Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker (Viking, 2019). Zenobia July is starting a new life. She used to live in Arizona with her father; now she's in Maine with her aunts. She used to spend most of her time behind a computer screen, improving her impressive coding and hacking skills; now she's coming out of her shell and discovering a community of friends at Monarch Middle School. People used to tell her she was a boy; now she's able to live openly as the girl she always knew she was.
When someone anonymously posts hateful memes on her school's website, Zenobia knows she's the one with the abilities to solve the mystery, all while wrestling with the challenges of a new school, a new family, and coming to grips with presenting her true gender for the first time. Timely and touching, Zenobia July is, at its heart, a story about finding home. -- Publisher's blurb. Join NH author Lisa Bunker at Gibson's Bookstore on Tuesday, June 4th, 2019 at 6 pm. This event is presented in conjunction with Concord Pride!
The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train: Stories from a Yankee Writer's Notebook by Geoffrey Douglas (Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 2019). Dublin, New Hampshire's own Yankee Magazine has been in existence since 1935, providing readers with interesting stories and tidbits about New England food, living and travel. Author Geoffrey Douglas has been a Yankee Magazine contributor since the late 1990s. "There are seventeen stories here, reported and written over roughly twenty years. All of them unfold within the six states of New England, though they could as easily have happened anywhere. Several recount public events, widely reported: a Maine town turning against itself under the weight of an influx of Somalis, a fatal fire in Worcester MA, a Vermont reporter’s defense of marriage equality, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize. Others, the majority, are more private, the stories of men and women surviving, facing choices, living life: a small-time jockey scratching out an existence at county-fair racetracks; a local police chief’s terrible moral quandary; a Massachusetts poet’s love affair with his town. A few are essays, the most recent a mapping of a young man’s path toward suicide.
Some have won honors. A story on the nine-day life of a half-formed infant — and his parents’ struggle to understand — was a National Magazine award finalist; a piece detailing the double life of a Boston office worker was a selection for Best American Sports Stories. Several have been anthologized.
The best of these, taken together, make for a rich collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable. One or two would qualify as period pieces, their contexts already obsolete. If there is a single theme linking them all (other than the region), it is the simple, undressed grit of those involved."-- Publisher's blurb Join Geoffrey at the following local bookstores where he will be discussing his latest book: Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 6:00 pm at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord, NHSaturday, June 15, 2019 at 2:00 pm at Toadstool Bookstore in Keene, NH
The Den by Abi Maxwell (Knopf, 2019). NH author Abi Maxwell has a new book out this month, titled The Den, and it looks to be just as intriguing and mysterious as her previous debut novel, Lake People. A luminous, hypnotic story of youth, sex, and power that tells of two young women who find themselves ostracized from the same small New England community for the same reasons–though they are separated by 150 years.
Henrietta and Jane are fifteen and twelve, growing up in a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Their mother is a painter, lost in her art, their father a cook who’s raised them on magical tales about their land. When Henrietta becomes obsessed with a boy from town, Jane takes to trailing the young couple, spying on their trysts–until one night, Henrietta vanishes into the woods. Elspeth and Claire are sisters separated by an ocean–Elspeth’s pregnancy at seventeen meant she was quickly married and sent to America to avoid certain shame. But when she begins ingratiating herself to the town’s wealthy mill owner, a series of wrenching and violent events unfold, culminating in her disappearance. As Jane and Claire search in their own times for their missing sisters, they each come across a strange story about a family that is transformed into coyotes. But what does this myth mean? Are their sisters dead, destroyed by men and lust? Or, are they alive and thriving beyond the watchful eyes of their same small town? With echoes of The Scarlet Letter, Abi Maxwell gives us a transporting, layered tale of two women, living generations apart yet connected by place and longing, and condemned for the very same desires. -- Publisher's blurb. Abi Maxwell will be at Gibson's Bookstore on Tuesday, May 14th, 2019 at 6 pm.
The NH Dublin Committee has selected its nominees for the 2020 Dublin Literary Award. These are fictional works of high literary merit published in English during 2018. After reading and discussing many excellent books, the committee selected these titles for nomination:
A sweeping 19th-century adventure tale with a modern twist, told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old slave named Washington Black who becomes free while under the care of an eccentric explorer, inventor, naturalist, and abolitionist. What does it mean to be captive? What is true freedom? These are some of the questions posed in this tale of re-invention and redemption.
Virgil Wander is a delightful novel, written with warmth and charm. It’s full of strange events and quirky characters, but it also captures the way people in a small community care for each other, even as that community materially declines.
There There comes from a viewpoint we don’t often see represented in fiction: that of the "Urban Indian." Author Tommy Orange takes us inside the minds of a set of characters that in some ways could not be more different, but who are all trying to figure out how to balance connection to their cultural heritage with the demands of modern life. NOTE: Tommy Orange will be at The Music Hall in Portsmouth as part of Writers' on a New England Stage on Thursday, May 16, 2019.
"Posted by:" noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Stockbridge)
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