• Tuesday, May 2nd at 6:00pm(Award)

Cammie McGovern & Arthur Kinney will receive the Jones Library’s fourth annual Samuel Minot Jones Award (the “Sammy”) for Literary Achievement at the Stirn Auditorium, Amherst College, Amherst.   The event doubles as a part of a capital investment campaign for the Jones Library.   For more information, go here.

• Thursday, May 4th at 4:30pm(Book launch party)

Join University of Massachusetts professor Daniel Sack & some of his contributors, including Amherst College professor Chris Grobe, in celebrating the publication of a new book: Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, a collection of hypothetical performances written by nearly one hundred leading theorists & artists of the contemporary stage.   The dramatic fragments, prose poems, & microfictions describe imaginary events that put theory itself onstage.   Each no longer than a page, & accompanied by a reflective gloss, these texts consider what might be possible & impossible in the theatre.

• Tuesday, May 9th at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Discussion)

Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.   Amherst Books’ Noontime Book Group is a book group without fixed membership.   If you would like to chat about a book join us for that month.   If you can, purchase your copy from Amherst Books with a 10% discount.   The group meets on the second Tuesday of every month.

• Tuesday, May 9th at 7:00pm (Panel discussion)

“Political Resistance & the Arts, Locally & Globally”   As part of the “UMass Press Reads @ the Jones Library” series, Jim Smethurst, editor of SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Reader, will facilitate a conversation at the Jones Library, Amherst, about how the arts have been used in the past to combat fascism, racism, sexism & how those strategies are relevant today.   Panelists are Chris Vials, author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, & the Fight against Fascism in the United States; Lorraine Elena Roses, author of Black Bostonians & the Politics of Culture, 1920–1940; & Stephen Clingman, author of Birthmark, A memoir of growing up in South Africa.

• Tuesday, May 16th at 7:00pm (Panel discussion)

“Science, Scientists, & Resistance”   As part of the “UMass Press Reads @ the Jones Library” series, Sam Redman, UMass Press Committee member & author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, will facilitate a conversation at the Jones Library, Amherst, about how scientists have used their discoveries to counteract political intimidation & raise public awareness about the important consequences of their discoveries—especially concerning the environment, nuclear arms, & climate change.   Panelists include: Paul Rubinson, author of Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, & Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America; Banu Subramanian, UMass Press Committee member & author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation & the Politics of Diversity; & Sigrid Schmalzer, author of the forthcoming Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists.

• Tuesday, May 23rd at 7:00pm (Talk)

Local author & poet Sharon Dunn will talk about her new memoir, Under a Dark Eye: A Family Story.   In it she explores the forces—of family, society & history—that shaped her parents’ inner & outer lives.   She began wanting to answer a single question: what made her father into the complex unempathic loner she knew?   Dunn uses photographs, letters, journal entries, dreams, memories, & more, to take us on a journey from nineteenth century immigration, to the Great Depression, World War II, women in medicine, & finally her early family life on the grounds of the state mental hospital in Concord, NH—piecing together a compassionate vision of her disappointed entrepreneur father & her mother, a practicing psychiatrist.

• Wednesday, May 24th at 7:00pm (Talk)

In the first full biography of Hemingway in fifteen years, & the first one to be written by a woman, Mary Dearborn draws on fresh sources, including the writer’s complete FBI file, KGB archives, as well as papers left by his sister, mother, & Key West mistress.   Dearborn’s biographies of Norman Mailer, Peggy Guggenheim, Henry Miller, & Louise Bryant have illuminated the lives of some of the most complex & influential figures of modern culture.  In her new book, Ernest Hemingway A Biography, she traces Hemingway through his youth, his early work in journalism, his adventures, wives, & personal demons—alcohol, manic depression, & brain injuries—all of which she believes eventually led to his suicide.   Despite the challenges, Dearborn says, Hemingway changed the way we use language & even the way we think.