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Brookline Booksmith

Brookline Booksmith opened its doors in 1961 as Paperback Booksmith with the slogan "Dedicated to the fine art of browsing." And for more than 50 years the Booksmith has been exactly that. Constantly changing with the neighborhood around it, Brookline Booksmith has served the people of Brookline and Boston with its eclectic mix of titles, literate and helpful staff, and seemingly neverending schedule of book signings, talks and poetry readings. Visit and listen to an author speak at the Readers & Writers Series; browse the stacks, both new and used; peruse the always changing Card & Gift Room; check out popular staff picks; or ask a bookseller for a recommendation. You'll see why Brookline Booksmith has been a standard-bearer for independent bookselling, winning the ABA's Bookstore of the Year in 1998, and Best of Boston from Boston magazine in 7 of the last 9 years.

http://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/

Fight of the Century: 100 Years of ACLU Cases

Thu, Feb 13, 2020

Authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman join Carol Rose, executive director of ACLU Massachusetss, to discuss their compliation of essays,"Fight of the Century", featuring works by influential writers including Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Salman Rushdie, Jesmyn Ward, and more, each writing about a landmark ACLU case. In response to the ["Palmer Raids"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids), part of the Red Scare in the U.S. after World War I when many were arrested without warrants and immigrants were targeted without regard to constitutional protections, a small group opposed to the actions formed the [American Civil Liberties Union](https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history). In May, 1920, they published their "Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice". This 2020 book of essays is published in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the organization.

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Poupeh Missaghi: Trans(re)lating House One

Wed, Feb 12, 2020

Author Poupeh Missaghi in discussion with Sheida Dayani regarding her new book "Trans(re)lating House One." Her book covers the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, as a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection–teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars–her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language? Image: Book Cover

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Reimagining the Epics with Karthika Nair and Nina MacLaughlin

Tue, Dec 3, 2019

Hear retellings of the epics from different characters and other perspectives. Authors Nina MacLaughlin and Kathika Naïr discuss their two novels that reenvision these old tales. In _Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata_, Karthika Naïr retells the Mahabharata through the embodied voices of women and marginal characters, so often conquered and destroyed throughout history. Through shifting poetic forms, ranging from pantoums to Petrarchan sonnets, Naïr choreographs the cadences of stray voices. And with a passionate empathy through a chorus of bold voices, she tells of nameless soldiers, their despairing spouses and lovers, a canny empress, an all-powerful god, and a gender-shifting outcast warrior. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer’s gaze? In voices both mythic and modern, _Wake, Siren_ revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature.

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Dictionary of the Undoing: John Freeman talks with Krysten Hill

Wed, Nov 13, 2019

In the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent to John Freeman. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued—on citizens’ rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilization, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defense. The result is his his dictionary of the undoing. Freeman sits with Krysten Hill, poet and teacher of poetry at UMass Boston.

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Sigrún Pálsdóttir in Conversation With Lytton Smith

Tue, Sep 24, 2019

Join author Sigrún Pálsdóttir and translator Lytton Smith in conversation of Pálsdóttir's novel, _History. A Mess._ as a part of the Transnational Literature Series. While studying a seventeenth-century diary, the protagonist of _History. A Mess._ uncovers information about the first documented professional female artist. This discovery promises to change her academic career, and life in general … until she realizes that her “discovery” was nothing more than two pages stuck together. At this point there’s no going back though, and she goes to great lengths to hide her mistake–undermining her sanity in the process. A shifty, satirical novel that’s funny and colorful, while also raising essential questions about truth, research, and the very nature of belief. Image: Book Cover

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Poetry by Kaveh Akbar and Ilya Kaminsky

Thu, Aug 1, 2019

Brookline Booksmith's Transnational Literature Series presents an evening of poetry with Ilya Kaminsky and Kaveh Akbar. Kaminsky reads from _Deaf Republic_, set in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. Kaveh Akbar reads from his debut collection of poems, _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_, dealing with addiction and the strenuous path of recovery. **Details** _Deaf Republic_ confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them. _Deaf Republic_ opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_ boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight. “John Berryman and James Wright (and his son Franz Wright) haunt _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_, but Akbar also has a voice so distinctly his―tinted in old Persian, dipped in modern American, ancient and millennial, addict and ascetic, animal and more animal. In the end, nothing brings man―human or man―down to Earth more than the kingdom of flora and fauna.”―Porochista Khakpour, Virginia Quarterly Review.

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What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

Fri, Mar 22, 2019

Author Carolyn Forché talks about the world she crafted in her latest novel, _What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance_. Horrors and bravery brought to life in a lyrical memoir of empathy and intrigue. Image Source: Book Cover

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Amit Chaudhuri & Amitava Kumar

Wed, Feb 13, 2019

In _Friend of My Youth_, the narrator, Amit Chaudhuri (a novelist who is not to be confused with Amit Chaudhuri the novelist) is in Bombay, where he lived and went to school as a child and teenager: Hailing as he and his family do from Calcutta, he was never exactly home there although their home was there. That was long ago, however, and Bombay is now a different Bombay, just as his own childhood looks different through the lens of intervening years. And there’s another difference now: The old friend he always visited on returns to Bombay has fallen prey to a drug habit and is no longer there–and so another link with the past is broken. Amit wanders the streets of Bombay, reflects on the terrorist takeover of the glamorous Taj Mahal Hotel, runs errands for his wife and mother, remembers his father, misses his friend. In _Immigrant, Montana,_ a young Indian man’s American friends call him Kalashnikov, AK-47, AK. He takes it all in his stride: he wants to fit in–and more than that, to shine. In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, AK describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor–also an immigrant, his personal history as dramatic as AK’s is decidedly not; the very different natures of the women he loved, and of himself in and out of love with each of them. Telling his own story, AK is both meditative and the embodiment of the enthusiasm of youth in all its idealism and chaotic desires. Image: Book Covers

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Poetry with Sally Wen Mao, Jennifer Tseng, Ocean Vuong

Tue, Jan 22, 2019

Enjoy poetry with Sally Wen Mao, Jennifer Tseng, and Ocean Vuong to celebrate the release of Sally Wen Mao’s new poetry collection Oculus. Through poetry and fiction, through experimentation with form and genre, the work of these writers complicates our understanding of nationality and place by considering all that goes into their construction - technology and spectacle, translation and language, trauma and war. Image: Book Covers

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Gabriela Alemán: Poso Wells

Fri, Oct 5, 2018

Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán is joined by writer and translator Dick Cluster to discuss Alemán’s first work to appear in English: _Poso Wells_. Described as a feminist eco-thriller featuring corrupt politicians and greedy land speculators, _Poso Wells_ defies a genre, being part sci-fi, part satire and scathing in its treatment toward those in power in Ecuador.

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