• Wednesday, May 4th at 4:30 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join native son Peter Demerath in celebrating the publication of Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School.   Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance.   His book reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics & employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; & administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress & fatigue, incivility & vandalism, & the alienation of the less successful.   Insightful & candid, Producing Success is an often troubling account of the educationally & morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

• Thursday May 5th at 8:00 P.M. (Reading)

Shutebsury resident, Gian DiDonna will read from his play, Renati the King: A Phantasmagoric Tragi-comedy.   DiDonna, who now teaches at Frontier Regional School after years of teaching & playwriting in New York, imagines the final days of Descartes in his new play, of which Rainer Hanshe wrote, “This is a daring theatrical work that stands against the fashion of its time.”

• Friday, May 6th 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.

• Tuesday, May 10th at 4:30 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join Charles Rearick, professor emeritus in the History Department of the University of Massachusetts, in celebrating the publication of his new book, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City & Its Mystique.   His new book focuses on the last century & a half, arguing that we can best understand Paris as several cities in one, each with its own history & its own imaginary shaped by dream & memory.   Paris has long been at once a cosmopolitan City of Light & of modernity, a patchwork of time-resistant villages, a treasured heirloom, a hell for the disinherited, & a legendary pleasure dome.   Each of these has played a part in making the enchanting, flawed city of our time.   Besides Paris Dreams, Paris Memories Rearick is also author of Beyond the Enlightenment: Historians & Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France; Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment & Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France; & The French in Love & War: Popular Culture in France in the Era of the World Wars.

• Tuesday, May 24th at 4:30 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join University of Massachusetts English professors Suzanne Daly, Jane Degenhardt, & Adam Zucker in celebrating the publication of their new books.   Daly is author of Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels, which, tracing the history of Indian imports, then reading the novels of the period for the ways in which they infuse meaning into these imports, demonstrates how imperialism was written into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century England.   Degenhardt has two new books—Islamic Conversion & Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage, which explores the theme of Christian conversion to Islam as erotic & tragic in 12 early-modern English plays; & an edited volume, Religion & Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, whose articles reveal the ways in which questions of religion & questions of performance were inextricably linked in early modern England.   And Zucker’s new book, The Place of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy, examines competency & incompetence in comedies by Shakespeare, Jonson & their contemporaries through histories of familiar sites staged in their plays, such as Windsor Forest & Covent Garden.

• Monday, May 30th 2:00-4:00 P.M. (Book launch party)

Join co-editors Lynn Margulis & Celeste Asikainen, as well as contributors Robin Kolnicki, Jim MacAllister, Nathan Currier, Laurie Lassiter, Sonya Vickers, & Bruce Scofield, in celebrating the publication of their new book Chimeras & Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self—in OEB seminar room 319, Morrill Science Center, 611 North Pleasant Street, Amherst.   Chimeras & Consciousness begins the inquiry into the evolution of the collective sensitivities of life.   Scientist-scholars from a range of fields—including biochemistry, cell biology, history of science, family therapy, genetics, microbial ecology, & primatology—trace the emergence & evolution of consciousness.   Margulis, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the modern originator of the symbiotic theory of cell evolution.   Once considered heresy, her ideas are now part of the microbiological revolution.   Asikainen is a geologist & administrator of the Margulis Lab.   Wolfgang E. Krumbein (a third editor), formerly at Oldenburg University in Germany, is counted among the founders of geomicrobiology & biogeochemistry, new scientific fields especially relevant to global climate & planetary biology.