• Thursday, October 8th at 5:00 P.M.(Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of several new books by Robert Bagg & James Scully.   Bagg, who used to teach English at the University of Massachusetts, is author of many volumes of poetry & translations of Greek drama.   His most recent books are, Horsegod: Collected Poems; & a translation of Euripides’s Hippolytos, collected in The Complete Euripides Volume III: Hippolytos & Other Plays.   Scully is a translator & poet.   His most recent books include Vagabond Flags: Serbia & Kosovo—Journal, Scrapbook & Notes; & a collection of poetry, Oceania.

• Thursday, October 8th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

Doug Anderson will read from his new memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, & a Journey of Self-discovery.   Anderson, author of a collection of poetry, Moon Reflected Fire, highlights the vibrant history of his generation in a farewell to Vietnam, the chaotic sixties, & their long aftermath. “We tend to write about what will not go away,” he says in this candid, darkly humorous journey of self-discovery.   Beginning in 1943, in the pre–civil rights South filled with tobacco & war stories, he recalls the difficult childhood that propels him into service in Vietnam.   In 1967, having returned home deeply shaken by his experience as a combat medical corpsman, Anderson plunges into the heady freedoms & excesses of the sixties.

• Wednesday, October 14th at 5:00 P.M. (Book launch party)

Help University of Massachusetts English professor Stephen Clingman celebrate the publication of a new book—The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction & the Nature of the Boundary, a lively & wide-ranging study of twentieth-century fiction that examines how writers across nearly a hundred years have confronted issues of the transnational, of location, land & identity.   Clingman's books include The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, which Per Wastberg, on the official Nobel Prize website, calls the 'best study' published on Gordimer; & Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, a biography of the white Afrikaner who led Nelson Mandela's legal defense at the Rivonia Trial, which won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa's premier prize for non-fiction.

• Wednesday, October 14th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

Jedediah Berry will read from his whimsically wonderful novel of mystery & fantasy, The Manual of Detection.   In this tightly plotted yet mind–expanding debut novel, an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella & a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in & through people's dreams.   A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote ”The Manual of Detection might not follow the detective-fiction manual, but there is nothing mysterious about the appeal of this inventive, outrageous & often amusing dream-within-a-dream."   Sponsored by Amherst College Creative Writing center.

• Thursday, October 15th at 7:00 P.M.(Poetry reading)

James Tate, Ellen Doré Watson, & James Haug will read at the Amherst Cinema as part of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.   Tate—winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, & the William Carlos Williams Award; Watson, winner of the New England/New York award from Alice James Books, as well as a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, the Rona Jaffe Writers Award, & a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship; & Haug, who is winner of the National Poetry Review Book Prize & the Morse Poetry Prize—will read from new & selected work.   Tickets are $10 for adults & $5 for students & seniors.   To reserve your spot, please visit Amherst Cinema.

• Friday, October 16th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

“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.

• Saturday, October 17th at 4:30 P.M.(Poetry reading & talk)

John Felstiner talk in the West Lecture Hall at Hampshire College about his survey of nature poetry, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems.   Felstiner, a professor of English at Stanford University for more than thirty years, is probably best known for his translations & studies of the poetry of Paul Celan & Pablo Neruda.   Sponsored by the Kestrel Trust.

• Sunday, October 18th at 3:00 P.M.(Poetry reading)

“Jubilat/Jones Reading Series”   Jordan Stempleman & Michelle Taransky 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.   Stempleman is the author of six collections of poetry including Doubled Over.   He is the Associate Editor of The Continental Review.  Taransky’s poetry has been published in the Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, & VOLT.   She is winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize & a coauthor of the chapbook, The Plans Caution.

The reading will be preceded by a ‘Poetry Swap' at 2:00 PM.

• Tuesday, October 20th at 5:00 P.M.(Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of a new book by Colgate professor Paul Lopes—Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book,   Exploring how comic books in the 1930s were perceived as a “menace” in the 1950s, only to later become collectors’ items & eventually “hip” fiction in the 1980s, Lopes immerses himself in the discourse & practices of this art & subculture to provide a social history of the American comic book over the last 75 years.  

• Wednesday, October 21st at 8:00 P.M. (reading)

Rachel Glaser, Noy Holland, & Sam Michel will read as part of a celebration of the literary journal, New York Tyrant & the launch of Tyrant Books, which will be publishing books by Eugene Marten, Michael Kimball, Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Jason Schwartz, & Atticus Lish.   The New York Tyrant is a tri-quarterly literary magazine based in Hell’s Kitchen, focusing on the immediacy of the short story.   The pieces, coming from voices both new & seasoned, are concise, evocative, often humorous, & sometimes surreal.   Glaser, who is in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts has had stories published in Unsaid & New York Tyrant.   Her first book is being published by Publishing Genius this summer.   Holland is the author of two collections of short fiction, What Begins With Bird & The Spectacle of the Body.   She is a Professor in the MFA program for Writers & Poets at the University of Massachusetts.   Michel is author of two collections of short stories: Under the Light &, more recently, Big Dogs & Flyboys.   He recently won the Tyrant’s Lidano Fiction Award.

• Thursday, October 22nd at 8:00 P.M. (Poetry reading)

Poets Lisa Olstein & Rebecca Wolff, will read from their new books at Memorial Hall, University of Massachusetts.   Olstein is author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, which won the Hayden Carruth Award, & Lost Alphabet.   A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from both the Massachusetts Cultural Council & the Centrum Foundation, Olstein has been widely published.   She presently serves as associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts & is a cofounder of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action.   Wolff is author of three volumes of poetry— Manderly, which was chosen for the National Poetry Series; Figment, winner of the Barnard Women Poetrs Prize; & most recently, The King.   She is a founder of the literary magazine Fence & of Fence Books.   Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts M.F.A. Program's Visiting Writer Series.

• Saturday, October 24th at 10:00 A.M.(Author signing)

David Morine will sign copies of his newest book, Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship.   David Morine agreed to canoe down the Connecticut River with his old friend, retired CEO Ramsay Peard, under one condition: no camping.   Morine recounts their journey of whim, humor, & self-discovery as two men explore the River while staying with strangers every night.   Morine was the head of land acquisition for The Nature Conservancy from 1972 to 1990.   He is the author of five books, including Good Dirt: Confessions of a Conservationist.

• Wednesday, October 28th at 8:00 P.M. (Poetry reading)

Poets Zach Savich & Kiki Petrosino, will read from their new collections of poetry.  Savich, who is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Massachusetts, is author of Full Catastrophe Living, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.   Marvin Bell, writing of Savich’s work said, ”The poems of Zach Savich take root in a shape-shifting amalgam of juncture & disjuncture.  Their intensely wrought language pleases the mind & troubles the heart as only the genuine article can.“   Petrosino is author of Fort Red Border.   Srikanth Reddy said, ”Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection's imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, & creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros. . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, & Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”

• Friday, October 30th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

“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.