's Breakfast with the Beatles leads the conversation, joined by archivist David Bieber, and musician Sal Baglio performs; Farrington's photographs and Bieber's Lennon memorabilia are on display.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Raj Panjabi discusses Safer: A Playbook — Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community, "the essential guide for navigating crisis and uncertainty from the acclaimed physician who led the White House response to the world's most dangerous health emergencies." Panjabi fled Liberia's civil war as a child and founded Last Mile Health.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Alex Gonzalez discusses his novel The Man of Wind and Moss, "a folk horror tale" in which six college friends on a woodland getaway make supernatural deals to survive, pitched as "The Blair Witch Project meets Cabin in the Woods." Paul Tremblay, the horror novelist, joins him.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Adam Grant discusses his new book VIBE: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, on "the surprising science of human connection" and building stronger relationships in an increasingly disconnected world. Grant is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Give and Take.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:30pm
The Moth's curated touring Mainstage — five storytellers, true stories told live without notes, on the theme TIGHTROPE — comes to the Wilbur. This is the produced, directed evening, not an open-mic StorySlam: tellers are selected and coached, and the form at its best is as gripping as any play.
from $57
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
LaHines discusses Miracle Grow of the Mind, a novel about a couple whose son is born prematurely and the years of pediatric neurologists, sensory therapy and evaluations that follow, and about deciding which treatments are worth their cost. Her The Vixen Amber Halloway won a 2024 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Rick Moody joins her.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:30pm
An evening of true stories told live, recorded at GBH's Calderwood Studio for the series Stories from the Stage. The theme is the brief meeting that stays with a person for years afterwards. Tellers are selected and directed rather than drawn from the floor, and the audience is part of the recording.
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.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm
Joseph Finder, Jule Selbo and Janet Raye Stevens make up the Friends of the Library’s annual crime-fiction panel. Finder has written 17 suspense novels, most recently The Oligarch’s Daughter, and saw High Crimes and Paranoia filmed; Selbo writes the Dee Rommel mysteries and was a television writer-producer; Stevens won a Daphne du Maurier award for A Moment After Dark. Kate Flora, author of twenty-four books, moderates.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:30pm
Camille de Peretti discusses her novel Portrait of an Unknown Woman, which starts from a true episode: in 1910 Gustav Klimt painted a young woman, then painted over her portrait, and the canvas, stolen in 1997, resurfaced two decades later. De Peretti imagines the woman behind the painting and the generations that follow her. MIT's Global France Seminar presents the talk with Literature at MIT and the French Library.
Thu Oct 29 · 3pm
Jelena Golubović launches her first book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo, which “unearths a buried history of retributive violence that unfolded inside besieged Sarajevo,” drawing on interviews with Bosnian Serb women whose suffering the dominant narrative of the war leaves out. She discusses victimhood, nationalism and contested histories of violence in conversation with Sasha Sabherwal. Copies sell at a 30 percent discount.
Thu Oct 29 · 6pm
R.F. Kuang discusses her new book, Taipei Story. Kuang is the No. 1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface and Katabasis, and her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford and British Book Awards. She is the Millard Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross. Northeastern's Global Asian Studies program hosts.
Thu Oct 29 · 7pm
Nathaniel Philbrick discusses his new book The Rush, which recasts the Gold Rush as “the origin story of America’s modern contradictions: capital consolidated at dizzying speed, democracy in thrall to private power, xenophobia weaponized in the name of liberty.” Philbrick won the 2000 National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea and is the author of Mayflower, Bunker Hill and Valiant Ambition.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm
Editors Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles and contributors discuss America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, a collection of 62 essays by more than 50 Harvard Law School faculty marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. The essays take up the expansion of executive power, democratic accountability in a market-driven economy, and governance amid rapid technological change. Contributors include Stephen Breyer, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jill Lepore and Cass R. Sunstein.
Thu Oct 29 · 7pm
Rachel Squires Bloom presents her new book Hancock Cemetery: Alive with History, which places Quincy’s “Old Burying Ground” in “the contexts of Puritan theology, colonial community life, and the development of Quincy as a civic and industrial center,” through the farmers, ministers, merchants and civic leaders buried there. Bloom, a Quincy Public Schools teacher for more than two decades, also wrote Squantum School: A Great Place to Start.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:00pm
Edward Steed discusses Happy Hour: A Book of Drawings, in which "a generational talent's old cartooning soul returns for a second round." Steed draws for the New Yorker and has a Grammy for a Father John Misty album cover. Ruth Lichtman, an Emmy-nominated director, joins him.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:00pm
Michelle Lerner, a Harvard-educated lawyer, discusses her memoir A Series of Opinionated Animals, on a life of "loving, chaotic service" to rescue animals — beginning with a neurologically impaired squirrel who insisted on being sat on by his rabbit roommate.
Fri Oct 30 · 10:30am
Two Massachusetts picture-book authors lead a storytime, then sign. Amanda Davis's new Chasing the Light, illustrated by Faryn Hughes, follows a mother and daughter who play “a game of hide and seek with the Northern Lights” on a winter night. Megan Litwin, a former classroom teacher with a master's in children's literature from Simmons, wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, Winter Night, a winter twist on the nursery rhyme.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:00pm
Emily Ladau, a disability rights activist and writer, launches the updated second edition of Demystifying Disability, her guide to being “a thoughtful, informed ally to disabled people,” with practical steps on what to say and do, and what not to. The launch includes a moderated discussion, audience questions and a signing, with ASL and CART services provided and sliding-scale tickets available.
Sat Oct 31 · 2:00pm
Paul Tremblay signs copies of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, billed as "Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers": a former semi-professional gamer takes a temp job chaperoning a man in a vegetative state, with proprietary AI implanted in his head, from California to the East Coast. Tremblay's earlier novels include Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of the World, filmed as Knock at the Cabin.
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.
Sun Nov 1 · 9:30am
Padma Venkatraman reads Faraway Family at a morning story time — a picture book about visiting relatives in another country after a long separation, and how the reconnecting takes longer than the travelling. Venkatraman has won awards for her middle-grade novels, several set in India.
Sun Nov 1 · 1:00pm
Kathleen Carr Foster signs her debut novel, The Jewel of Corlivo, set “in a reimagined Byzantine empire.” Anna, raised to be a courtesan in mountain-ringed Corlivo like her vanished mother, catches the eye of Sebastianus, an explorer who thinks she has found a clue to a lost city of treasure in an ancient book. They flee to the imperial court, where Anna uncovers a secret tied to her mother's fate.
Sun Nov 1 · 3pm
The New England Poetry Club rejoins the Worcester County Poetry Association for a reading by three poets, followed by an open mic. Mandy Gutmann-González, a Chilean poet and novelist who teaches creative writing at Clark University, has two collections forthcoming, O/CCULT and Out, Little Spear! K. T. Landon’s debut, Abide, won the 2025 Richard Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize; Janet MacFadyen’s latest is Love Letters to the Wild.
Sun Nov 1 · 10am
Raúl the Third signs his latest book, ¡Vamos! Let’s Celebrate Halloween and Día de los Muertos, and gives a 30-minute live drawing demonstration with the chance to draw along (suggested age five and up); a signed copy, sketchbook and pencil come with the ticket. The Somerville illustrator, a New York Times bestseller and three-time Pura Belpré award winner, made the restaurant’s Davis Square mural.
$28 (includes signed book, sketchbook and brunch voucher)
Sun Nov 1 · 2:45pm
Lizards & Gizmos Comedy presents an afternoon of creative nonfiction, personal stories billed as “moving, funny, and inspirational,” read by eight writers: Bayani Young, Channing, Christina Blakely, Claire Maguire, Lizzie Granata, Nikki Raheja, Shiyanbade and Talie Fraine.
Sun Nov 1 · 5:00pm
Peter Hahn discusses Angels in the Cellar: Notes from a French Vineyard, his account of “leaving a globe-trotting corporate career to build a new life as a winegrower in France’s Loire Valley.” Hahn spent almost fifteen years in global management consulting and finance before settling at Le Clos de la Meslerie, where he makes small-batch organic wines. The evening includes wine from his vineyard and a book signing.
Mon Nov 2 · 7:00pm
Deni Elliott discusses Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself, "one woman's journey through progressive blindness and the extraordinary guide dog who kept her safe along the way." Elliott is an ethics scholar, co-director of the National Ethics Project and professor emerita at the University of South Florida.
Mon Nov 2 · 8:00pm
Pádraig Ó Tuama reads from The Weight of Time with Susan Stewart, whose most recent book is Bramble. Ó Tuama is an Irish poet and theologian who presents the podcast Poetry Unbound; Stewart is a MacArthur fellow and former Princeton professor who writes criticism as well as poems.
Mon Nov 2 · 7pm
Kerri Maher joins a book-club discussion of her novel Summer of Love, in which two sisters, a Berkeley poet and a Napa winemaker, make life-changing choices in San Francisco’s 1967 summer, and Dawn Hartley, fifty years later, hunts the anonymous author of novels that seem to know her family’s secrets. Maher wrote the USA Today bestseller The Paris Bookseller. Co-presented with the British International School; the discussion includes spoilers.
Mon Nov 2 · 7pm
Kathleen Foster and Emily Franklin, two writers with ties to Milton, discuss finding novels in the stories missing from the historical record. Foster’s debut The Jewel of Corlivo is a historical fantasy set in a world inspired by the early Byzantine empire; Franklin’s Love & Other Monsters tells the origin of Frankenstein through Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister. Franklin also wrote The Lioness of Boston, about Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Mon Nov 2 · 6pm
Munis D. Faruqui discusses his new history of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), the last of the so-called great Mughal emperors, castigated by some for religious intolerance and hailed by others as a Muslim hero. Drawing on a large archive, the book covers his rise to power, his administrative and religious policies, and the imperial eunuchate and harem. Ayesha Jalal, Tufts' Mary Richardson Professor of History, chairs.
Mon Nov 2 · 7:00pm
Cartoonists Leah Hayes and Maria Hoey talk about identity, and about finding and losing yourself, in Picture + Panel, the monthly graphic-novel conversation series run with Porter Square Books. Hayes, also a musician and producer, has published Funeral of the Heart, Holy Moly and now Identical with Fantagraphics. Hoey, author of The Shadower, makes comics with her brother Peter, including the Eisner-nominated series Coin-Op. Rae Borman of Readercon moderates.
Tue Nov 3 · 7:30pm
An open-mic storytelling competition from The Moth: names are drawn from a hat, and each storyteller gets five minutes, without notes, for a true story on the theme, judged by teams from the audience. The theme is the holiday season, from “the chaos of family gatherings” to “take-out for one,” and what belonging, or not belonging, looks like. Holiday stories from any season are welcome.
$17
Tue Nov 3 · 7:00pm
Paris Marx discusses Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires, in which he "exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities." It is longlisted for the 2026 Financial Times and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year. Marx hosts the podcast Tech Won't Save Us. Becca Lewis, an MIT assistant professor who studies right-wing politics in Silicon Valley, joins him.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:00pm
Joanne Chang discusses The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share, "a warm, stunning, celebratory baking book of favorite cookies, classic and new." Chang has a James Beard award and founded Flour Bakery + Cafe and Myers + Chang in Boston. At the Brattle, ticketed.
Ticketed
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Christy Scott Cashman discusses her new novel What Happened in Beulah, in which "a teenage girl uncovers the dark secrets of her Smoky Mountain town while searching for a missing classmate." Cashman is a Boston-based author, actress and producer, and founded the youth arts nonprofit YouthINK.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo discusses Countertenor, on his life, his training and the history of his voice, tracing the countertenor from the Baroque to today with Jeremy Eichler, the former Globe classical critic. Costanzo also performs select arias during the evening.
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.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Lucy Foley discusses Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, a new Miss Marple novel written with the Christie estate's blessing, which sends Christie's detective abroad. Foley wrote The Guest List and The Midnight Feast and has topped the New York Times list. GBH records the conversation in front of an audience at its Brighton studios.
Wed Nov 4 · 12:00pm
Jelena Diab Golubović discusses Inner Zone, on the violence committed inside besieged Sarajevo rather than from the hills around it — a history the city's own account of the siege largely leaves out. She is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs and did her fieldwork across the former Yugoslavia.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:30pm
Michael Blanding discusses The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, an investigation of the Green family, whose money has taken religious-liberty cases to the Supreme Court, funded institutions behind the repeal of Roe v. Wade and stocked the Museum of the Bible with illegally trafficked antiquities. Blanding, a Boston investigative journalist and former Harvard Kennedy School senior fellow, wrote the New York Times bestseller The Map Thief.
Wed Nov 4 · 12:30pm
Jean Duffy reads from and discusses Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World, her book about South Africa's teams of soccer-playing grandmothers. The session is part of the library's monthly Author Talk series, in which local writers give the background to a book, read excerpts and take questions from a moderator and the audience. It runs in partnership with Newton's Department of Older Adult Services.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:30pm
Katherine A. Sherbrooke discusses her fourth novel, This Much is True, in which a veterinarian on her fifty-eighth birthday recognises her daughter’s future father-in-law from “an incident during high school that changed the trajectory of her life.” Sherbrooke’s Leaving Coy’s Hill was a New York Times notable book and a Massachusetts Book Award finalist, and she chaired GrubStreet’s board. Family counselor and novelist Lynne Reeves Griffin joins her.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:00pm
Jacob Weisberg discusses Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, whose title inverts John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. Weisberg chairs the Committee to Protect Journalists, was for many years editor of Slate, and co-founded the podcast company Pushkin Industries with Malcolm Gladwell; his earlier books include The Bush Tragedy. The Cambridge Public Library co-presents, and a signing follows.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Kathryn Silver-Hajo discusses Spinning: Love, Family and Other Strange Entanglements, her new story collection, with the flash fiction writer Claudia Monpere. Silver-Hajo is the author of the flash collection Wolfsong and the young adult novel Roots of the Banyan Tree, a 2025 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medalist. Monpere, who won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize, is the author of the flash collection The Periodic Family.
Wed Nov 4 · 6:00pm
Comedian and columnist Scott Kerman brings his Last Honest Politician Tour, a live storytelling show drawn from four years of Wednesday visits with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Those hundreds of hours of recorded conversations became his book The Duke: Weekly Conversations with the Last Honest Politician. The evening mixes stories, some not told publicly before, with audience interaction, and ends with a Q&A and book signing.
$12.51 (Eventbrite price incl. fees)
Wed Nov 4 · 5:45pm
Paul Tremblay reads from his new book, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sleep, and discusses earlier novels including A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted as the film Knock at the Cabin. A New York Times bestselling horror writer, Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Sheridan Le Fanu and Massachusetts Book awards.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Howard Mansfield discusses Invisible Monuments, on the statues, obelisks and markers people pass without seeing, and why a few still move us decades later while most fall mute; the book is “about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.” Mansfield writes on history, architecture and preservation from Hancock, New Hampshire, and his dozen books include In the Memory House and I Will Tell No War Stories.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
Stephen Kinzer discusses Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, "the untold history of America's secret seventy-five-year struggle in Ukraine that set the stage for today's war." Kinzer reported from more than fifty countries for the New York Times and is a senior fellow at Brown's Watson Institute.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
Audrey Henderson and Alan Smith Soto present the Collected Poems of Mark Smith-Soto, the Costa Rican-American poet who edited International Poetry Review at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for many years and whose earlier books include Any Second Now and Berkeley Prelude. The reading can be attended in the shop or joined online.
Thu Nov 5 · 6:00pm
Linford D. Fisher discusses Stealing America, which traces the enslavement of Indigenous people from the years just after 1492, “ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas,” nearly 600,000 of them in North America, through the boarding schools that followed its 1867 ban. Fisher, an associate professor of history at Brown, wrote The Indian Great Awakening and leads the Stolen Relations project.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
Matson discusses Winnowing, which alternates essays on what it means to own things with a day-by-day “Winnowing Log” of her own attempt to reduce what is in her house. She has written several novels, among them The Tree-Sitter and The Hunger Moon, and three books of poetry, most recently As Creatures.
Thu Nov 5 · 7pm
Weina Dai Randel discusses her novel The Lost Kingdom of Daughters, set in a matriarchal society based on China’s Moso people “where marriage doesn’t exist and free love is the tradition,” whose heroine meets two stranded American brothers. Randel wrote The Last Rose of Shanghai, optioned for film, and won the RWA RITA Award. Karen Kirsten, author of the National Jewish Book Award finalist Irena’s Gift, joins her.
Thu Nov 5 · 7pm
David Tuch discusses his debut book, The Wireless Operator: The Untold Story of the British Sailor Who Invented the Modern Drug Trade. Drawing on newly declassified records, Tuch tells the story of his cousin Harold Derber, whose smuggling operations “helped shape the modern drug trade and the war on drugs that followed.” He is joined in conversation by journalist Dick Lehr, co-author of Black Mass.
Thu Nov 5 · 6:30pm
Janis Robinson Daly discusses her novel Under Two Flags, in which eighteen-year-old Josephine Therese Marzynski leaves Boston in 1916 to study opera in Berlin and, when America enters the war in 1917, goes "from welcomed student to enemy of the state." The book retells Marzynski's own memoir, first ghostwritten by Daly's grandfather, Eliot H. Robinson Sr. Daly's first two books, both award winners, concern pioneering women in medicine.
Thu Nov 5 · 6:30pm
Franny Choi discusses We Radiant Things, their first essay collection, which blends lyric memoir and cultural criticism to ask "what sci-fi representations of Asian femmes reveal about race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and language." Choi, who teaches literature at Bennington College, is the author of the poetry collections Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. Writer Maria Pinto joins them in conversation.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
The literary magazine AGNI launches its fall print issue at United Parish in Brookline with four readers, a set by singer-songwriter Naomi Westwater and a release party. Tracy K. Smith, the former US poet laureate whose Life on Mars won the Pulitzer, reads with Palestinian novelist Ibtisam Azem, a 2026–27 Radcliffe Fellow, Wesleyan poet and translator Shangyang Fang, and John Cotter, author of the memoir Losing Music.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:30pm
Stephanie Leydon of GBH interviews Tom Perrotta, the best-selling novelist and screenwriter, about his work and how living in Belmont informs his writing. Perrotta is the author of Election and Little Children, both adapted for film, and of The Leftovers, which he co-created as an HBO series; Tracy Flick Can’t Win (2022) returned to Election’s heroine. Belmont Books sponsors a signing afterward.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
Maya Rupert discusses The Real Ones, which argues that “authenticity is a privilege kept from people of color,” drawing on pop culture, workplace advice and her own experience on the presidential campaign trail. Rupert, the third Black woman in history to run a presidential campaign, is executive vice president at Blue State and hosts When We Win, a podcast nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm
Riley Black discusses Tyrant Lizard Queen, "an imaginative celebration of T. Rex from hatching to adulthood" — an animal "exceeding 40 feet in length and weighing over 9 tons." Black is science correspondent for Smithsonian and wrote The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 8
Fri Nov 6 · 4pm / Sat Nov 7 · 12pm / Sun Nov 8 · 11am
The country's antiquarian booksellers bring rare books, manuscripts, maps, photographs and ephemera to the Hynes for the 48th Boston fair — three days of browsing material that ranges from affordable curiosities to five-figure landmarks, with dealers happy to talk provenance with anyone who asks.
$25 Friday (valid all weekend), $15 Saturday, $10 Sunday; students free with ID
Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm
Translator Ellen Elias-Bursać discusses Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah, which she translated with Mirza Purić: nineteen stories imagining what inspired the Bosnian folk songs of the author’s Sarajevo childhood. Jergović won the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize for Sarajevo Marlboro. Elias-Bursać, who taught in Harvard’s Slavic department, is joined by translator Jim Hicks, former executive editor of the Massachusetts Review. Part of the Transnational Literature Series.
Sat Nov 7 · 2:00pm
Two middle-grade authors appear together: Diane Debrovner presents Roxie in Color, about a girl with blind parents, typeset in a low-vision font, while debut author Wendy Lu shares Casting April, about a disabled sixth grader chasing a Broadway role. Both books center disability and identity; Lu is a New York Times deputy editor.
Sat Nov 7 · 1:00pm
Tara Lynn Masih discusses The Silent Women, a novel drawn from the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge — the closed town where thousands worked without being told what they were building. Her protagonist, Song Holloway, is ordered to inform on the women around her. Masih has won the Julia Ward Howe Prize.
Sat Nov 7 · 4:00pm
Anna Housley Juster reads How to Train Your Amygdala and The Best Good Thing: Discovering Joy on a Very Bad, Smad Day. She is a licensed child and adolescent mental health clinician who began as a Head Start teacher and has spent twenty-five years in curriculum development and family support.
Sat Nov 7 · 10:00am
Children's author Ellen Mayer reads from Flutter, Flap, Fly, Cake Day and Yellow, Red, Green — Go with banjo player Malcolm Pittman accompanying. The shop is explicit that the children are expected to sing along rather than sit and listen, so it runs closer to a singalong than a reading.
Sat Nov 7 · 1:00pm
Sandy Bailey discusses She’s On To Something, a sapphic romantic thriller in which a butch SEC prosecutor, Jaye Brannigan, uncovers a church-based investment scam draining millions from working-class families. Bailey drove freight and passenger trains across New England before law school, then prosecuted white-collar and domestic-violence cases in New Mexico and corporate fraud in Boston and Washington. Rozzie Bound asks for an RSVP.
Sat Nov 7 · 1:00pm
Michael Carini signs Tyler Madison and the Secret of Washington's Treasure, an adventure novel in which Tyler inherits a pocket watch from his grandfather, a former president. The watch has passed through the hands of every commander in chief since John Adams, and the secret it carries leads Tyler and his friends into the White House, an ancient secret society and the buried truth about George Washington.
Sat Nov 7 · 2:00pm
Christopher Mirabile signs two novels in his Silas Lopez mystery series, set in Provincetown. In The Washashore, a fatal late-night hit-and-run draws interim police chief Silas Lopez, “a fifteenth-generation ranch hand turned plain-spoken cop,” from the dunes and cranberry farms to the docks of New Bedford. The Holdfast, out September 15, follows an elderly homeowner’s suspicious death into shell companies and shadowy real-estate deals.
Sat Nov 7 · 11:30am
Kelly Riera reads her picture book What Trucks Love to Do 2: Help and Serve Crew, a celebration of community helpers "and all they do to keep our towns rolling." A crew races, rescues, fixes, cleans and serves its way through town, from fire trucks that spray to garbage trucks that munch and food trucks that sizzle. It is the second What Trucks Love to Do book.
Sat Nov 7 · 6pm
Rim Battal and her translator Liza Tripp give a bilingual reading from I'll Look Myself in the Eyes, Battal's autobiographical novel about a 17-year-old in Marrakesh whose mother, catching her smoking, demands a virginity test, and talk about translating culture and sensitive language. The French original won the 2025 prix de la littérature arabe des lycéens. Battal, a poet and journalist, lives between Paris and Rabat.
Sat Nov 7 · 11:00am
Two picture-book authors read and lead crafts for children. Kathy Choi reads Giving Thanks with Halmoni, about Chuseok, the Korean harvest-moon festival, and teaches a Korean wrapping-cloth craft; Mia Wenjen reads from The Traveling Taco, on the surprising journeys of children's favourite foods, and shows how to fold origami french fries and a cup. Both books were named 2026 Notable Social Studies Trade Books.
Sat Nov 7 · 5:30pm
Dr. Camille V. Edwards meets readers and signs Within These Four Walls, her portrait “of a marriage lived in the shadows of emotional abuse.” Edwards is a physician, a wholeness coach and the founder of Reclaim Reset Restore, a community dedicated to healing the whole person, “mind, body, and soul.” Admission includes a signed copy of the book and a meet-and-greet with the author.
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.
Sun Nov 8 · 2:00pm
Debrovner introduces her middle-grade novel Roxie in Color, which grew out of her Parents magazine article “What Blind Parents Want You to See.” She is joined by Aria Mia Loberti, the actress and UNICEF ambassador who narrates the audiobook and wrote I Am Ingrid: The Adventures of the World's Greatest Guide Dog, about her own guide dog. Audience questions and a signing follow.
Sun Nov 8 · 11:00am
Mark Epstein signs Cape Dreams: A Season with the Brewster Whitecaps, his account of the team's 2024 summer in the 101-year-old Cape Cod Baseball League. Epstein followed the club all season under manager Jamie Shevchik, writing about players, coaches, volunteers and host families. He spent nearly 30 years in the Charleston County School District, and the book was chosen for the Baseball Hall of Fame's 2026 Author Series.
Sun Nov 8 · 12:00pm
Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament and his brother Barry discuss their new book, Since Forever, and the stories behind its photographs. Jeff Ament, a founding member of Pearl Jam who earlier played in the Seattle bands Green River and Mother Love Bone, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Pearl Jam in 2017. Barry Ament is a graphic designer who co-founded the Seattle studio Ames Bros.
Mon Nov 9 · 6:00pm
Francine Berman discusses Better Tech: Putting People First in Cyberspace. Berman founded and heads the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass Amherst and co-chairs the Berkman Klein Center working group on the subject. Free with an RSVP at the Harvard Science Center, co-presented with Harvard Library.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:00pm
Lloyd Schwartz reads from his new collection Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948) and Other Poems. Schwartz won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, served as Poet Laureate of Somerville, and is professor emeritus of English at UMass Boston.
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.
Mon Nov 9 · 7pm
Edith Netter presents The House at Schumannstrasse 7: A Memoir, a Holocaust survivor’s story told in the voice of her grandmother, Alice Rothschild Netter. The story takes in a home seized by the Nazis, a German concentration camp, British internment camps, the Kindertransport and a fraught journey by “sealed train.” Netter, a retired lawyer, spent years researching the family’s past, even retracing her grandmother’s route to freedom.
Mon Nov 9 · 7pm
Jenn Bouchard, a Massachusetts novelist who writes stories set in New England, talks about her path to publication and “embracing life’s second acts.” Bouchard did not publish her debut novel until she was 44; at 49 she is releasing her third, Palms on the Cape, while still teaching high school social studies full-time and raising a family. She has close to 100 book events behind her.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:00pm
Kasey Lansdale discusses her debut novel First Chance, which introduces Chance Kirby, a former journalist turned private investigator in Hopeful, Texas. Her first case, the unsolved killing of a client's sister, uncovers a string of young women murdered the same way. Lansdale, a singer-songwriter and the daughter of the novelist Joe R. Lansdale, is joined by Christopher Golden, the Massachusetts horror writer whose Ararat won the Bram Stoker Award.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:00pm
Sarah Cavanaugh discusses Peaceful Exit: A Guide to Reimagining Your Final Chapter, which “invites readers to prepare for death as an act of service — both to themselves and to the people they love.” Cavanaugh hosts the Peaceful Exit podcast, where she has interviewed Alua Arthur, Anne Lamott and Patti Davis. She is joined by Heather Myers, a friend since seventh grade who advises endowments on investment strategy.
Mon Nov 9 · 6pm
Local author Kwan Kew Lai discusses Finding Independence in America: An International Student’s Journey from Malaysia to Medical School, a memoir spanning 17 years of her path from international student to American citizen. Without sustained family support, she relied on scholarships, loans and ingenuity while “navigating a cultural landscape of racism, sexism, and unfamiliar social cultures,” and took her medical expertise into global humanitarian work.
Mon Nov 9 · 7pm
Melissa Mack, a poet and essayist who brings social and natural history into lyric and hybrid-lyric poems, reads from her work for the Princemere Writers Series. Her full-length collection The Next Crystal Text won the Timeless, Infinite Light first-manuscript award; she has received a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, sits on the board of Small Press Traffic and is completing a PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.
Tue Nov 10 · 6:00pm
Alice Hoffman discusses The Witches of Cambridge, "the brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe." Hoffman has written thirty works of fiction.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
David Weinberger discusses Beautiful Particulars, "a fresh and eye-opening new explanation of AI — and how its focus on specifics is changing our ideas about ourselves and our world." Weinberger researches at Harvard's metaLAB, is a long-time Berkman Klein affiliate and wrote Everyday Chaos.
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.
Tue Nov 10 · 10:30am
The author and illustrator Grace Lin discusses her work and meets young readers. Lin has written and illustrated dozens of children's books, among them Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and the Ling and Ting series, and holds Newbery, Caldecott and Theodor Geisel Honors.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
A poetry reading with two authors sharing new collections: Ilan Mochari presents Playthings, and Rosemary Herbert reads from Sisters in Time, centered on her experience unearthing a fourth-century Roman-era pagan burial in Winchester, England. Mochari, a novelist and Pushcart nominee, and Herbert together anchor an evening devoted to contemporary poetry.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Joanne Chang, the James Beard Award-winning baker who founded Boston's Flour bakeries and co-owns Myers+Chang, discusses The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share. Known as the “cookie girl” at Harvard, she opens the book with “a baker’s dozen of baking questions” before chapters of bars, sandwich cookies and savoury ones. Ashley Stanley, founder of the food-rescue nonprofit Lovin' Spoonfuls, joins her.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Sarah Bruhn launches Holding On to Home, built on five years of fieldwork and more than a hundred interviews, on how immigrant women's care work in families, schools and neighbourhoods is what makes sanctuary mean anything in practice. Bruhn researches how public policy shapes immigrant families' chances of inclusion.
Tue Nov 10 · 6:00pm
Jay Vogt reads from A Walking Life: A Memoir in Seventeen Walks, including a six-mile Sunday loop from his Concord door past the Old Manse and the Old North Bridge into the Estabrook Woods, and pieces on the Camino and an alpine pass. Vogt, founder of the consulting practice Peoplesworth, then draws on forty years as a facilitator to gather attendees’ own walking stories. Registration opens October 10.
Tue Nov 10 · 7pm
Daphne Elliot marks release day for Wood You Be Mine, a small-town romance in which a “determined elementary school principal moves in next door to grumpy lumberjack Henri Gagnon” with one year to prove herself and save her job. She is in conversation with fellow romance author Brittanée Nicole, then signs the new book and up to two titles brought from home.
Tue Nov 10 · 7pm
Randy Ross, a Boston-area novelist, storyteller and comedian and the author of God Bless Cambodia, tells how a homebody’s sixteen-week solo trip around the world in 2007, with four continents and three bungee jumps, turned into a comedy novel and a one-man show. His one-man shows have played libraries, youth hostels, senior centers and more than 30 fringe festivals in the U.S., Canada and Edinburgh.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Alyson Mosquera DuTemple discusses her debut story collection, in which an amateur herpetologist is swindled by women he meets on lizard-care message boards and a dental hygienist makes a doomed trip to a sham psychic on the Atlantic City boardwalk. DuTemple's stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and Colorado Review. Leah de Forest, who teaches fiction at the Harvard Extension School, joins her.
Tue Nov 10 · 7pm
Former Boston Globe and Washington Post film critics Ty Burr and Janice Page talk through the Oscar frontrunners and recent festival hits and misses, and Page discusses her memoir Year of the Water Horse, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice she worked on as the 2023 Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger resident at Yaddo. Burr, a 2017 Pulitzer finalist for criticism, is the author of Gods Like Us.
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.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:00pm
A Veterans Day edition of Fish Tales, the Gloucester Writers Center's series of true stories told live in the manner of The Moth, under the title “Veterans – What it Means, What it Meant.” The stories, by and about veterans, look past the uniform at military life: how serving affected the tellers at the time, how they see it years later, and how it shaped them.
Wed Nov 11 · 6:30pm
Laura Zigman discusses her new novel The Author Weekend, in which bestselling mystery writer Faye Wader, her sales slipping, hosts her first fan weekend on Great Misery Island, only for a rival novelist to crash it and an attendee to turn up dead. Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry and Separation Anxiety, also collaborated on Eddie Izzard’s bestseller Believe Me. The Friends of the South End Library present the talk.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:00pm
Mari Howes, a lawyer and Georgetown Law graduate, discusses her debut thriller The Tribes, the story of “a cult member accused of a shocking crime and the lawyer who chooses to defend her,” in which a jury must decide whether Heather’s indoctrination makes her victim or perpetrator. Jenna Blum, author of the novel Murder Your Darlings and co-founder of the author-interview platform A Mighty Blaze, joins her.
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
Dan Moren launches Eternity's Tomb, a comic science-fiction heist in which an ex-con named Z, his ursine partner Graham, a "genetically engineered murder bird" and a floating brain in a jar go after a tomb "hurtling through space towards a black hole." Moren, a former Macworld senior editor and two-time Jeopardy! champion, is the author of All Souls Lost and the Galactic Cold War space-opera series.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Dana Mashoian Walrath discusses The Book of Genocides, a graphic narrative in which "a descendant of genocide survivors brings history's darkest horrors to life, calling on us to remember, repair, and resist." Walrath is a medical anthropologist and artist whose earlier graphic memoir Aliceheimer's drew her mother's dementia.
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.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Tom Cole appears in conversation with Michael Bronski, who teaches women, gender and sexuality studies at Harvard. Bronski has written about gay culture and politics since the 1970s, from Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (1984) to A Queer History of the United States, which won a Stonewall Book Award.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm
The novelist Claire Messud gives a reading and audience Q&A as Boston University's Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, with a reception, book sale and signing to follow. Messud is the author of the best-selling The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs, and teaches creative writing at Harvard.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Terrill presents her debut novel The Violin Maker, which runs two stories against each other: a 1950s Manhattan violin dealer asked to appraise an old Italian cello by a fellow veteran, and Pietro Guarneri in 1693 building the only cello of his career. Janet Rich Edwards, author of Canticle, joins her.
Thu Nov 12 · 6:00pm
Robert M. Thorson, professor of Earth sciences at the University of Connecticut, lectures and reads from The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau, which tells how Thoreau “resuscitated Walden with a sharp swerve toward science” and reads the book against climate change, water supply and technology. Thorson also wrote Walden’s Shore and The Boatman. The Thoreau Alliance and the Walden Woods Project co-sponsor.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Kip Wilson launches her middle-grade debut, Backpack, Boy, Berlin, a verse novel based on the true story of a boy delivering secret anti-Nazi messages in wartime Berlin. Janae Marks, the New York Times bestselling author of the Zoe Washington series, presents Starting Now, about a tween who uncovers a family secret after moving in with her estranged half-brother. Wilson’s earlier books include White Rose.
Thu Nov 12 · 5:00pm
Lauren Klein and Tanvi Sharma discuss their new book, Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science, which “returns to the history of data visualization to expose the power of charts and maps.” Klein, an Emory professor, co-wrote Data Feminism; Sharma is an art director at Apple. Arvind Satyanarayan, who teaches data visualization at MIT, joins them in conversation.
Thu Nov 12 · 7pm
Trisha Blanchet discusses her new mystery Murder Like Magic, set in Lowell, in which Tess Tulley, a “charmingly grouchy private eye” and a witch whose mind-reading is unreliable, investigates a victim “found in a pool of someone else’s blood.” Blanchet wrote the Neath trilogy and hosts A Mighty Blaze Podcast. Novelist Jane Roper, author of The Society of Shame and Eden Lake, joins her in conversation.
Nov 12, Dec 14 · 6:30pm/7pm
Thu Nov 12 · 6:30pm, Lecture Hall (Waltham) / Mon Dec 14 · 7pm, Bonsignore Hall (Medford)
Wildlife ecologist Brad Timm draws on his book Wildlife Out Your Window to show the hidden behaviours, adaptations and ecological roles of New England’s most familiar birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects. Illustrated with photographs, videos and stories from his years of fieldwork, the talk also offers science-based ideas for making a yard, neighbourhood or community more welcoming to wildlife.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
M. T. Anderson discusses Stealing Saint Nick, his history of Nicholas of Myra, traced from a third-century child of "a fringe Jewish cult" to Father Christmas, by way of the Great Persecution, the fall of Rome and two thefts of his bones. Anderson won the National Book Award for Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party; the book grew from research for Nicked, his adult debut.
Thu Nov 12 · 7pm
Anthropologist Andrea Rugh presents In Search of Worldviews: What Anthropology Can Tell Us About the Middle East, arguing that anthropological study is the best data-driven way to understand cultural views in the region, and sharing vignettes from her fieldwork. Rugh lived 25 years in the Middle East, worked on development projects for USAID, UNICEF and Harvard, and has written fourteen books on the region.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Marking the centenary of Rainer Maria Rilke's death in 1926, the poet and translator Mark S. Burrows reads Rilke in his own English versions, with the sitarist David Whetstone accompanying. Burrows published a new translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus in 2024 and co-wrote You Are the Future with Stephanie Dowrick. Whetstone, a disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan, toured for four decades with Robert Bly and Coleman Barks.
Thu Nov 12 · 6:00pm
Frances McNamara discusses Unpapered Bedroom, the fourth book in her Nutshell Murder Mystery series, inspired by the murder dioramas of forensic science pioneer Frances Glessner Lee. Set in 1924 Boston, it has Lee investigating the death of a wealthy banker’s wife, found in a rundown South End rooming house, in a case that may turn on the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti or on a tawdry love triangle.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Three poets read after an open mic in the 2nd Thursday series, hosted by Toni Bee. Matthew E. Henry, an educator and essayist who edits The Weight Journal, has published seven poetry collections, most recently Promises to Keep. Rosemary Herbert’s Sisters in Time draws on her excavation of a Roman-era burial in Winchester, England. Kristin J. Kelley, a Boston poet and artist, writes about grief and family inheritance.
Fri Nov 13 · 6:30pm
Mona Chalabi, the Pulitzer-winning data journalist, discusses Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are, for which she followed ten people over five years to ask how much wealth it takes to feel safe in America — a question sharpened by her own mother's sudden illness. A signing follows.
Fri Nov 13 · 7:00pm
Charrise Barron discusses The Platinum Age of Gospel, "the story of gospel music's chartbusting mainstream success and the accompanying shifts in Black Christian theology," beginning with "the clandestine spirituals of the enslaved." Barron is a minister, a gospel artist and an assistant professor of music at Harvard.
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.
Fri Nov 13 · 6:30pm
Four romance writers — Cecilia Tan, May Furhst, Lauren Burka and MJ Etkin — perform dramatic readings of each other's work and argue about where romance stops and erotica starts. Tan founded Circlet Press and has written on the subject for decades. The event is restricted to adults and falls on Friday the thirteenth.
Fri Nov 13 · 6:00pm
Neuroscientist Anna Chambers discusses Circuit Breakers: How Neuroscientists Get Inside Your Head, which takes readers into a working brain research laboratory to show "how cutting-edge tools can manipulate memories, make neurons glow in the dark, and record signals at every level." Chambers, who researches memory, sleep and hearing, is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a researcher at Mass Eye and Ear's Eaton-Peabody Laboratories.
Fri Nov 13 · 7:00pm
A launch for A Table to Hold the World: Celebrating the Immigrant Roots of American Cuisine, an anthology of essays from Pangyrus, the Cambridge literary magazine, edited by Deborah Norkin with Greg Harris as associate editor. Built around family recipes such as a remembered Persian stew and a father’s matzoh ball, its essays follow “people from all over the world” as they “become their American selves.”
Sat Nov 14 · 11:00am
Author Heidi E.Y. Stemple and debut illustrator Annie Gregoire launch their picture book E. Norm Moose, a read-aloud about a moose searching for a friend. Stemple, daughter of author Jane Yolen, has published nearly fifty books. Members of the Islandport Press team join the launch, making it a full publication celebration.
Sat Nov 14 · 11:30am
Carrie Finison reads Even Steven: A Book About Sharing, a picture book about a boy who likes everything split perfectly even, until he meets things that cannot be halved, like a nickel, a book or a slide. Taking turns helps, but Steven is left wondering whether some things can be even but not fair. Finison and her illustrator also made Don't Hug Doug.
Sat Nov 14 · 2pm
Three poets read before an open mic, in a series hosted by Elizabeth Lund of NewTV’s Poetic Lines. Nidia Hernández, a Venezuelan poet, translator and broadcaster, won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award for her anthology The Invisible Borders of Time. Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of seven collections including Bad Harvest, has two Pushcart Prizes and translates Ukrainian poetry. Richard Waring’s poems have appeared in Ars Medica and Appalachia.
Sat Nov 14 · 2pm
Inbal Alon, a Cambridge school librarian who taught first grade for twelve years, meets young readers aged four to eight. She is the author of the picture books The Whys Get in Trouble, about a curious girl named Naomi and her many questions, and Maddy's Towers. Born in Canada and raised in Israel, she draws her stories from children's questions and small everyday moments.
Sat Nov 14 · 1:00pm
Four local authors discuss how fiction takes on social and political issues. Ellen Meeropol, author of six novels including Sometimes an Island; Randy Susan Meyers, whose latest is The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone; essayist Theresa Okokon, author of the memoir Who I Always Was; and Lisa Stringfellow, author of the middle-grade novels Kingdom of Dust and A Comb of Wishes, take part. Writer and engineer Cameron Dryden moderates.
Sat Nov 14 · 3:00pm
Jennifer Haigh reads from and discusses her novel Rabbit Moon, a drama set in Shanghai about “a fractured American family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters.” Haigh’s first book, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and Mercy Street was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. She talks with Rebecca Pacheco, a yoga and meditation teacher and author of Still Life.
Sat Nov 14 · 10:00am
A children’s storytime with Amanda Davis, whose new picture book Chasing the Light, illustrated by Faryn Hughes, follows a mother and daughter on a winter night’s hunt for the Northern Lights. Davis, a former classroom teacher once named Massachusetts Secondary Art Educator of the Year, also wrote 30,000 Stitches: The Inspiring Story of the National 9/11 Flag and Moonlight Memories, and wrote and illustrated Sometimes Stormy.
Sun Nov 15 · 11:00am
The third annual Newton Children’s Book Festival brings more than 100 authors and illustrators of children’s and, for the first time, young adult books to sign copies, with Toadstool Bookshops selling books and a craft table for children. Those taking part include Raul the Third, Padma Venkatraman, Brian Lies, Josh Funk and Rajani LaRocca. The festival has moved this year to American Legion Nonantum Post 440.
Sun Nov 15 · 4pm
Caitlin Green launches her debut book, Tame Your Inner Critic, with an author talk, workshop exercises, audience Q&A and a signing. The session, aimed at an inner critic that shows up as perfectionism, self-doubt or people-pleasing, blends “storytelling, practical psychology, mindfulness, and guided reflection.” Green is a self-trust coach, yoga teacher and former special educator who works from evidence-based psychology and mindfulness.
$20 – $25
Sun Nov 15 · 2pm
Megan Marshall discusses After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025), essays mixing memoir, biography and cultural history on the art of biography and the lives that shaped her work, from Sophia Peabody Hawthorne to the Black Power activist Jonathan Jackson. Marshall won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life; the Wellesley Historical Society co-presents.
Mon Nov 16 · 6:00pm
Terence Tao discusses Six Math Essentials, in which "the 'Mozart of mathematics' invites readers on a brief tour of six core ideas — numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis, and dynamics." Tao is a Fields medallist and professor of mathematics at UCLA. Free with an RSVP, in Hall D.
Mon Nov 16 · 6:30pm
Sean Sherman, the James Beard-winning Oglala Lakota chef known as the Sioux Chef, discusses Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. He joins Tamika Francis of Food & Folklore on Indigenous foodways and food sovereignty; guests get a bite from the book afterward.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:00pm
Shaul Magid and Zev Mishell discuss Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, "a collection of texts illustrating the complex reasons why Jews have contested or rejected the Zionist ideal over more than a century." Magid teaches modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School; Mishell is a graduate student in the study of religion.
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.
Mon Nov 16 · 8:00pm
Jennifer Barber reads from her new collection A Prevalence of Angels with David Orr, author of The Marvels. Barber founded and long edited the literary journal Salamander at Suffolk University. The Blacksmith House series runs weekly through the autumn in the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's Brattle Street house.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:00pm
Ryan Holiday, founder of The Daily Stoic and host of its podcast, gives a keynote drawing on his newest book, Wisdom Takes Work, followed by audience Q&A. Holiday's books on Stoic philosophy, among them The Obstacle Is the Way, Stillness Is the Key and The Daily Stoic, have sold over ten million copies. The Painted Porch Bookshop runs a pop-up, and VIP tickets add a pre-show meet-and-greet.
Mon Nov 16 · 6:00pm
Melissa Clark discusses her new cookbook, The Big Book of Dinner: Recipes and Rules (and How to Break Them). Clark is a staff writer for the New York Times Food section, where she has long written the A Good Appetite column, and a winner of James Beard and IACP awards; her New York Times bestsellers include Dinner in One. Book-included tickets are available.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:00pm
Joanne Chang discusses The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share, which opens with answers to basic baking questions and then sorts its recipes by kind, from drop cookies and bars to sandwich and savory cookies such as Parmesan Chive Coins. Chang founded the Flour bakeries in Boston, co-owns the restaurant Myers+Chang, and won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker in 2016.
Mon Nov 16 · 6pm
Elisa Shua Dusapin discusses her novel The Old Fire, about “two estranged sisters, a childhood home, and all that remains unspoken between them.” Dusapin, who was born in France to a South Korean mother and grew up between Paris, Seoul and Switzerland, writes in French; Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. MIT and the French Library co-present.
Tue Nov 17 · 6:00pm
James Gleick discusses The Telephone: A New History, "a sweeping history of the instrument that created modern life," beginning in 1876 with Bell saying "Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you." Gleick wrote Chaos and The Information and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
Ticketed
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Janet Rich Edwards discusses her debut novel Canticle, a national bestseller longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize and a New York Times Editors' Choice, newly in paperback. Edwards is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard who works in women's health at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Brooke presents her debut novel Madeline McKnight Signs Off, about a friendship between two women a generation apart and a late attempt at making amends. She took an MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars and has published in The Threepenny Review and Passages North. Emily Franklin, who wrote The Lioness of Boston about Isabella Stewart Gardner, joins her.
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
Joanne Chang launches The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share. She won a James Beard award and founded the Flour bakeries in Boston; the book opens with a baker's dozen of basic questions before working through cookies from the familiar to the unlikely. One of three Boston-area dates on her tour.
Tue Nov 17 · 7pm
Meghan Nesmith, a Boston writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Guardian, appears for A World Apart, her first novel. It is a queer romantasy set in London in 1866, in which a miscast spell opens a doorway into the Veil, a realm where a family has been trapped for 800 years since a bargain with the Faerie Queen.
Tue Nov 17 · 7pm
Nathaniel Philbrick discusses The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, which begins with the 1848 strike at Sutter’s Mill and traces how California’s rise “helped push a fractured nation toward war.” Philbrick, whose In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award, talks with Randall MacLowry, the filmmaker behind The Gold Rush for PBS’s American Experience.
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.
Tue Nov 17 · 7pm
Boston city archaeologist Joe Bagley, who runs the Boston Archaeology Program, talks about the program’s work and his book A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts, which tells the city’s story through items discovered beneath it. His second book is a companion on Boston’s 50 oldest buildings and the history of their preservation. Copies will be sold and signed, with all proceeds going to the archaeology program.
Tue Nov 17 · 7pm
Co-authors Randy Cogill and Tripp Underwood discuss Have a Cheap Day, their coffee-table book collecting the best Building 19 advertisements of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. The two Gen X friends trace the story of the discount store, which began as a salvage business in an old warehouse, drawing on the people who shaped it, among them one of the brand’s key architects, who became their friend.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Rhonda DeChambeau launches Stained, a novel in verse for young readers, on its publication day, in conversation with author Elaine Dimopoulos. Twelve-year-old Ulysses, new in town and self-conscious about the port-wine stain on his face, photographs his middle school’s mural project, then watches the town divide when a tiny painted rainbow leads to demands that the mural be destroyed. The story is based on real-world events.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:30pm
The Moth’s monthly Boston StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition in which anyone may put a name in, and those drawn tell a true five-minute story on the night’s theme. This month’s theme is Keeping the Faith: stories of believing without seeing, a Hail Mary pass, a stranger’s unexpected kindness, small miracles, deep rituals and storms weathered. PRX and WBUR are media sponsors; seating is first come, first served.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
Omékongo Dibinga discusses Trigger Words, which "examines how language in the United States has been manipulated and politicized to sow division and dehumanization, rather than to encourage inclusion" — from "woke" to "DEI" to "CRT." Dibinga is a trilingual poet, rapper and professor of intercultural communication at American University.
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.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
Alfred Corn and Marilyn Hacker read, introduced by Lloyd Schwartz. Hacker won the National Book Award for Presentation Piece and has translated widely from the French; Corn has published a dozen collections since All Roads at Once in 1976; Schwartz is a Pulitzer-winning critic.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
Tillman presents Lucy Miles' Photogenic Mind, a magical-realist mystery in which a teenage boy, a suspended Boston police officer and a Cape Cod snack-shack owner go looking for a friend who vanished after the deaths of her parents. Tillman is Associate Director of the Writing Program at UMass Amherst. Beth Castrodale joins him.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:00pm
Daniels discusses Jenny Will Eat You Now, a horror-romance in which the river monster Jenny Greenteeth follows an academic around Boston after a chance meeting leaves her hungry and curious about the world she has been avoiding. Daniels's poetry and short fiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among more than thirty publications.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:00pm
Carter Wilson discusses his new thriller, When They Find Me, in conversation with Hank Phillippi Ryan, then signs. Wilson is the USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of eleven standalone psychological thrillers, among them Tell Me What You Did and Mister Tender's Girl. Ryan, an on-air investigative journalist with 37 Emmys, has written 17 thrillers; All This Could Be Yours won the 2026 Mary Higgins Clark Award.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
Weina Dai Randel talks about the writing life in the age of AI: the myths that keep people from writing, letting the story lead, and persevering through writer's block and rejection. Randel has written six historical novels, including The Last Rose of Shanghai, optioned for a feature film; her latest, The Lost Kingdom of Daughters, set in a matriarchal society based on China's Moso people, is published November 1.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:30pm
Earfull puts two authors and two musical acts on one bill. M. L. Rio wrote the bestselling novel If We Were Villains, the novella Graveyard Shift and Hot Wax. Wally Lamb’s seven New York Times bestselling novels include She’s Come Undone and, most recently, The River is Waiting. Songwriter Amy Fairchild plays with guitarist Thomas Juliano, and Morning Camera draws members from Treat Her Right, the Either/Orchestra and Morphine.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:00pm
Contributors discuss Ecologies of Justice: Making and Unmaking Prison Worlds, a collection on the role of “multi-species ecologies” in prison, jail and reentry programmes. Speakers include co-editor Matt DelSesto, a sociologist who has taught in prison education for over fifteen years; Judith Foster, founder of the H.E.R.O. Nurturing Center; and Renée Portanova and Erika Rumbley of The New Garden Society, which gardens with students in a Boston prison yard.
Wed Nov 18 · 6:30pm
Katie Stryjewski returns to discuss Make Myna Double: Cocktails for Bird Lovers, an illustrated guide to drinks each inspired by a real bird species, from hummingbirds to toucans. She shares her favorite bird facts and serves a signature cocktail and mocktail from the book. Stryjewski earned her doctorate in ornithology at Boston University, runs the Instagram account @garnish_girl and wrote Cocktails, Mocktails, and Garnishes from the Garden.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:00pm
Rodrigo Nunes discusses Anatomy of Disintegration, which "dissects the global far right's appeal through the lens of Bolsonarismo, tracing its roots to the social disintegration caused by the crisis of neoliberalism and looming climate change." Nunes teaches philosophy at PUC-Rio in Brazil.
Thu Nov 19 · 6:30pm
GBH WORLD records another Stories from the Stage evening at its Brighton studio, this one on the occasions when laughter is the only reasonable response left. The tellers are ordinary people whose stories have been selected and shaped for the broadcast rather than stand-up comedians working material.
Thu Nov 19 · 6:00pm
A panel on Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the reporter known for covering the 1893 Lizzie Borden trial, who became an editor, suffrage activist and mystery novelist. Sharon M. Harris, author of the new biography Her Life in Ink, joins Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, editors of the Penguin Classics The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, and Betsy Devine, Jordan’s namesake and a Concord resident.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm
Phoebe Judge, host of the podcast Criminal, which tells stories about people “who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle,” turns the format on herself in a new stage show. She tells stories about her own eccentric, unpredictable family in Chicago, the secrets she discovered growing up, and how they shaped her work as a journalist and true-crime host.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:00pm
Ibtisam Azem discusses The Sleep Thief, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon, which follows Gharib Haifawi as he comes of age, is drawn into resistance and "dreams of a Palestinian identity that will transcend sorrow." Azem, a New York journalist and 2026–27 Radcliffe Fellow, was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize for The Book of Disappearance. William Granara, professor of Arabic literature at Harvard, joins her.
Thu Nov 19 · 4pm
Min Jin Lee returns to Harvard Radcliffe Institute to discuss her new novel, American Hagwon, which she worked on as the Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow in 2018–2019. Lee is the author of Pachinko, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, and Free Food for Millionaires. She is joined in conversation by Jared Bowen, WGBH's executive arts editor and host of The Culture Show.
Thu Nov 19 · 4:00pm
Maria Termini reads from her memoir Available Details, thirty-one stories from a life of travel and curiosity, each told as if she were reporting live from the scene. They run from finding gold at nine and volunteering as Lady Godiva at twenty to learning figure skating at fifty, carpentry in Hawaii, the Peace Corps and the Appalachian Trail, much of it as a single mother of twin sons.
Fri Nov 20 · 7:00pm
Brian D. Goldstein discusses Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect, "the first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture." J. Max Bond Jr. was also a civil rights activist and educator. Goldstein chairs art history at Swarthmore.
Fri Nov 20 · 7:00pm
Anderson discusses Stealing Saint Nick: A Legendary Corpse, a Notorious Theft, and the Stories that Shape the World, on the man who became Father Christmas by way of the Great Persecution, the fall of Rome, and his bones being stolen twice. Anderson won the National Book Award for Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party and the LA Times Book Prize for Feed.
Fri Nov 20 · 7pm
Keltie Knight tours her first solo book, The F∗ck Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person, in conversation with Holly Madison, author of the memoir Down the Rabbit Hole. The night adds a writing and manifestation workshop and a Q&A, and admission includes a pre-signed book. Knight, a three-time Emmy winner, hosts E!’s Live From the Red Carpet and co-created the podcast LadyGang.
Fri Nov 20 · 12:45pm
J. Jarpa Dawuni, a political scientist at Howard University, discusses her new book African Women in Law: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2026), which takes up the issues African women face in the legal profession in national, regional and international courts. Dawuni founded the Institute for African Women in Law and co-edited Gender and the Judiciary in Africa. The Mandel Center for the Humanities hosts.
Sat Nov 21 · 1:00pm
Gabrielle Rossi reads Lizzie Learns to Ride, about a girl who is frightened of riding and finds the nerve to try anyway. It comes from Strong Girl Publishing, a press set up to make books for young female athletes. Rossi is an educator and founded an organisation for girls in sport.
Sat Nov 21 · 10:30am
The Weston Community Children's Association presents local author Yola Thorp, creator of the Sightseeing Sophie series, in an interactive reading for children from preschool through third grade and their families, followed by a conversation about Sophie, travel and how her books came to be. Children can ask questions and join a simple story- or travel-themed activity, and the morning ends with a book signing.
Sat Nov 21 · 11:30am
Phaea Crede returns to read All I Want For Christmas: A Holiday Countdown, a picture book for ages 3 to 7 and the first in her Holiday Critter Countdown series, in which animal friends count down to holidays. With twelve days to go, Reina the Reindeer sets off across the North Pole in search of her two front teeth and finds friendship instead.
Sat Nov 21 · 2:00pm
Alex Krieger discusses his memoir Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant's Life, which begins when he arrived in America at nine with parents who had survived the Holocaust, and found himself in Chicago learning a fourth language in four years. Krieger is Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has served two terms on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and co-wrote Mapping Boston.
Sat Nov 21 · 7pm
The Penumbra Podcast marks the audiobook release of If Memory Serves, a Juno Steel mystery about the wisecracking private eye on Mars. Joshua Ilon, who plays Juno, performs a reading from the novel, followed by a Q&A on the making of the audiobook with the podcast's creators: Harley Takagi Kaner, its co-producer, director and sound designer, and Kevin Vibert, its lead writer.
$20 – $25
Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Bill Leeman, a professor at Salve Regina University, discusses The Long Road to Annapolis and the story of John Paul Jones, the Scottish émigré who became a Revolutionary War sea captain and argued for better education and training for American naval officers. Largely forgotten afterward, Jones was reclaimed as “Father of the American Navy” by Theodore Roosevelt, who was building support for a larger navy.
Mon Nov 23 · 7:00pm
Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico's senior health care reporter, on Side Effects: How Abortion Bans Impact Everyone's Health — years of reporting on how losing abortion access has degraded care across the whole American health system, including services with nothing to do with pregnancy.
Mon Nov 23 · 8:00pm
John Skoyles reads from That's Where You Come In with Clay Ventre, author of Excellent Wildlife Photos. Skoyles taught for many years at Emerson College and served as poetry editor of Ploughshares. The Blacksmith House pairs an established poet with a newer one most weeks of the series.
Tue Nov 24 · 10:30am
Chad, a cartoonist who has been making comics since 2006, visits to talk about his work with children. He draws the Bikeman comics and titles in the Get to Know Your Universe! science comics series, and takes his subjects from science, giant robots, math, monsters, friendship and trust. Part of the library's Author & Illustrator Series.
Tue Nov 24 · 7:00pm
The seventh annual edition of this storytelling night presents true stories by adult storytellers on identity, origin, separation and reunion, drawn from adoption, foster care, donor conception and unexpected family discoveries. It was created by Lisa “LC” Coppola, a DCF adoptee and author of Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees, whose debut novel Monster Flower is forthcoming. Kristal Parke, a filmmaker and transracial adoptee, also appears.
Sat Nov 28 · 2:00pm
Poets Chris O’Carroll, Lynne Viti and Shanta Lee each read from their work at this Saturday afternoon reading sponsored by the New England Poetry Club, then stay to talk and sign copies of their books. The club, founded in 1915 by a group that included Amy Lowell and Robert Frost, awards annual poetry prizes, among them the Amy Lowell Prize.
Sun Nov 29 · 4:00pm
Natalie Silverstein discusses Simple Acts of Care, “a practical, warm-hearted guide for friends, family, neighbors who want to show up for someone in crisis, and for the caregivers standing beside them.” Silverstein wrote Simple Acts: The Busy Family's Guide to Giving Back and co-founded a Parkinson's foundation. Jessica Fein, author of the memoir Breath Taking and Psychology Today's Grace in Grief columnist, joins her.
Mon Nov 30 · 7:00pm
Sandro Galea discusses his memoir Alien: Reflections on Being an Immigrant, "a personal treatise on the indelible effects of being an immigrant — and what it means for the greater good." Galea left Malta at fourteen and is now dean of the school of public health at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mon Nov 30 · 8:00pm
Robert Pinsky, whose latest books are The First Two Books of Poems and On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy, has the evening to himself; the season's other Mondays each pair two writers. Pinsky served three terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project, translated Dante's Inferno and has long taught at Boston University. Admission is $5 at the door.
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.
Tue Dec 1
Joanne Chang, the James Beard-winning baker behind Flour Bakery and Myers+Chang, returns to CitySpace to talk about cookies — the subject of her new book. Her third Boston appearance for the same title this season, after the Brattle and Brookline Booksmith dates.
Tue Dec 1 · 6:00pm
Kevin Hartnett discusses The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI, the “inside story of Lean,” a Microsoft Research bug-checker taken up by mathematicians including Peter Scholze and Terence Tao and by firms such as Google DeepMind. Hartnett was Quanta Magazine’s senior writer on mathematics and computer science and wrote the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” column. The talk is part of the Harvard Science Book Talks series.
Tue Dec 1 · 7:00pm
Amod Sandhya Lele discusses After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Our Culture of Rage, which “challenges the popular assumption that anger is necessary to combat injustice,” drawing on Buddhist meditation teachings, Stoic thought and psychology. Lele is associate director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University. He is joined in conversation by Christopher Queen, former president of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:00pm
Launch of the twelfth issue of spoKe, the Boston poetry annual Kevin Gallagher founded in response to the 2013 Marathon bombing, with readings by Kristin Prevallet, John Mulrooney and Nimi Wariboko, introduced by Gallagher, a poet and professor of global development policy at Boston University. Prevallet's books include I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time; Wariboko, born in Nigeria, teaches social ethics at Boston University's School of Theology.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:00pm
Mandy Silverman, known to her followers as Mandylicious, presents Twisted, her first cookbook: more than 60 sweet and savory recipes for challah and babka, setting traditional recipes and techniques beside newer inventions. Over more than a decade she has developed upward of 600 flavors and built a following of tens of thousands of home bakers. She teaches and bakes from her kitchen in Sharon, Massachusetts.
Wed Dec 2 · 12:30pm
Rosie Sultan reads from and discusses All the Small Surrenders in the library’s monthly Author Talk, in which local writers give the background to a book, read excerpts and take questions from a moderator and the audience. Sultan won a PEN Discovery Award for fiction, wrote the novel Helen Keller in Love, and has taught writing at Boston University. The series runs with Newton’s Department of Older Adult Services.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:30pm
The Moth StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition: names are drawn from a hat, and each storyteller has five minutes, without notes, to tell a true story, scored by teams of judges from the audience. This one throws out the theme, so any story is fair game, including one that never fit a past Moth theme or comes from “the archived memories.” WBUR is The Moth’s media partner.
$17
Wed Dec 2 · 7pm
Katherine A. Sherbrooke discusses her latest novel, This Much Is True, in which Veronica Harmon learns that the man at the center of a traumatic incident from her high school days is the father of her daughter’s fiancé. Sherbrooke is the author of Leaving Coy’s Hill, a New York Times notable book and Massachusetts Book Award finalist, and chaired GrubStreet’s board from 2013 to 2023.
Wed Dec 2 · 7pm
Anna Hogeland discusses her novel Wild Aster, about Mae Smith, who is kidnapped from her adoptive parents by her biological mother, grows up on the run, and spends the next half century, through the Depression and the Second World War, reinventing herself. Hogeland is also the author of The Long Answer. Grace Talusan, whose The Body Papers won the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, joins her in conversation.
Wed Dec 2 · 6:45pm
Sudeep Sen and Julie Williams-Krishnan, both poets and photographers, share poems and images from two continents. Sen, whose work has been translated into more than 25 languages, won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for Anthropocene and the A K Ramanujan Translation Award for Aria. Williams-Krishnan, a Medford photographic artist, teaches photography at Brimmer & May School and was previously Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:00pm
Nick Paumgarten, a staff writer at The New Yorker, discusses his debut book, The Intangibles, a memoir of his lifelong obsession with hockey and an exploration of masculinity, male friendship, and fathers and sons. Its title is the name of his beer-league team. He is joined in conversation by Louisa Thomas, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:30pm
The poet Claudia Rankine gives a reading in Boston University's Bay State Road Reading Series, followed by a catered reception and a book signing. Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and a MacArthur Fellow.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:00pm
Author Katie Naymon celebrates her new romance In Every Future, It's Us, a dual-timeline story of two best friends and a yearly New Year's Eve game. She is joined in conversation by USA Today bestselling author Chelsea Curto, with book influencer Grace Vogt-Alwardt moderating this holiday-themed romance evening.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:00pm
Hoefling discusses Dryads: Spirits of the Trees, on spirits distilled from tree sap, an old category the book names “dryads,” covering their history, culture and production and adding some sixty cocktail recipes. A Cambridge spirits writer raised in Newton, Hoefling founded the Herzog Cocktail School; his The Cocktail Seminars was a 2022 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award finalist. Katie Stryjewski, a PhD ornithologist who posts cocktails as @garnish_girl, joins him.
Thu Dec 3 · 6pm
Tufts University Art Galleries launches Arnold J. Kemp: A Reader, co-published with No Place Press, with a panel pairing the artist and Pamela Lee, Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Yale, moderated by TUAG curator and co-interim director Laurel V. McLaughlin. Edited by Rachel Churner and designed by Geoff Kaplan, the book gathers writing by Gregg Bordowitz, Huey Copland, Kevin Killian, Ed Roberson, Lynne Tillman and others.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:00pm
Two local suspense novelists talk about their work. Jenna Blum is the author of Murder Your Darlings and of Those Who Save Us, the New York Times bestseller about a German mother who lived through the Second World War and the American daughter who tries to learn her story. Karen Winn wrote the novels The Society and Our Little World. Their books will be on sale afterwards.
Thu Dec 3 · 6:00pm
Diane Williams, whose twelfth book of fiction is I Liked Rex, talks with Maggie Doherty in Harvard's Writers Speak series. Williams founded and edits the literary annual NOON, and The Collected Stories of Diane Williams gathered her work in 2018; her archive and NOON's were acquired by the Lilly Library in 2014. Doherty, a Visiting Lecturer on English at Harvard, wrote The Equivalents.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:00pm
Sean Palfrey discusses Mosaic, the sixth and final volume in his photography series, which gathers landscapes and portraits drawn from his archive, each paired with his own writing. Palfrey has worked as a pediatrician, Faculty Dean at Harvard and Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Public Health at Boston University. He is joined by his wife and colleague Judith Palfrey, T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
Fri Dec 4 · 7:00pm
Salesses presents To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time, a memoir written after his wife died of stage four stomach cancer, weaving together his identities as “adoptee, Asian American, husband, father, and, finally, widower.” Salesses, adopted from Korea, teaches in the Virginia Tech MFA program and is the author of The Sense of Wonder and Craft in the Real World. Hanif Abdurraqib calls it “impressively honest and vulnerable.”
Fri Dec 4 · 7:00pm
Nick Thorkelson discusses If I Could But See It, his graphic biography of William Morris (1834–1896), the designer, polymath and socialist, tracing how his politics shaped his poetry and design, and his efforts to democratise art while making pieces for the wealthy. Thorkelson, author and illustrator of Herbert Marcuse, is a former Boston Globe editorial cartoonist, as is Dan Wasserman, creator of We’ve Been Framed, who joins him.
Sat Dec 5 · 11:00am
A holiday reading with two authors and an illustrator: Cynthia Platt shares Santa in Disguise from her Holidays in Disguise series, while Vivian Kirkfield and illustrator Jill Weber present Pippa's Hanukkah Hunt, a companion to Pippa's Passover Plate. A seasonal event pairing Christmas and Hanukkah picture books for young readers and families.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:00pm
Lewis, professor emeritus at Boston College, discusses his book on how Poe's “The Raven” became the most famous American poem. More than 5,300 poems appeared in American magazines in 1845; he asks why this one was reprinted, attacked and parodied so relentlessly, in versions swapping the raven for owls, turkeys, pigs and bedbugs, and what Poe's own reputation had to do with it.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6 · 11am
Sat Dec 5 / Sun Dec 6 · 11am
MICE brings several hundred independent comics artists and small presses to BU's School of Visual Arts for a weekend of tabling, panels and workshops. It is the largest event of its kind in New England and is free to attend, with the programme aimed at readers and makers rather than collectors.
Sat Dec 5 · 2pm
Teen fantasy author Hemie Yao talks about her writing process as a young author and the ancient Chinese mythology behind her series, The Untold Truth of Clun Menshen. Yao published her debut novel in 2023, at the age of twelve. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant, she lives in New Hampshire and grew up between cultures. Registration is requested.
Sun Dec 6 · 11:15am
The Rev. Robert D. Flanagan discusses While Mortals Sleep, the volume he edited on the life and legacy of Phillips Brooks, the preacher and rector of Trinity Church who wrote "O Little Town of Bethlehem." The collection gathers reflections on Brooks's lasting influence, including his years in Boston; Trinity's archivist, Cynthia E. Staples, and its rector, the Rev. Morgan Allen, are among the contributors.
Mon Dec 7 · 8:00pm
J. Allyn Rosser reads from Chronic Transience with Kate Stearns, author of Out Toward Morning. Rosser has won the Morse Poetry Prize and the New Criterion Poetry Prize and edits New Ohio Review. The reading closes the Blacksmith House series' autumn run at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
Mon Dec 7 · 7:00pm
Cartoonists Andy Hartzell and Matt Madden discuss the rules behind the comics form in Picture + Panel, the monthly graphic-novel conversation series. Madden, author of Ex Libris, is best known for 99 Ways to Tell a Story, a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Hartzell brings Monday; his first graphic novel, Fox Bunny Funny, was a New York Times holiday pick. Emmy Waldman (Filial Lines) moderates.
Mon Dec 7 · 7:00pm
Matt O’Hara discusses The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon, which follows Richard Gill, a frail American explorer who went down an Amazon river in 1938 in search of curare, the blow-dart poison that later transformed surgery. O’Hara is professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and author of A Flock Divided; Boston College historian Sylvia Sellers-García joins him.
Tue Dec 8 · 7:00pm
Yesenia Barragan discusses In Latin America You Could Be Free: An African American History, on the free and fugitive African Americans who looked south for freedom before the Civil War, after Chile, Colombia and Mexico had abolished slavery, some drawn by a Lincoln-backed colony scheme in Panama. Barragan, associate professor of history at Rutgers, is the author of Freedom’s Captives, winner of the American Historical Association’s Wesley-Logan Prize.
Wed Dec 9 · 7:00pm
Diego Perez, the #1 New York Times bestselling author who writes as Yung Pueblo, presents Journey: The Year That Changes Everything — 365 daily reflections on self-awareness and inner peace. Harvard Book Store hosts at First Parish Church; tickets include a pre-signed hardcover.
Ticketed (includes a pre-signed hardcover)
Wed Dec 9 · 6:30pm
Jason Allison discusses his debut novel The Killing Yards, set in 1993 New York, where reformed drug trafficker Jimmy Lettner runs a Manhattan nightclub while his right-hand man deals ecstasy inside it and a rookie cop goes undercover. Allison, born and raised in the Bronx, spent twenty years with the NYPD, mostly as a homicide detective. The talk closes the Friends of the South End Library’s fall series.
Wed Dec 9 · 7:00pm
Caitríona Moran discusses her debut novel, The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow, an enemies-to-lovers fantasy in which a scholar and healer who performs forbidden abortions is betrayed, accused of witchcraft and banished to the realm’s northernmost city to await trial under its young Lord Proctor. Moran grew up in western New York, studied at Boston College and spent ten years in academic publishing before becoming an editor at a nonprofit.
Thu Dec 10 · 7:00pm
Four poets read: Rosemary Carroll, Miguel Coronado, Rob Macaisa Colgate and Nay Saysourinho. Colgate's debut, Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), is built as an accessible art museum, its sections laid out as gallery rooms about life in a disabled body. Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini, from Ugly Duckling Presse, is written in the imagined voice of a real sideshow performer brought to the United States around 1900.
Thu Dec 10 · 6:30pm
The December edition of Stories from the Stage takes the holidays that go wrong and the people who turn up anyway. GBH WORLD records the series before a studio audience at Calderwood Studio; the tellers are members of the public whose stories have been selected and directed for broadcast.
Thu Dec 10 · 6:30pm
Max Heinegg, Medford's Poet Laureate for 2025–2027, and friends combine a poetry reading with musical performances of seasonal poems and songs. Heinegg has taught English in the Medford Public Schools since 1998 and has made records in Boston since the late 1990s, chiefly with The High Ceilings; his books of poems include Good Harbor (2022), Going There (2023) and Keepers of the House (2025).
Thu Dec 10 · 7:00pm
Jim Bildner discusses A Matter of Hope, a national bestseller drawing on two decades at the venture-philanthropy foundation Draper Richards Kaplan to set out how hope becomes action against problems like poverty and food insecurity. Bildner is the foundation’s CEO and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is joined by Judy Woodruff, former anchor and managing editor of the PBS News Hour.
Fri Dec 11 · 7:00pm
Rose Smith discusses her debut novel, The Shared Life of Egan and Lucian, about identical twin brothers raised on an island off the coast of Maine, one set on becoming an athlete and the other a painter, and Lea, the woman who comes home with Lucian and leaves with Egan, caught between them over decades. Smith’s writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Craft and Five Points.
Sat Dec 12 · 11:00am
Two authors share new winter picture books: Cathy Stefanec Ogren presents Winter Solstice Hill, about a family's wishing-on-a-star tradition, and Amanda Davis reads Chasing the Light, a nighttime hunt for the Northern Lights in the spirit of Owl Moon. Davis is a Massachusetts Secondary Art Educator of the Year. A family reading.
Sat Dec 12 · 4pm
Nathan Rubin reads from his debut children's book, Chasing a Dream, a story "written to inspire confidence, kindness, and self-belief" that encourages young readers "to see the greatness within themselves." Rubin, a 2024 graduate of Lexington Christian Academy, helped the school win Eastern Independent League and NEPSAC championships in basketball, and now plays at the college level for UMass Boston.
Sun Dec 13 · 11:15am
Jay Wickersham, Chris Milford and Hope Mayo, authors of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University (Monacelli Press), discuss what the architect's drawings reveal about the collaborative design process in the studio that produced Trinity Church. Houghton holds more than 4,000 drawings by Richardson and his studio, including Charles McKim and Stanford White, largely unpublished until now.
Fri Dec 18
The Moth GrandSLAM is the championship of The Moth's open-mic StorySLAMs: winners of the local slams return to compete for the title, each telling a true, personal story live and without notes before teams of audience judges. The Moth, founded in New York in 1997 by the novelist George Dawes Green, also produces The Moth Radio Hour. The show runs 2 hours 15 minutes with no intermission.
Sat Dec 19 · 2:00pm
Matt Tavares reads Dasher, his picture book about the reindeer who leads Santa's team, takes questions and demonstrates drawing before signing copies. The event marks a new animated-special cover edition, and the shop expects to show a preview of the adaptation. Tavares has written and illustrated many picture books, several on baseball history.
Sun Dec 20 · 5:00pm
Author-illustrator Matt Tavares shares his bestselling Dasher: How a Brave Little Doe Changed Christmas Forever, being reissued as a special edition with poster and ornaments from the animated adaptation. After the reading, the store screens the 45-minute Disney+ holiday special. Pajamas are encouraged for this family evening with a New York Times bestselling creator.
Sun Jan 17 · 11am
Megan Lyman reads her newest book, A Sticky Day in Boston Town, in which Maggie McMarbles races to save her grandmother's treasured recipe book when a wave of molasses crashes through the North End. The book is "inspired by the unbelievable true story of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919." Lyman is a children's author with a background in early childhood education and lives in Maine.
Thu Jan 21 · 4:30pm
Ted Widmer discusses his latest book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. Widmer, a Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, formerly directed Brown’s John Carter Brown Library and was a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton. His Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington won the 2020 Lincoln Forum Book Prize, and he helped create the New York Times’s Disunion series on the Civil War.
Sun Jan 24 · 11am
Rosanne Demas reads her picture book Lily the Dragon and the Spooky Lake, in which a young dragon who runs home every night from a lake that bubbles, steams and glows orange decides at last to face her fear. It opens a planned children's series on social-emotional growth. Demas, a former marketing and events professional and mother of two, writes to help young children manage big feelings.
Thu Jan 28 · 6:00pm
Rob Quinn discusses On the Other Side of the Street, his first book, an account of living through HIV, addiction and the loss of a career and identity, organised around the image of a street crossing. Quinn shares passages and opens a community conversation. A Hyde Park resident, long-term survivor and advocate, he founded R4 Style and has worked with children and families in hospitals.
Sun Jan 31 · 11am
Alyssa Kim reads her debut picture book, RoRo’s Paris, in which RoRo’s parents plan a day of sightseeing on his first trip to the city while all he cares about is the Eiffel Tower. As he explores, he finds there is more to Paris, and a surprise awaits him at the end. Kim is a Korean-American author who writes about travel and food and lives in Waltham.
Sun Feb 7 · 11am
Arthur Smith reads his book The Robe Squad: A Charlestown Tail, an illustrated story in which a man and his dog find a small mouse in need on a walk, take it to a vet and bring it home. The book is "meant to inspire children to do good for others." Smith, a first-time author known as The Robe Guy, lives in Charlestown with his 2.6-pound Yorkshire terrier, Gizmo.
Tue Feb 23 · 10:15am
De la Peña, who won the Newbery Medal for Last Stop on Market Street, visits to talk about his work with children. His young adult novels include Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here and Superman: Dawnbreaker; his picture books include Love. He took an MFA at San Diego State and attended the University of the Pacific on a basketball scholarship.
Tue Mar 9 · 10:30am
Magoon visits to talk about her work with children and teenagers. She writes novels and nonfiction on identity, community and social justice; her books include the NAACP Image Award-nominated young adult novel The Rock and the River, The Secret Library, The Season of Styx Malone and the Robyn Hoodlum adventure series.
Sun Mar 14 · 11am
Kathleen Jeffrey reads her picture book Katie’s Really Bad Day, in which cheerful Katie panics before a spelling test, disrupts her class, and learns calming tools from her teacher that soon have the whole class joining in; the book carries "teaching points and practical advice for anxious kids." Jeffrey studied elementary education, spent twelve years as an independent bookseller, and visits schools to share Katie’s story.
Sat Mar 20 · 10am
Sara Levine launches How We Fly, a nonfiction picture book for the youngest readers that explains the mechanics of flight, from birds, bats and bugs to seeds and airplanes, and links our bodies to those of flying creatures; Diana Mayo illustrates. Levine, a veterinarian trained at Tufts with an MFA from Lesley, has written more than ten books for young children, including Sensitive and A Visit With the Birds.
Tue Mar 23 · 7pm
Margot Grey marks release day for Raven’s Wrath, a dystopian paranormal romance from Alcove Press in which “a demon and a demon hunter forge an unlikely alliance in the ultimate fight for agency and freedom.” After a demon invasion leaves women with few choices, Raven joins a brotherhood of demon hunters and is ordered to kill Dax Morningstar, the half-demon son of Lucifer, and fails.
Sun Apr 11 · 7:00pm
Casey Sherman tells the story of Helltown, his true-crime book about Tony Costa, the Cape Cod serial killer behind the disappearance of several women from Provincetown in the late 1960s, a case that drew in Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. Sherman's 19 books include Hunting Whitey, Boston Strong and A Murder in Hollywood. Proceeds go to Miles for Military, which flies junior enlisted service members home.
$30–$55
Tue Apr 27 · 10:30am
Knisley visits to talk about her comics with children. She has published more than a dozen titles for readers from infancy to adulthood, mostly about food, found family and cats, among them the New York Times bestsellers Relish: My Life in the Kitchen and French Milk, and the Peapod Farm series.
Sat May 1 · 11:00am
The store's fifth annual free festival celebrating graphic novels for young readers, running an all-day program. Details and creator lineup are still to come, but the recurring event has been a fixture on the store's calendar. A save-the-date listing; reservations are required through the store's dedicated festival page.
Tue Jun 8 · 1:00pm
Lincoln Peirce, the New York Times bestselling cartoonist, visits to talk about his work and meet children. Peirce created the Big Nate comic strip, which he has drawn since 1991, and writes and illustrates the Big Nate novels for young readers, along with the graphic-novel series Max and the Midnights. He has also written animated shorts for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
