8 Main Street Amherst, MA 01002 ·
413.256.1547 · 800.503.5865 ·
books@amherstbooks.com
Events
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.)
- Thursday, May 2nd at 4:30pm(Reading)
Mat Johnson will read at from his most recent novel,
Pym—which NPR called, “loony, disrespectful, & sharp,” at
Pruyne Lecture Hall, Fayerweather, Amherst College. Johnson is the highly acclaimed author of the novels
Drop;
Hunting in Harlem, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; as well as the graphic novels
Incognegro &
Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story.
- Friday, May 3th at 7:000pm(Reading)
Eugene Ostashevsky,
Matvei Yankelevich, &
Polina Barskova will celebrate the release of
An Invitation For Me to Think, by the late Russian avant-garde poet Alexander Vvedensky.
The Nation writes: “Vvedensky’s poems sear…. There are few more churning, lacerating & willfully beautiful works in Eastern European literature.” For
TLS, Vvedensky & his friends “mounted a challenge in the late 1920s & ’30s to ‘worldly logic’ by questioning & confusing the most basic categories through which the world may be rendered coherent & transformed into narrative… They practiced a kind of silence through words, wearing various comic masks while pointing to inexpressible realities.” Ostashevsky is the editor of the volume; Yankelevich is a contributor to it; Barskova teaches Russian Literature at Hampshire College.
- Friday, May 3th at 7:30pm(Talk)
Hedrick Smith will talk at
Bowker Auditorium, UMass about his new book
Who Stole the American Dream? Smith—who is a former Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times & an Emmy-winning PBS documentarian, shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Paper series & won another Pulitzer for his reporting from Russia—together with a pre-recorded video address by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, will kick off a three-day conference, “Rules Change: Resetting the Playing Field for Corporations, People & Democracy,“ organized by the UMass Donahue Institute at the request of U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern & four other non-profit policy groups. McGovern will be a special guest at the event. For more information go to
Ruleschange.org.
- Thursday, May 9th at 4:000pm(Book launch party)
Join University of Massachusetts English professors
Ruth Jennison &
Hoang Phan in celebrating the publication of their new books. Jennison’s
The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, & the Avant-Garde, argues that Objectivist poetry, inaugurated by Louis Zukofsky in 1931, gave expression to the complex contours of culture & politics in America during the Great Depression, & how Zukofsky, Oppen, & Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, & feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Phan’s new book,
Bonds of Citizenship: Law & the Labors of Emancipation, demonstrates how American citizenship & civic culture from the founding of the Constitution through the Civil War were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, & indentured labor.
- Friday, May 10th at 7:00pm(Poetry Reading)
UMass M.F.A. graduates
Jack Christian,
Wendy Xu, &
Luke Bloomfield, will read from thier recent work. Christian is author of a collection of poetry,
Family System; Xu is author of the collection
You Are Not Dead; & Bloomfield is author a forthcoming volume of poetry.
- Thursday, May 16th at 7:00pm(Talk)
Ron Story will talk at the Pelham Library about his new book, Jonathan Edwards & the Gospel of Love . Story is a professor emeritus in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts. The event is sponsored by The Pelham Historical Socieity & the Pelham Library. For more information: The Pelham Historical Society.
- Friday, May 17th (Celebration)
Help us celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of Amherst Books!
—Victuals all day long!
—Open mic (read your favorite passage from any book) @ 4:00!
—Music: bring an instrument or your whole band & seranade us!
- Tuesday, May 21st at 7:00pm(Reading & conversation)
Carole DeSanti,
Laura Harrington,
Amy Hoffman, &
Maryanne O’Hara will talk at the
Jones Library, Amherst, about their new books & the relationship between fiction, art, & history; researching & writing fiction; the endless fascination of memoir; & the situation of women writers publishing today. DeSanti is author of the recent novel,
The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R.; Harrington is author of the novel,
Alice Bliss; Hoffman, of the memoir
Lies About My Family; & O’Hara, of the novel,
Cascade. See the Jones Library
website for more information.
