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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/

Olga Tokarczuk: Flights

Tue, Sep 25, 2018

Olga Tokarczuk joins translator Jennifer Croft and moderator Shuchi Saraswat as part of the Transnational Literature Series. A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? We call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer. Image: Book cover

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Dubravka Ugrešić: American Fictionary

Tue, Sep 18, 2018

Dubravka Ugrešić will be in conversation with translator Ellen Elias-Bursać about _American Fictionary_ as part of the Transnational Literature Series. In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugrešić — winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature — was invited to Middletown, Connecticut, as a guest lecturer. A world away from the brutal sieges of Sarajevo and the nationalist rhetoric of Miloševic, she instead has to cope with everyday life in America, where she’s assaulted by “strong personalities,” the cult of the body, endless amounts of jogging and exercise, bagels, and an obsession with public confession.  Organized as a fictional dictionary, these early essays of Ugrešić's (revised and amended for this edition) are as pertinent to today’s America as when they were first published. It’s here, in these pieces filled with Ugrešić's unparalleled wit and devastating observations, that the comforting veil of Western consumerism is ripped apart as the mundane luxuries of the average citizen are contrasted with the life of a woman whose country is being destroyed.

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Hala Alyan: Salt Houses

Tue, Aug 21, 2018

Hala Alyan reads from her novel _Salt Houses_ as part of the Transnational Literature Series. Salt Houses is her first novel. On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Lyrical and heartbreaking, _Salt Houses_ follows three generations of a Palestinian family and asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.

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Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀: Stay With Me

Tue, Jul 17, 2018

In Adébáyọ̀'s work Stay With Me, a husband and wife tell the story of their marriage - and the forces that threaten to tear it apart. The book was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize and the 9mobile Prize for Literature. It was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. _Stay With Me_ was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

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Roxane Gay Discusses 'Not That Bad' and 'Hunger'

Thu, Jun 14, 2018

Roxane Gay is a cultural critic and the author of the essay collection _Bad Feminist_, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel _An Untamed State_, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the short story collections _Difficult Women_ and _Ayiti_. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, Gay has written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for _The Best American Short Stories 2012_, _The Best American Mystery Stories 2014_, and other anthologies. Hear a conversation about her recent works, the new anthology _Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture_ and the bestselling _Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body_. Read about Roxane Gay and the reach of the #MeToo movement [here](https://medium.com/@ForumNetwork/roxane-gay-and-the-reach-of-metoo-9f98ff0abf29 "Roxane Gay and the Reach of #MeToo").

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Nothing Happened: A Shakespearean Retelling

Tue, May 15, 2018

Young adult author Molly Booth talks about her novel, _Nothing Happened_, with author Katie Bayerl. Booth's novel is a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s _Much Ado About Nothing_ in which sisters Bee and Hana juggle their camp counselor responsibilities with simmering drama at the idyllic Camp Dogberry. Image: Book Cover

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A Conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour

Mon, Apr 30, 2018

Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour discusses his magisterial novel of love and war, Moon Brow, with his intrepid translator Sara Khalili and Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans as part of Brookline Booksmith's Transnational Literature Series, which focuses on books concerning migration, exile and displacement. Part of the [Transnational Literature Series](https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/programs/transnational-literature-series/ "Transnational Literature Series") at the Brookline Booksmith.

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Luljeta Lleshanaku: Negative Space

Fri, May 4, 2018

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania. Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand. Part of the [Transnational Literature Series](https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/programs/transnational-literature-series/ "") at the Brookline Booksmith.

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No Boston Olympics

Wed, Jun 21, 2017

In early 2015, Boston was the forerunner among cities with a bid to host the 2024 Olympics. But by July, the bid was dropped. What happened? Chris Dempsey, a former co-chair of **[No Boston Olympics](http://www.nobostonolympics.org/ "")**, discusses his new book on how a small group of activists ended the bid for the Olympic Games to come to Boston.

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Deborah Nelson: Tough Enough

Thu, Apr 20, 2017

Author Deborah Nelson focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. _Tough Enough_ traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness. (Pictured: Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt)

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