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Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store is an independently run bookstore serving the greater Cambridge area. The bookstore is located in Harvard Square and has been family-owned since 1932. We are known for our extraordinary selection of new, used and remaindered books and for a history of innovation. In 2009, we introduced same-day "green delivery" and a book-making robot capable of printing and binding any of millions of titles in minutes. Find out more about us at www.harvard.com.

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Jennifer Weiner: Fly Away Home

Wed, Jul 21, 2010

Bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner reads from a discusses her most recent book, *Fly Away Home*. When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician’s wife—her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator. Lizzie, the Woodruffs’ younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more. After Richard’s extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.

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Adam Ross: Mr. Peanut

Thu, Jul 15, 2010

Nashville columnist and debut novelist Adam Ross discusses *Mr. Peanut*. David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After thirteen years of marriage, he still can't imagine a remotely happy life without her--yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice's suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin's role in Alice's death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Like the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games David designs for a living, these complex, interlocking dramas are structurally and emotionally intense, subtle, and intriguing; they brilliantly explore the warring impulses of affection and hatred, and pose a host of arresting questions. Is it possible to know anyone fully, completely? Are murder and marriage two sides of the same coin, each endlessly recycling into the other? And what, in the end, is the truth about love?

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Howard Norman: What Is Left the Daughter

Tue, Jul 27, 2010

Howard Norman reads and explores his newest work, *What Is Left the Daughter*. Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges—the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda. Setting in motion the novel′s chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Wyatt′s account of the astonishing—not least to him—events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It′s a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.

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William Powers: Hamlet's Blackberry

Thu, Jul 22, 2010

Media and technology writer William Powers discusses his new book, *Hamlet′s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age*. At a time when we′re all trying to make sense of our relentlessly connected lives, this book presents a bold new approach to the digital age. Part intellectual journey, part memoir, *Hamlet′s BlackBerry* sets out to solve what William Powers calls the conundrum of connectedness. Our computers and mobile devices do wonderful things for us. But they also impose an enormous burden, making it harder for us to focus, do our best work, build strong relationships, and find the depth and fulfillment we crave. *Hamlet′s BlackBerry* argues that we need a new way of thinking, an everyday philosophy for life with screens. To find it, Powers reaches into the past, uncovering a rich trove of ideas that have helped people manage and enjoy their connected lives for thousands of years. New technologies have always brought the mix of excitement and stress that we feel today. Drawing on some of history′s most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, he shows that digital connectedness serves us best when it′s balanced by its opposite, *disconnectedness*.

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Gail Caldwell: Let’s Take the Long Way Home

Thu, Aug 12, 2010

Memoirist and former Boston Globe book critic Gail Caldwell reads from her new memoir, *Let′s Take the Long Way Home*, about her dear friend and colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Knapp.

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Maile Meloy: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

Mon, Jun 28, 2010

Short story writer and novelist Maile Meloy reads and discusses her newly in paperback collection of stories, *Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It*. This collection is about the battlefields--and fields of victory--that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly--and reluctantly--in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.

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Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: The Fall

Thu, Sep 23, 2010

Director Guillermo del Toro and author Chuck Hogan discuss *The Fall*, the second installment in the *Strain Trilogy*. The pair are interviewed by the Brattle Theatre's creative director, Ned Hinkle. The vampiric virus unleashed in *The Strain* has taken over New York City. It is spreading across the country and soon, the world. Amid the chaos, Eph Goodweather, head of the CDC′s team and one of a small group who have banded together to fight the bloodthirsty monsters that roam the streets, finally manages to identify the parasite that causes the infection. But it may be too late.

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Deborah Fallows on Dreaming in Chinese

Thu, Oct 7, 2010

Deborah Fallows explores her experiences as an American living in China in her new book, *Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.* Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world, but nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language--a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar--became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Here she shares what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, *Dreaming in Chinese* opens up China to westerners in an entirely new way.

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Mark Vonnegut: Just Like Someone without Mental Illness

Wed, Oct 13, 2010

Mark Vonnegut talks about his memoir *Just Like Someone without Mental Illness Only More So*, a follow-up to the acclaimed *The Eden Express*. Here is Mark’s childhood spent as the son of a struggling writer in a house that eventually held seven children after his aunt and uncle died and left four orphans. And here is the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital to find his family forever altered. At the age of twenty-eight—and after nineteen rejections—Mark was accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gained purpose, a life, and some control over his mental illness.

Mental Health Month

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David A. Kessler: The End of Overeating

Tue, Oct 5, 2010

**David A, Kessler,** former commissioner of the US food & drug administration, discusses ways the food industry manipulates the way we eat through his book, *The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite*. Most of us know what it feels like to fall under the spell of food-when one slice of pizza turns into half a pie, or a handful of chips leads to an empty bag. Its harder to understand why we cant seem to stop eating, even when we know better. *The End of Overeating* explains for the first time why it is exceptionally difficult to resist certain foods and why its so easy to overindulge, uncovering facts about how we lose control over our eating habits, and how we can get it back.

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