• Monday, October 3rd at 7:00pm (Talk)

Tom Grace, author of the recently published Kent State: Death & Dissent in the Long Sixties, will talk about the shootings at Kent State University 46 years ago.   He will be joined in discussion by local author & professor Chris Appy.   Appy is author, most recently, of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War & Our National Identity.   Co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press.

• Wednesday, October 5th at 8:00pm (Poetry reading)

Amherst College visiting lecturer Kirun Kapur will read from her recent, award-winning, collection of poetry, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist.   Her work was awarded the 2012 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry.   In 2015, NBCNews named her to their list of Asian-American Poets to Watch.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, October 6th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of University of Massachusetts Management Professor Anurag Sharma’s new book, Book of Value: The Fine Art of Investing Wisely.

• Tuesday, October 11th at 4:00pm - 5:00pm (Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of a new book by Annie Rogers, Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis & the Enigma of Language.   Rogers teaches at Hampshire College, is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalist, & is author of A Shining Affliction : A Story of Harm & Healing in Psychotherapy & The Unsayable: Understanding the Hidden Language of Trauma .

• Wednesday, October 12th at 8:00pm (Reading)

Amherst College visiting writer Naomi Jackson will read from her recent novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award & the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction & long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize & the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.  It was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association & selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce & Indies Next List programs.   Co-sponsored by the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.

• Thursday, October 13th at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Discussion)

Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.   Feel free to bring your lunch.   Amherst Books will provide coffee & water.   There is a 10% discount on the book until the end of the month.   All are welcome.   (This discussion will be reprised on Tuesday, October 25th.)

• Thursday, October 13th at 4:00pm (Talk)

Dennis Childs will talk in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall, UMass, Amherst, about his recent book, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary.   Childs is associate professor of African American literature & an affiliate faculty member of the department of ethnic studies & critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego.   For more information go to the UMass Calendar.

• Friday, October 14th at 1:00pm (Reading)

Novelist, painter, essayist, & poet, Clarence Major, will read from his recent collection of fiction, Chicago Heat.   Major has won numerous awards & grants & was awarded the “2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.   (Please note this new, correct, time.)

• Monday, October 17th at 4:30pm (Talk)

Talitha LeFlouria will talk in the Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall, UMass, Amherst, about her award-winning book, Chained in Silence: Black Women & Convict Labor in the New South.   For more information go to the UMass Calendar.

• Tuesday, October 18th at 6:00pm (Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of a new book co-written (with Andrew Eagle) by Amherst’s own Tulip Chowdhury.   Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi immigrant, novelist, poet, columnist & former teacher.   Chowdhury will be providing refreshments!   And there will be music!

• Wednesday, October 19th at 5:00pm (Book launch party)

We’re celebrating the publication of a new book by Audrey Altstadt—The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-40.   Altstadt, who teaches in the History Department at UMass, argues that Soviet policies in creating national republics, such as Azerbaijan, were a form of nationalism.   Please join us!

• Thursday, October 20th at 7:00pm (Book launch party)

A psychologist in private practice here in Amherst, Patricia Everett will talk about her new book, Corresponding Lives: Mabel Dodge Luhan, A. A. Brill, & the Psychoanalytic Adventure in America, followed by a dramatic reading from the correspondence.   Everett is also author of A History Of Having A Great Many Times Not Continued To Be Friends: The Correspondence Between Mabel Dodge & Gertrude Stein, 1911-1934.

• Sunday, October 23rd at 3:00pm (Poetry reading)

jubilat/Jones Reading Series at the Jones Library, Amherst.   Poets Camille Rankine & Tyehimba Jess will read.   Meet the poets at an informal Q & A session that follows the reading.     For more information go to the jubilat Event page.

• Monday, October 24th at 12:10pm - 1:00pm (Noontime Book Discussion)

Michael Greenebaum will lead a discussion of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.   Feel free to bring your lunch.   Amherst Books will provide coffee & water.   There is a 10% discount on the book until the end of the month.   All are welcome.   (This discussion is a repeat of one from Thursday, October 13th.)

• Monday, October 24th at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Jack Christian & Liana Quill will read from their new collections of poetry.

• Tuesday, October 25th at 4:00pm (Talk)

19th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Symposium at the Robert Crown Center, Hampshire College, Amherst.   Naomi Murakawa & Khalil G. Muhammad will talk about “Life in a Penal Democracy: Race, Policing, & the Limits of Liberal Reform.”   For more information go to the Hampshire College Eqbal Ahmad Symposium page.

• Tuesday, October 25th at 5:30pm (Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of two new books by UMass English professor TreaAndrea Russworm—her own Blackness Is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, & the Problem of Recognition, & a co-edited one, From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry.   Russworm’s areas of interest include video games & new media, digital cultural studies, African American popular culture, digital humanities, comic books & visual representation, & postmodern and psychoanalytic theories.

• Wednesday, October 26th at 7:00pm (Talk & book launch party)

Jonathan Westphal will talk about his new book, The Mind-Body Problem.   Revisiting solutions that have been given to the problem from Descartes to Kripke, Westphal offers his own neutral monist solution.   Westphal is Permanent Member of the Senior Common Room at University College, Oxford, has taught at Amherst & Hampshire Colleges, & been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich.

• Thursday, October 27th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor of English & Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute here at the University of Massachusetts, will read from his new memoir, The Birthmark.   Clingman, who grew up in South Africa, was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye.   The operation failed, & the birthmark returned, but in somewhat altered form.   In his book, Clingman takes the fact of that mark—its appearance, disappearance & return—as a guiding motif of memory.   This is how we remember the worlds we are born into, how they become a set of images in the mind, surfacing & resurfacing across time & space.   South Africa under apartheid was itself governed by the markings of birth—the accidents of color, race, & skin.