Offerings from the deep summer
New England Literary News
Dear all, good morning, hello, in the fireworked heatwaved morning-after. Your heat-stunned correspondent is going to honor the extended weekend and take a quick break from the literary news, and I’ll be back to you next weekend, with a few tiny tidbits here before I go, and the hopes that you’re feeling the ease of the heatdome’s dissolve from above us, and can be outside for a bit, the day lilies, sunlight through trees, a walk along a river. Relief comes in a lot of different forms. Thank you as always for being here.
Art auction for Archipelago’s Elsewhere Editions
This strays from New England, but thinking more broadly about the United States of America, and the importance of translated literature being available in our reading culture — Archipelago Books is a nonprofit press that publishes works in translation from around the world. I have Archipelago to thank for my introduction to Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hanne Ørstavik, Antoine Volodine, and Scholastique Mukasonga, among others. Right now they’re running their annual art auction to support Elsewhere Editions, their international children’s imprint. You can bid on artwork by Anne Carson, Renee Gladman, Mala Iqbal, a bunch of others. The art is cool, the cause is cool, and you have until 8 pm this evening, July 5, to make a bid.
Free ice cream for your book donation
If you’re up in Maine, St. George Pizza in Warren is opening Upstairs Books, a used bookstore above the pizza shop, and they’re looking for help filling the shelves. They’re looking particularly for cookbooks and food-related books, but welcome all genres. And right now, if you make a book donation, you’ll get a free soft serve ice cream cone. A portion of the profits from Upstairs Books will go to the Warren Public Library to support their programming.
Summer issue reading for House House Magazine
And if you’re in the Boston area, this coming Friday, July 10, Harvard’s new House House Magazine is hosting a reading for its summer issue. Readers include poet, New Yorker poetry critic, and Bernie Sanders biographer Dan Chiasson; poet, teacher, and managing editor of Ploughshares Rachel Dillon; and me. Come out. Say hello. I’d love to see you. A deep-summer reading to celebrate this magazine. That’s Friday, July 10 at 7 pm at the Barker Center at Harvard, 12 Quincy Street, in Cambridge. Keep track of House House on Instagram.
More to come and here’s to all the peaches and cherries and swims and good books in the meantime. And with my gratitude to you for being part of this, for helping the health of the region’s literary scene. Please, if you can, help me keep this work going with a paid subscription.
I'd love to attend this reading! Alas, will probably be with the lemmings on the highway. We'll see.
The photo of the kitchen on the island warms my heart!