• Friday, December 1st at 4:30 P.M.(Book launch party)

Join Catherine Ciepiela, professor in the Russian Department at Amherst College, in celebrating the publication of her new book, The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak & Marina Tsvetaeva.   (Read more on our Local Authors page!).

• Friday, December 1st 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.   Tonight is a reading of First Year students: Ata Moharreri, Matthew Gagnon, Emily Toder, Ezekiel Black, Kyle McCord, Madeline ffitch, Ari Field, Anjali Khosla, & Boomer Pinches.

• Sunday, December 3rd at 5:00 P.M.(Reading)

Elizabeth (Liza) Trahan will read from the second volume of her memoirs, Ten Dollars in My Pocket: The American Education of a Holocaust Survivor, A Memoir in Documents.   Following on the heels of A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna, Trahan “offers a captivating portrait of US society in the early postwar years through the perspective of a sensitive & keenly perceptive young woman survivor of the Holocaust.   The intertwining of a story of personal maturing with a difficult & humorously told acculturation process unfolds in a riveting way.   Ample quotations from diaries & letters of that time give the remembered story an extraordinary immediacy.“ — Walter H. Sokel.  (Read more on our Local Authors page!).

• Thursday, December 7th at 8:00 P.M.(Poetry reading)

Peter Covino will read in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College.   Covino is author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter & Straight Boyfriend, which won the 2001 Frank O'Hara Chapbook Prize.   His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia, The Journal, The Paris Review, Verse, & The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing.   He is one of the founding editors of Barrow Street & Barrow Street Press.   Sponsored by Amherst College’s Creative Writing Center.

• Wednesday, December 13th at 6:00 P.M.(Book launch party & reading)

Join poets Dara Wier & Alex Phillips in celebrating the publication of their new volumes of poetry.   Wier, professor in the English department at the University of Massachusetts is author of many volumes of poetry, most recently, Remnants of Hannah.   (Read more!).   Phillips, who teaches creative writing at the University of Massachussets is author of Under a Paper Trellis.   (Read more!).

• Monday, December 25th at 4:00 P.M. (Memorial reading)

The Swiss writer Robert Walser died 50 years ago on this day.   Walser (1878-1956) left school at fourteen & led a wandering, precarious existence while producing poems, essays, stories, & novels.   In 1933 he entered an insane asylum—he remained there for the rest of his life—& quit writing.   “I am not here to write,” he said, “ but to be mad.”   He went for a walk on the 25th of December of 1956 & was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow near the asylum.   Books in translation include, Robber, Jakob Von Gunten, & Selected Stories.   For more information, see the Wikipedia article