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Amherst Books
8 Main Street  Amherst, MA 01002  ·   413.256.1547  ·  800.503.5865  ·  books@amherstbooks.com
Events

< April 2010 >

Events listed in white are at the bookshop; events listed in yellow are elsewhere.

Unless noted otherwise all events are free & open to the public.

(Click on a picture or a title to check our inventory or to purchase.)
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Join us in celebrating the publication University of Massachusetts professor Andrew Donson’s first book, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, & Authority in Germany, 1914-1918. In his new book, Donson, who teaches in the History Department & in the Department of German & Scandinavian Studies, examines the dawn of the great era of mobilizing teenagers & schoolchildren for experiments in state building & extreme political movements like fascism & communism.
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Adrian Louis will read in Memorial Hall at the University of Massachusetts as part of the M.F.A. Program’s Visiting Writer Series.   Louis was born & raised in northern Nevada & is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe.   He edited four Native newspapers including the Lakota Times & Indian Country Today & was a co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association.   Louis has taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota & currently teaches at the Minnesota State University in Marshall.   He has written ten books of poems, including Logorrhea, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; & two works of fiction, including Skins, which was produced as a feature film directed by Chris Eyre.   Louis has won various writing awards including Pushcart Prizes & fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, & the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation.
Emilyreading
“Live Lit”   Students in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts will read from their recent work.   Evenings usually include a mix of poetry & fiction.
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Caryl Phillips will read from his recent fiction in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Building, University of Massachusetts.   Phillips is author of numerous works of fiction, plays & non-fiction.   His novels include The Final Passage; Crossing the River, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize & was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Distant Shore, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark, which won the PEN/Beyond the Margins Award; &, most recently, In the Falling Snow.   His non-fiction includes The Atlantic Sound; & A New World Order.   His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, & a Lannan Foundation Fellowship.   Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts’ Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities & Fine Arts.   (Phillips will also be talking on April 8th.   See below.)
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Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg will talk about her new book, Surprisingly Happy: An Atypical Religious Memoir.   Weinberg served as rabbi of the Jewish Community in Amherst for many years.   She is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; a major contributor to the Kol Haneshamah prayerbook series; is active in Rabbis for Human Rights, an international organization that gives voice to the Jewish search for justice; & teaches at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, which she co-founded.
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Caryl Phillips will give the annual Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities & Fine Arts talk, “Colour Me English,” in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Building, University of Massachusetts.   Phillips is author of numerous works of fiction, plays & non-fiction.   (For more information see the listing for April 6.)   Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts’ Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities & Fine Arts.   (Phillips will also be talking on April 8th.   See below.)
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Roberta Isleib, will talk at the Leverett Library about raising your sleuthing IQ.   Isleib is a clinical psychologist who writes mysteries.   Her first series, featuring a neurotic professional golfer & a sports psychologist, was nominated for both Agatha & Anthony awards.   Isleib’s series starring a Connecticut psychologist & advice columnist, debuted in 2007 with Deadly Advice, followed by Preaching to the Corpse, & Asking for Murder.
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Deanna Fei will read from her new book A Thread of Sky.   Fei is graduate of Amherst College & the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.   She has received a Fulbright Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, & a Chinese Cultural Scholarship, among other awards.   Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh, said of A Thread of Sky, “This had me at the first page.   Fei’s debut novel is both intensely enjoyable &, I think, important—this novel charts the cost of that famous Asian silence between generations, as a family takes in the price of it across several generations.   But it is also an intimate portrait of that famous ‘new China’, as much of a surprise to Chinese Americans as it is to the rest of us.   Truly a book for our times.”   Sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center.
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Join us in celebrating the publication of a new book by University of Massachusetts history professor Joel Wolfe, Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity.   Wolfe reinterprets twentieth-century Brazilian history through automobiles, using them as a window for understanding the nation’s struggle for modernity in the face of its massive geographical size, weak central government, & dependence on agricultural exports.   Wolfe is author of Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo & the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955; his articles have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, Hispanic American Historical, Radical History Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, & Revista Brasileira de História.
Emilyreading
“Live Lit”   Students in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts will read from their recent work.   Evenings usually include a mix of poetry & fiction.
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University of Massachusetts M.F.A. Program graduates Daniel Coudriet, Chris Hosea, & Cecily Iddings will read from recent work.   Courdriet is the author of a recent collection of poems, Say Sand.   He has published in Verse, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Fourteen Hills, Octopus, & elsewhere.   His translations of the Argentinean poets Oliverio Girondo & Reynaldo Sietecase have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, & Fascicle.   Hosea’s poems have been published in Swerve, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Harvard Review, & elsewhere.   His manuscript, The Promise of the Baffled, was a semifinalist for the 2007 Walt Whitman Award.   He works at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.   Iddings’ poems & reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, jubilat, Meridian, Pleiades, Spinning Jenny, Verse, & Verse Daily, among other places.   She is working on the second issue of The Blue Letter with Chris Hosea, & is a former managing editor of Slope Editions.

  3:30 P.M.   Eric Carle Museum: Antonio Fransconi Exhibit Tour

Curator tours of the internationally acclaimed artist’s woodcuts, including works inspired by Pablo Neruda & W.S. Merwin
      4:30 P.M.   Eric Carle Museum: Roundtable: On Poetry & the Visual Arts
Jen Bervin, Terrance Hayes, & Matthea Harvey; moderated by Jane Curley
      6:00 P.M.   Fine Arts Center Lobby: Independent Journal & Book Fair Opening Reception
      7:30 P.M.   University Gallery: Reading
Jen Bervin, Christian Hawkey, Michael Teig, & Matthew Zapruder

 10:30 A.M.   Fine Arts Center Lobby: Journal & Book Fair re-opens
 11:00 A.M.   University Gallery: Roundtable: Poetry, Publishing & the Pioneer Valley

The dreaming up, creating, & evolving of jubilat, Verse Press/Wave Books, & Rain Taxi, with Rob Casper, Matthew Zapruder, & Eric Lorberer; moderated by Dara Wier
    12:30 P.M.   University Gallery:Roundtable: The Future of Poetry, Part II
Heather Christle, Cathy Park Hong, Evie Shockley, & Rebecca Wolff; moderated by Rob Casper
      3:00 P.M.   Amherst Cinema Arts Center: Reading & Performance
Terrance Hayes, Caroline Knox, & Dean Young; followed by the premier of a performance based on Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”, staged by Missoula Oblongata

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“Jubilat/Jones Reading Series”   James Tate & Matthea Harvey will read from their recent work as part of the jubilat/Jones Reading Series in the Trustees Room at the Jones Library, 43 Amity Street in Amherst.  Tate, who teaches in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts here in Amherst, has been awarded a National Institute of Arts & Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, & fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation & the National Endowment for the Arts, for his 20+ volumes of poetry & prose.   His most recent collection of poetry is The Ghost Soldiers.   Harvey is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sad Little Breathing Machine; Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form; Modern Life, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award & a New York Times Notable Book; & children’s book, The Little General & the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel.   Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper & BOMB.   She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence & lives in Brooklyn.

The reading will be preceded by a ‘Poetry Swap' at 2:00 PM.
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Join us in celebrating the publication of a new book by Jeannine AtkinsBorrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, & Their Daughters. & Wilder, Walker, & Curie were bothn in 1867; each of them had complicated relationships with their daughters—relationships Atkins explores in her new book of poetry for children & adults.   Atkins is author of many wonderful books for children with historical themes, including Anne Hutchinson’s Way; Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists; & Aani & the Tree Huggers.   Atkins teaches children’s literature at the University of Massachusetts.
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Michelle Boyajian will read from her debut novel, Lies of the Heart, a shocking case of three lives derailed by love & murder which is reminiscent of Jodi Picoult, Ann Packer, & Sue Miller.   Boyajian is a graduate of New York University, Miami University, & the University of North Carolina–Wilmington, where she received an MFA & the Austin Robert Hartsook Fellowship in Creative Writing.   Her most recent short stories appeared in Third Coast & Timber Creek Review, & were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.   She currently lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Alexander Chee will read from recent work.   Chee is author of Edinburgh, which won the Michener/Copernicus Prize, the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice prize, & was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.   He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writer's Award, a 2004 NEA Literature fellowship, & a 2005 MacDowell Colony fellowship.   Junot Diaz, asked by the Austinist, what recent books had excited him said, “Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, fucking incredible son of a bitch.”   Chee’s fiction & non–fiction has been published in Granta, Guernica, Barrow, Out, & Lodestar Quarterly, among other journals.   He is working on his second novel, The Queen of the Night.   Chee is ending his term as a visiting writer at Amherst College, & he will be missed.   Reading co-sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center.

Updated 18 April, 2010Site MapWant to have an event?