• Wednesday, July 13th at 8:00 P.M.

Valley-ites John Crowley & Kelly Link will join us for an evening of entertainment.   Crowley will read from his new novel, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.   Ron Charles, writing in The Washington Post, wrote, "In an astounding display of scholarship & imagination, John Crowley has stitched together pieces of biography, literary history, textual criticism, computer science & cryptography to produce a novel about Byron's lost masterpiece."   Crowley is author of a series of novels which combine in various degrees fantasy, political realism, Renaissance history, & in general, a peculiarly—subtle & whimsical & fey—attitude to reality.   Having said that, I'll go on to say that it's impossible to describe in a single (coherent) sentence the extraordinary & wonderful oeuvre comprised by such novels as The Translator; Little, Big; Ægypt; Beasts & The Deep.   Link is editor of Trampoline: An Anthology, & is author of a wonderful collection of short stories, Strange Things Happen & now another, Magic for Beginners.   Writing of Link's first volume, China Miéville said, "This small-press short-story collection by a young American writer is a joy—a very tired word, & not one I use lightly.   I've not been so moved & affected—& dammit, yes, inspired—by a book for a long time."   Link has won numerous science fiction awards for her stories.

• Wednesday, July 20th at 7:30 P.M.

Reading & talk by Amherst native Dorion Sagan.   Sagan, together with Eric Schneider, has just published Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, & Life.   Into the Flow focuses on the Second Law of Thermodynamics; it details how complex systems emerge, enlarge, & reproduce in a world tending toward disorder.   They show that far more observable than divine caprice, more real than computer simulations, & more basic than natural selection, are the effects of the organizing, complexity-giving power of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.   Sagan is co-author (with Lynn Margulis) of What is Life?, Microcosmos, & Acquiring Genomes: The Theory of the Origins of the Species.

• Sunday, July 31st at 1:00 P.M.

Reading & talk by Masako Takeda.   Masako is professor of American Literature, Osaka Shoin Women's College, Japan.   She has compiled several textbooks on Dickinson's poetry for Japanese students, & has translated Dickinson's love poetry, some of her letters & a Dickinson cookbook into Japanese.   A book recounting her experiences in the U.S. in search of Emily Dickinson was published in 1996 in Japan.   In Search of Emily: Journeys from Japan to Amherst is her first book written for an American audience.   The event is scheduled to coincide with the International Emily Dickinson Society Meeting.   Click here for more information on the meeting.