March Calendar of
Author Appearances and Events
All events are free and
open to the public and, unless otherwise noted, are held at The Odyssey.
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March 2010
|
Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
|
28
|
March 1 |
2 7:00 p.m.
Heidi Durrow,
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky |
3 11:00 a.m.
Story-time |
4 7:00 p.m.
Jedediah
Berry (The Manual of Detection) and Paul
Tremblay, (No Sleep Till Wonderland) |
5 |
6 |
|
7 |
8 7:00 p.m.
Howard Frank
Mosher, Walking to Gatlinburg
7:00 p.m.
The Odyssey
Crime Club discusses Dead Before Dying by Deon Meyer |
9 |
10 7:00 p.m.
Jerome
Charyn, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson |
11 |
12 |
13 11:00 a.m.
Story-time |
|
14 |
15 7:00 p.m.
The
Odyssey's Open Fiction Book Group discusses The Outcast
by Sadie Jones |
16 7:00 p.m.
Martha
Johnson, Why Not Do What You Love? |
17 11:00 a.m.
Story-time |
18 |
19 |
20 |
|
21 |
22 |
23 7:00 p.m.
Ellen
Fitzpatrick, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving
Nation |
24 7:00 p.m.
Dr. Lewis
Cohen, No Good Deed: A
Story of Medicine, Murder Accusations, and the Debate Over How We Die |
25 |
26 7:00 p.m.
"Moving
Toward Home: A Reading for Gaza" -- a benefit for the
Middle East Children's Alliance |
27 11:00 a.m.
Story-time |
|
28 11:00 a.m.
Sundays
with Shakespeare discusses Measure for Measure |
29 |
30 |
31 11:00 a.m.
Story-time
7:00 p.m.
Tom
Juravich, At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The
Degradation of Work in the 21st Century |
|
|
|
February
21
• Sunday
• 11:00
am
Sundays with Shakespeare
The monthly
Shakespeare discussion group, led by UMASS English professor Arthur F. Kinney,
will discuss The Winter's Tale. The month’s selection is discounted
20%.
February 23
• Tuesday •
7:00
pm
Joe Hill
Horns
Ignatius
Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next
morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns
growing from his temples. At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination,
the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a
lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams,
who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown
would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing
natural about the horns, which were all too real.
February 25
• Thursday •
7:00
pm
Christina Asquith
Sisters in War: A
Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq
Caught
up in a terrifying war, facing choices of life and death, two Iraqi sisters take
us into the hidden world of women’s lives under U.S. occupation. Through their
powerful story of love and betrayal, interwoven with the stories of a
Palestinian American women’s rights activist and a U.S. soldier, journalist
Christina Asquith explores one of the great untold sagas of the Iraq war: the
attempt to bring women’s rights to Iraq and the consequences for all those
involved.
“Christina Asquith’s description of
the wild incompetence–and dedication–of early American efforts in Iraq reads
like a great novel but with the added weight of history. And her focus on women,
both American and Iraqi, makes this book uniquely valuable among the many on
this long war. Asquith is a fine writer and, clearly, a very brave reporter. She
has filled in several crucial pieces of the Iraq puzzle, and done it
beautifully.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm
February 27
• Saturday • 11:00 am
Dr. Seuss Birthday
Party!
It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday, so
come celebrate with games and a special story-time at the Odyssey Bookshop.
March 2
• Tuesday •
7:00
pm
Heidi Durrow
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
An Odyssey Bookshop First Edition
Club Selection
This
debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a
black G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. With her
strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a
mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring
mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her
overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a
world that wants to see her as either black or white. In the tradition of
Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, here
is a portrait of a young girl— and society’s ideas of race, class, and
beauty. It is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript
addressing issues of social justice.
“When I first envisioned the Bellwether
Prize, I imagined all the best qualities of fiction; vivid language, compelling
characters, and clear moral vision. Novels just like this one, Heidi
Durrow’s breathless telling of a tale we’ve never heard before.
Haunting and lovely, pitch-perfect, this book could not be more timely.”
– Barbara Kingsolver
Children’s Story
Time
:
March 3 • Wednesday • 11:00
AM
March 13 • Saturday • 11:00 AM
March 17 • Wednesday • 11:00 AM
March 27 • Saturday • 11:00 AM
March 31 • Wednesday • 11:00 AM
Odyssey Bookseller and children’s buyer,
Rebecca Fabian, reads from her favorite children’s picture books.
March 4
• Thursday •
7:00
pm
Jedediah Berry (The Manual
of Detection) and Paul Tremblay (No Sleep Till Wonderland)
The
Manual of Detection:
Reminiscent of imaginative fiction from Jorge Luis Borges to Jasper Fforde yet
dazzlingly original, The Manual of Detection marks the debut of a
prodigious young talent. Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious
detective agency located in an unnamed city always slick with rain. When Travis
Sivart, the agency's most illustrious detective, is murdered, Unwin is suddenly
promoted and must embark on an utterly bizarre quest for the missing
investigator that leads him into the darkest corners of his soaking, somnolent
city.
“This debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes
Anderson were to adapt Kafka.” -- The New
Yorker
No
Sleep Till Wonderland: Mark Genevich
is stuck in a rut: his narcolepsy isn’t improving, his private-detective
business is barely scraping by, and his landlord mother is forcing him to attend
group therapy sessions. Desperate for companionship, Mark goes on a two-day
bender with a new acquaintance, Gus, who is slick and charismatic—and someone
Mark knows very little about. When Gus asks Mark to protect a friend who is
being stalked, Mark inexplicably finds himself in the middle of a murder
investigation and soon becomes the target of the police, a sue-happy lawyer, and
a violent local bouncer.
“Snappy prose, a brilliantly original detective and a cast of sharply drawn
low lifes—Paul Tremblay mixes it up with style. In the end, No Sleep till
Wonderland is much more than just a crime book—it’s all about the
narrator’s unique take on the world. Thoroughly recommended.” – Simon
Lewis, author of Bad Traffic
March 8
• Monday •
7:00
pm
Howard Frank Mosher
Walking to Gatlinburg
A
stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller, Walking to Gatlinburg is a
spellbinding story of survival, wilderness adventure, mystery, and love in the
time of war. Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting
17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his
brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But
first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a
mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.
“We are in the hands of a skilled storyteller, and every word matters. A
captivating story, and one that cries for a sequel.” – Kirkus,
starred review
March 8 •
Monday • 7:00 pm
The Odyssey Crime Club will discuss Chasing
Darkness by Robert Crais. During a fire evacuation of Laurel Canyon, the
charred body of a man Detective Elvis Cole helped to clear of murder charges is
found, along with an album of photos of seven brutally murdered young women. This
month’s selection is discounted 20%.
March 10
• Wednesday
• 7:00
pm
Jerome Charyn
The Secret Life of Emily
Dickinson
This event is being co-sponsored by
the Mount Holyoke College English Department.
An
astonishing novel that removes Emily Dickinson’s own mysterious mask and
reveals the passions and heartbreak of America’s greatest poet. What if the
old maid of Amherst wasn’t an old maid at all? Her older brother, Austin,
spoke of Emily as his “wild sister.” Jerome Charyn, continuing his
exploration of American history through fiction, has written a startling novel
about Emily Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations
that he learned from her letters and poems. Charyn has written an extraordinary
adventure that will disturb and delight.
“In his breathtaking high-wire act of
ventriloquism, Jerome Charyn pulls off the nearly impossible: in The Secret
Life of Emily Dickinson he imagines an Emily Dickinson of mischievousness,
brilliance, desire, and wit (all which she possessed) and then boldly sets her
amidst a throng of historical, fictional, and surprising characters just as hard
to forget as she is.” — Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The
Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
March
15 • Monday • 7:00
pm
The Odyssey Open Fiction Book Group will
discuss The Outcast by Sadie Jones. Jones tells the story of a boy
who refuses to accept the polite lies of a tightly knit community that rejects
love in favor of appearances. Written with nail-biting suspense, The Outcast
is an emotionally powerful testament to the powers of love and understanding.
The month’s
selection is discounted 20%.
March 16
• Tuesday •
7:00
pm
Martha Johnson
Why Not Do What You Love?
There are few gifts in life of
greater value than the opportunity to earn a living doing what you love to do.
One can hardly call such an activity work. Unfortunately, too few of us have
been shown how to find out soul’s purpose, our own unique calling. The title, Why
Not Do What You Love, is both a question and a compassionate exhortation to
all those pondering how to make their life and work matter – certainly to
themselves, and to those around them.
March 23
• Tuesday •
7:00
pm
Ellen Fitzpatrick
Letters to Jackie:
Condolences from a Grieving Nation
It
is perhaps the most memorable event of the twentieth century, a moment that left
a family and a nation mourning, one that many Americans recall as their first
historical memory--the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within seven
weeks of the President's death, Jacqueline Kennedy received more than 800,000
condolence letters. Two years later, the volume of correspondence would exceed
1.5 million letters. For the next forty-six years, the letters would remain
essentially untouched. Now historian Ellen Fitzpatrick has selected
approximately 250 of these letters for inclusion in Letters to Jackie, a
remarkable human record that perfectly preserves the heart-wrenching grief and
soul searching of the nation in a time of crisis. Capturing the extraordinary
eloquence of so-called ordinary Americans across generations, regions, race,
political leanings, and religion--in messages written on elegant stationery,
scraps of paper, in pencil, type, ink smudged by tears, and in barely legible
handwriting--the letters capture what John F. Kennedy meant to the country, and
how his death for some divided American history into Before and After.
“A terrific, original, and important
work….Fitzpatrick provides a stunningly fresh look at the impact of JFK’s
assassination on the American people.” — Doris Kearns Goodwin
March 24
• Wednesday
• 7:00
pm
Dr. Lewis Cohen
No Good Deed: A
Story of Medicine, Murder Accusations, and the Debate Over How We Die
Accomplished physician and
researcher Dr. Lewis Cohen writes the untold story of two Massachusetts nurses,
their struggles with end of life care, and how they were accused of murdering a
patient. Captivating and powerful, No Good Deed explores what happens when
decisions about end of life issues and the purpose of modern medicine move from
the hospital to the courtroom to the church.
March
26
• Friday •
7:00
pm
Moving Toward Home: A Reading for
Gaza
A Benefit for the Middle East Children's Alliance
Eleven poets, including local
poet Martin Espada, will be reading poems to raise funds and awareness about the
current plight of the people, children especially, who suffering a collective
political punishment in Gaza. That evening, Moving Towards Home
will be raising funds for the Middle East Children's Alliance (www.mecaforpeace.org).
March
28
• Sunday
• 11:00
am
Sundays with Shakespeare
The monthly
Shakespeare discussion group, led by UMASS English professor Arthur F. Kinney,
will discuss Measure for Measure. The month’s selection is discounted
20%.
March 31
• Wednesday
•
7:00
pm
Tom Juravich
At the Altar of the Bottom
Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century
Based on extensive interviews with
workers in four different industries, this book takes us behind the statistics
of the economic collapse and into the lives of Americans who are struggling to
make ends meet and support their families. Tom Juravich combines oral history
with social and economic analysis to provide a vivid account of the multiple
challenges presented in today’s workplaces.
“This is a beautifully written,
compelling portrait of four groups of Massachusetts workers. Juravich
convincingly argues that their plight is tied to corporate decision-making
processes that—whatever their own internal logic—make no sense for the
society they so deeply affect, and are often counterproductive in their impact
on worker productivity and efficiency. . . . The author is a gifted interviewer
and his narrative lifts up the voices of workers themselves.” -- Ruth
Milkman, author of
L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement