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The Odyssey Bookshop |
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Order Books Here:
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The Odyssey Bookshop |
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Order Books Here:
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Pictures of recent events
The Odyssey Bookshop is one of five independent
bookstores participating in WAMC's Roundtable on Tuesday mornings,
just after the 10:00 news. People from the Odyssey will be on about once a
month, talking about our favorite books. The Odyssey Bookshop 413-534-7307 email odysseybks@aol.com
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Late January | February 2012 Calendar of A change regarding the cost of attending readings at the Odyssey Starting October 5, 2011, we will follow the lead of many bookstores throughout the country and initiate a charge for attending most adult author events at the Odyssey. The cost will be a $5.00 ticket, Event Bucks, which will allow you into the event and are redeemable for merchandise in the store. It can be used to purchase the book that is being promoted, or anything else at the Odyssey, either that day or on a future visit. Thank you for your continued support. We welcome your comments. Email us with questions, comments, or concerns here. Please call The Odyssey
at 534-7307 or email us to reserve a place for an event. (If emailing,
please give us your phone number.) If we have your name and telephone
number, we'll be able to call you with last-minute cancellations or
changes. Click on an event in the
calendar for details. Late January | February 2012
All Scheduled Events
Naomi Benaron will read and discuss her debut novel Running the Rift. Winner of the Bellwether Prize, it follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted Rwandan boy, from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life, a 10-year span in which his country is undone by the Hutu-Tutsi tensions. "Benaron accomplishes the improbable feat of wringing genuine loveliness from unspeakable horror . . . It is a testament to Benaron’s skill that a novel about genocide . . . conveys so profoundly the joys of family, friendship, and community." - Publishers Weekly, in a starred review "An auspicious debut . . . Having worked extensively with genocide survivor groups in Rwanda, Benaron clearly acquired a very lucid sense of her characters’ lives and of the horrors they endured. Her story tells, with compelling clarity, of Rwandan Tutsi youth, Jean Patrick Nkuba--who dreams of becoming Rwanda’s first Olympic medalist. It’s a dream he must postpone for more than a decade as the internecine savagery, Hutu vs. Tutsi, slaughters millions and derails the lives of countless others. While it would be counterintuitive to pronounce this a winning, feel-good story, there is something to be said for hope restored. And Naomi Benaron’s characters say it well." - The Daily Beast
The acclaimed author of Are We Rome? brings his highly praised blend of deep research, colorful travelogue, and insightful political analysis to a new history of the Inquisition. Mr. Cullen Murphy, editor of Vanity Fair and former editor of Yankee Magazine will read and discuss his latest history God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Some think of the Inquisition as a holy war fought in the Middle Ages. But, as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new book, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, he traces the Inquisition and its legacy. "Cullen Murphy’s account of the Inquisition is a dark but riveting tale, told with luminous grace. The Inquisition, he shows us, represents more than a historical episode of religious persecution. The drive to root out heresy and sin, once and for all, is emblematic of the modern age and a persisting danger in our time." - Michael J. Sandel, author of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
For all those with Irish lineage Robert Kanigel will be at the Odyssey Bookshop to read and discuss his history of Great Blasket island, On an Irish Island. It is a love letter to a vanished way of life in which Kanigel tells the story of the Great Blasket, a wildly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, renowned during the early twentieth century for the rich communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke. With the Irish language vanishing all through the rest of Ireland, the Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars and writers drawn there during the Gaelic renaissance and the scene for a memorable clash of cultures between modern life and an older, sometimes sweeter world slipping away. Kanigel is the author of six previous books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Grady-Stack Award for science writing. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, and Psychology Today.
The Journal of Best Practices and Look Me in the Eye and Be Different authors David Finch and local favorite John Elder Robison will be here to discuss their collected works on living life as an adult with Asperger syndrome. Finch’s new book The Journal of Best Practices is a documentation of his attempts, after 5 years of marriage and a new diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, to be the husband he knows his patient wife Kristen deserves. Finch sets out to understand Asperger syndrome and learn to be a better husband— no easy task for a guy whose inability to express himself rivals his two-year-old daughter’s, who thinks his responsibility for laundry extends no further than throwing things in (or at) the hamper, and whose autism-spectrum condition makes seeing his wife’s point of view a near impossibility. Nevertheless, David devotes himself to improving his marriage with an endearing yet hilarious zeal that involves excessive note-taking, performance reviews, and most of all, The Journal of Best Practices: a collection of hundreds of maxims and hard-won epiphanies that result from self-reflection both comic and painful.
Tzivia Gover, educator and author, will read and discuss her new book Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House. This memoir is a description of her experiences teaching teenage parents at The Care Center in Holyoke. Drawing on her knowledge of poetry and interpersonal relations, this is a fascinating exploration of the legacy of Mrs. Elizabeth Towne, a well off Holyoke resident, and the young women who are working hard in her former home to better their lives and the lives of their children. "Tzivia Gover tells us that according to the educator, Paulo Freire, ‘It is impossible to teach without the courage to love.’ In this beautifully written memoir, Gover musters up the courage to love her students despite the often difficult differences between them. By having the pregnant and parenting teens in her classroom learn to read, write, and recite poetry, Gover exposes her students to a whole new world. Upon reading their poetry, Gover is exposed to a whole new world as well. Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House is a testimony to the power of poetry. Reading it will enrich your life." – Lesléa Newman, former Poet Laureate of Northampton 2008-2010
Margot Livesey will read and discuss her new novel The Flight of Gemma Hardy. Set in Scotland and Iceland in the 1950s and ‘60s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a captivating homage to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, is a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original but is destined to become a classic all its own. After the death of her widowed father Gemma receives a scholarship to a private school that she believes will save her from the unwelcome existence she’s had at her relatives’ home in Scotland. However, at Claypoole she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant. To Gemma’s delight, the school goes bankrupt, and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. The remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma’s charge. Even before their first meeting, Gemma is, like everyone on the island, intrigued by Mr. Sinclair. Rich by Gemma’s standards, single, flying in from London when he pleases, Hugh Sinclair fills the house with life. Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, said, "The fabulous Margot Livesey has written a book steeped in remote landscapes, secret histories, and great love. Orphan Gemma is a modern day Jane Eyre, thoroughly engaging and bracingly unsentimental. The prose is meticulous, the tale transporting. Trust me, you will love this book."
Jake's grandfather, Billy, hears the talk of birds, is 88 years old, and is going to live forever. Even when Billy gets sick, Jake knows that everything will go on as always. But there's one thing Billy wants: to rebuild the sod house where he grew up. Can Jake give him this one special thing? From beloved author Patricia MacLachlan comes a poignant story about what we do for the ones we love, and how the bonds that hold us together also allow us to let each other go. This beautiful middle grade novel received starred reviews from both Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. For grades 2 to 5. This event is free.
Macbeth will be discussed by the Shakespeare Club led by University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Arthur Kinney. The play is available in the store.
The Open Fiction Book Group will discuss
This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon by Linda McCullough Moore in a discussion led by author Ellen
Meeropol. This
group is accepting new members so feel free to start your new year with a new
literary activity. The book is in the store now and is 20% off for Book Group
members.
Translator and author Joseph Donohue and acclaimed illustrator Barry Moser will present and discuss their collaboration to translate and illustrate Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé. Donohue’s new translation of the horrific New Testament story has recast Wilde’s shockingly radical drama in the natural idiomatic language of our own day. Presenting a colloquial and spare American English version of Wilde’s consciously stylized French, Donohue’s approach gives full value to the Irish author’s dark ruminations on evil and perversity in a world on the brink of a new, unsettling Christian dispensation. "Donohue has set himself the task of rendering Wilde’s French tragedy in an English translation that could be performed on stage today. His work reads smoothly, and he’s breathed life back into the play... The ominous Moser engravings also establish the time and place mercifully free of a single Beardsley peacock feather." – Shelf Awareness
Former U.S. Poet Laureate William Jay Smith will read and discuss his non-fiction work My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams was one of the most acclaimed, popular, and controversial American playwrights of the twentieth century. The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are all considered classics of modern theatre, and their characters and situations are iconic representations of the postwar South. My Friend Tom is at once Smith’s critical analysis of Williams’s early work in poetry and drama, a brief biography of Williams during his development stages as a writer, and a moving meditation on his friend’s career from Williams’s early failures and ambiguities to fame and notoriety. My Friend Tom is "especially valuable for the early chapters on the youthful, pre-fame Williams, but in its entirety a tender portrait that will appeal to scholars and fans alike." - Kirkus Reviews
Journalist Deborah Scroggins will read and discuss her new history Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayanna Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui. A riveting look at militant Islam, Muslim women’s rights, and the war on terror—brought into focus through two lives on opposite sides: activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and religious extremist Aafia Siddiqui. Deborah Scroggins is the author of Emma’s War, which was translated into ten languages and won the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize. Scroggins has written for The Sunday Times Magazine, The Nation, Vogue, Granta, and many other publications, and she won two Overseas Press Club awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as a foreign correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Scroggins’ research is wide-ranging and impeccable, and she keeps readers on the edge of their seats with her compelling prose. If we can understand Siddiqui and Ali, then we will have a better chance of understanding the war on terror." – Booklist
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| For reservations please call 413-534-7307 or email odysseynews@aol.com |
