• Friday, December 1st at 7:30pm (Reading)

Kim Yi Dionne will talk on World AIDS Day about her new book, Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa.   Dionne is the Five College Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College.   Her new book shows, through an analysis of foreign aid flows & public opinion polls, that while the international community highly prioritizes AIDS, ordinary Africans view AIDS as but one of the many problems they face daily.  

• Saturday, December 2nd at 2:00pm (Reading)

Mira Bartók will read at the Swift River School, New Salem, from her new novel for young people, The Wonderling: Songcatcher.   It tells the story of Arthur, a shy fox-like foundling with only one ear & a desperate desire to belong, as he seeks his destiny.   Bartók is also author of The Memory Palace which was a Washington Post Best Book of 2011, & won the 2012 National Book Critics Award for Autobiography.

• Tuesday, December 5th at 2:30pm (Reading)

Helen Benedict will read in from her most recent novel, Wolf Season, in Room 301, Herter Hall, UMass, Amherst.   Benedict is a prolific novelist & journalist; she is author of more than 6 novels, including Sand Queen, which The Boston Globe called “The Things They Carried for women in Iraq;” & several works of non-fiction, including Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.

• Tuesday, December 5th at 5:15pm (Reading)

Helen Benedict will read in the Taylor Room, Kern Center, Hampshire College, Amherst, from her new novel Wolf Season.   For more information see the listing for earlier today.

• Thursday, December 7th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of a new book by Daniel Warner, Live Wires: A History of Electronic Music, & a new edition of Audio Culture, Revised Edition: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner.   Warner is professor of music & Cox is professor of philosophy, both at Hampshire College.  

• Thursday, December 7th at 8:00pm (Reading)

Matthew Zapruder will read in Memorial Hall, UMass, Amherst, from his new book on reading poetry, Why Poetry.   Zapruder is author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear, Come On All You Ghosts, The Pajamaist, & American Linden.   He collaborated with painter Chris Uphues on For You in Full Bloom, & co-translated, with historian Radu Ioanid, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems.   He co-founded Verse Press. which later became Wave Books.   Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts MFA Program’s Visiting Writers Series.

• Friday, December 8th at 7:00pm (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.

• Tuesday, December 12th at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Conversation)

Amherst Books Noontime Book Conversation Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital.   The Conversation is not a book group in the traditional sense: it expects readers to come & go as their schedules & interests allow.   If you can, purchase your copy from Amherst Books with a 10% discount.   The group meets on the second Tuesday of every month.   Feel free to bring your lunch; water will be provided.

• Tuesday, December 12th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Celebrate the publication of new books by Amherst College professors Adi Gordon & Sergey Glebov.   Gordon, is author of Toward Nationalism's End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn.   Kohn (1891–1971) was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his peripatetic life took him from the Revolutionary-era Russia to interwar-era Palestine under the British Empire to the United States during the Cold War.  Bearing witness to dramatic reconfigurations of national & political identities, he spearheaded an intellectual revolution that fundamentally challenged assumptions about the “naturalness” & the immutability of nationalism.  Glebov is author, most recently, of From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, & Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920’s–1930’s.   The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian émigrés who had recently emerged from years of fighting & destruction.   In this first English language history of the Eurasianist movement based on extensive archival research, Glebov offers a historically grounded critique of the concept of Eurasia by interrogating the context in which it was first used to describe the former Russian Empire.

• Thursday, December 14th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Meghan Lamb will be joined by Melissa Dickey, & Dean Guarino, Maura Pellitieri, Andy Stallings, & Carolyn Zaikowski in a group reading of fiction & poetry.   Lamb is the recipient of an MFA in Fiction from Washington University & the 2018 Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing.   She is the author of the novel Silk Flowers, the poetry chapbook Letter to Theresa, & the novella Sacramento.   Her work has been featured in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Passages North, Redivider, & elsewhere.   Dickey is the author of Dragons & Lily Will, both from Rescue Press.   Her poems & reviews have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Sundog Lit, & KROnline.   Guarino is a misfit Mississippian living in New England with his wife, Maria, & their dog, Memphis.   He teaches at Wilbraham & Monson Academy, & received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he worked as a poetry editor of The Greensboro Review.   His work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream, & elsewhere.   Pellettieri is a poet, essayist, storyteller, performer, & art writer.  She writes & moves via inquiries of queerness, landscape, architecture, & collision.   Pellitieri’s writings appear or are forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Guernica, Apogee Journal, Tammy Journal, & elsewhere.   She received her MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis & teaches at the University of Hartford.   She grew up on the banks of the Hudson River, known first as the Mahicantuck River, or the “river that flows two ways.”   Stallings lives in Massachusetts, where he is on the faculty at Deerfield Academy.   A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop & an editor of THERMOS magazine, he is married to poet Melissa Dickey.   They have three young children: Esme, Curran, & Galen. To the Heart of the World is his first book of poems.     Zaikowski is the author of the novels In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, & I Collapse, & A Child Is Being Killed.   Her fiction, poetry, & essays have appeared widely, in such publications as The Washington Post, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, & Everyday Feminism, among others.   She lives & teaches in Massachusetts.