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Greetings Dear Readers, Some of you may have met, and even snuggled with, Gus our first bookstore cat over the weekend. Sadly for us but lucky for Gu
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Greetings Dear Readers,
Some of you may have met, and even snuggled with, Gus our first bookstore cat over the weekend. Sadly for us but lucky for Gus, he was adopted yesterday and now Alexia has moved in to await the right home. We are now giving cats from the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland a temporary bookstore home so we can help these sweet felines find new families. So come say hi to Alexia - she has lots to say!
And, again, in honor of National Poetry Month and this week's Meet the Author event with Betsy Sholl, here is a taste of Betsy's talents from her new collection, Otherwise Unseeable... |
Alms
Small as a fly bump, the little voice
behind me calling Miss, Miss, wanted
a dollar, maybe for food as she said
in that voice of mist, so plaintive
and soft it could have come from inside
my own head, a notch below whisper,
voice of pocket lint, frayed button hole,
voice of God going gnat small. I shivered
and stopped. I looked for the source,
and there it was again, Miss, so slight
it wobbled moth-like on air,
up from a bare trash-filled recess
beside the post office steps. Yes,
I gave the dollar. But I had seven
in my wallet, so clearly that voice
wasn't small enough, still someone
else's sorrow, easy to brush off,
till later that night, in bed, I heard it
again, smaller-miss, miss, little fly strafe
troubling sleep-not a name at all,
but a failure, a lack, a lost chance. |
Otherwise Unseeable by Betsy Sholl
Winner of the 2014 Four Lakes Poetry Prize
Thursday, April 10th, 7:00pm at Longfellow Books
The poems in Otherwise Unseeable are full of music and surprise, in voices that are personal, invented, and historical, sometimes belonging to the poet and sometimes to others. Betsy Sholl probes what there is still to learn from the devastations of the twentieth century, and she explores the roots of human envy, greed, and generosity in lively, unexpected ways, enacting the kinds of arguments we have with ourselves: between control and relinquishment, grief and ecstasy, regret and acceptance, faith and skepticism. The end result is a book of verbal wrestling, a girl-Jacob mixing it up with one kind of angel or another, limping for sure, but still blessed.
“Otherwise Unseeable is faithful, as is all Sholl's work, to the contradictions we live with from day to day. These deeply earned, masterful poems take in the full range of human nature, looking unflinchingly at human evil and human suffering, while also acknowledging the ground-note of joy that waits to be heard in our daily lives. Sholl’s poems can be elegiac and mournful; they can riff and fly on the force and spirit of their own language as they chart a path between despair and hope, making seeable what is ‘otherwise unseeable,’ as they give us glimpses of a ‘kingdom’ which is always here and always to come.” -Robert Cording
Join us for an evening with former Maine poet laureate, Betsy Sholl and hear her read from her latest work of poetry and get your books signed. As always, Longfellow Books events are free and open to the public. |
Maine Poets Stuart Kestenbaum, Peter Harris & David Sloan
Thursday, April 17th, 7:00pm at Longfellow Books
Stuart Kestenbaum has been the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine since 1988. He is an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council and a recipient of the Distinguished Educator s Award from the James Renwick Alliance. He is the author of three collections of poems, Pilgrimage, House of Thanksgiving, and Prayers and Run-on Sentences.
Peter Harris, born in 1947, has taught at Colby College since 1974. His chapbook, Blue Hallelujahs, won the Maine chapbook competition in 1996. His work has appeared in, among other places, The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, and Green Mountains Review. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Red Cinder House, and the Tyron Guthrie Center in Ireland, and has been awarded a Martin Dibner Writing Fellowship.
Davis Sloan is a graduate of the University of Southern Maine s Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program and loves living in Maine, at the edge of the world, with his wife Christine where they both work in Maine's only Waldorf high school. He is the author of two books on teaching: Stages of Imagination: Working Dramatically with Adolescents, and Life Lessons: Reaching Teenagers through Literature. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Barefoot Review, The Broome Review, The Café Review, Carpe Articulum, Innisfree, The Naugatuck River Review, The Northern New England Review, Passager, The Prairie Wolf Press Review and Words and Images. He is a recipient of the 2012 Betsy Sholl and Maine Literary awards, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Join us for an evening with these three talented Maine poets as they share their latest works and, of course, sign your books! As always, Longfellow Books events are free and open to the public. |
Can't and Won't: Stories by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.00)
The stories in Lydia Davis’s fifth collection may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.
“Davis continues to hone her subtle and distinctive brand of storytelling. These poems, vignettes, thoughts, observations, and stories defy clear categorization; each one is an independent whole, but read together they strike a fine rhythm ... Davis’s bulletproof prose sends each story shooting off the page.” -Publishers Weekly
“Can’t and Won’t ... is evidence of a writer who is in total control of her own peculiar original voice; its pleasures are unexpected and manifold ... Davis...shares with Samuel Beckett a sharp playfulness and antipathy toward ornamentation, as well as a tendency to subvert dramatic expectations that is, in the aggregate, startlingly dramatic.” -Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special
Click here to read more and order now... |
Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf, $25.95)
From the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel Seating Arrangements, comes a gorgeously written, fiercely compelling glimpse into the demanding world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations. Combining a sweeping, operatic plot with subtly observed characters, Maggie Shipstead gives us a novel of stunning intensity and deft psychological nuance. Gripping, dramatic, and brilliantly conjured, Astonish Me confirms Shipstead’s range and ability and raises provocative questions about the nature of talent, the choices we must make in search of fulfillment, and how we square the yearning for comfort with the demands of art.
“Shipstead’s prose moves fluidly through settings as varied as a ballet rehearsal and a suburban backyard, and her characterizations are full. The story proceeds with a quiet insistence that is matched by the inevitability of its denouement.” -Publishers Weekly
“Etonnez-moi, Diaghilev famously challenged Jean Cocteau: ‘Astonish me.’ That’s a fair description of what Maggie Shipstead did to me on nearly every page of this impressive novel. Like its subject, the ballet, this book is intricately choreographed, technically demanding, yet seemingly relaxed, written in a prose of great emotional range and acuity. I will be paying close attention to Shipstead’s career from here on in.” -bestselling author, Jeffrey Eugenides
Click here to read more and order now... |
Family Life by Akhil Sharma (W. W. Norton & Co, $23.95)
In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.
"[D]eeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core … Family Life is devastating as it reveals how love becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of huge grief. But it also gives us beautiful, heart-stopping scenes where love in the Mishra family finds air and ease … [W]here Family Life really blazes is in its handling of Mrs. Mishra's grief. Sharma is compassionate but unflinching as he tells of this mother's persistent and desperate efforts to cope over the years." -The New York Times Book Review
“Family Life will cut your heart to pieces but it will also make you rejoice. The language, the humor, the sophistication, the empathy, the insight—all signal a new kind of literature about families and the bonds with which they hold us tight.” -Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure
Click here to read more and order now... |
The Plover by Brian Doyle (Thomas Dunne, $24.99)
Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to, and beloved of, no one. But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. Brian Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea - and a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life’s surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
"A rare and unusual book and a brilliant, mystical exploration of the human spirit." -Kirkus Reviews
“Brian Doyle has spun a great sea story, filled with apparitions, poetry, thrills, and wisdom. The sweet, buoyant joy under every sentence carried me along and had me cheering. I enjoyed this book enormously.” -Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia
Click here to read more and order now... |
The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon (Doubleday, $26.95)
A dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power of the printed word. In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange. Alena Graedon's debut novel, The Word Exchange is a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.
"[A] spectacular, ambitious debut ... Graedon deploys all the hallmarks of a futuristic thriller, but avoids derivative doomsday sci-fi shtick. Instead, her novel is rife with literary allusions and philosophical wormholes that aren't only decorative but integral to characters' abilities and limitations in communicating, and it succeeds precisely because it's as full of humanity as it is of mystery and intellectual prowess." -Publishers Weekly
“Imaginative, layered, and highly original, The Word Exchange is an engagingly creepy story of technology gone wrong and a clever meditation on the enduring mysteries of language and love.” -Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles
Click here to read more and order now... |
An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma (W. W. Norton & Co, $14.95)
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award
Akhil Sharma's characters, whether politicians, children, priests, or extortionists, are exactly rendered, full of pathos and absurdity. An Obedient Father takes the reader to a world that is both far away and as real as the headlines or the house across the street-and into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes.
"[A] cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived portrait of a corrupt man in a corrupt society. Mr. Sharma's novel weaves the national into the personal without a trace of the didactic. What is more astonishing is his success in joining the amiably picaresque aspects of the corruption -- India's and Ram's -- with the ghastly evil of its underside ... An Obedient Father is hard, as well as rich and enthralling." -The New York Times
Click here to read more and order now... |
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Random House, $16.00)
National Book Award Winner
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.
"In her debut, Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker staff writer Boo creates an intimate, unforgettable portrait of India's urban poor ... For more than three years, Boo lived among and learned from the residents, observing their struggles and quarrels, listening to their dreams and despair, recording it all. She came away with a detailed portrait of individuals daring to aspire but too often denied a chance--their lives viewed as an embarrassment to the modernized wealthy ... The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition." -Kirkus Reviews
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In Books We Trust,
Chris & Co. |
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