Feb
26
6:30 PM18:30
Author Series

Wonderland by Nicole Treska

Start your spring season early on February 26th by coming out to hear Nicole Treska, author of her debut memoir  Wonderland set in Boston and reminding us of so many places we know and love. 

Nicole Treska was born to a family of gangsters. In the 1970s, during Boston’s mob wars, her grandfather’s diner was an unofficial headquarters for Whitey Bulger and other members of the Winter Hill Gang. Nicole’s father was also an associate of the gang: there was talk that, before Nicole could walk, her stroller was used as a decoy to sell drugs. In 1985, her father was arrested and tried—sentenced to two years in prison for federal drug trafficking.

Wanting to offer a better life to her children, Nicole’s mother moved her and her sister out of Boston. As an adult, Nicole strove to separate herself from her past, establishing a career as a writer and professor in New York City. But when she learns her father’s sister has passed away, she returns to her hometown and reunites with her dad—now stooped and struggling to walk on a bad knee. As she gets reacquainted with him and the old neighborhood, Nicole is forced to reconcile with her harrowing childhood and its lingering impact.

Reviews

“Treska ponders the lifelong imprints of class and community in this touching memoir.” –The New York Times Book Review

“This winning debut memoir… amounts to an arresting and compassionate self-portrait.” —Publisher's Weekly
“A poignantly affecting memoir about surviving and thriving.” —Kirkus


“A powerful, poetic memoir that brilliantly blends a history of Boston and its surrounding areas with the history of a fascinating—and at times functional—family. A swaggering storyteller of the highest degree, Nicole Treska will have your heart breaking on one page, and your eyes filling with tears of laughter on the next. Filled with hardscrabble characters and hard-earned lessons, here is a magnificent tale that is as New England as it gets.” —Isaac Fitzgerald,  New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

A “compelling portrait” (Safiya Sinclair, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of How to Say Babylon) “written with urgency, vulnerability, and compassion” (Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter), “Wonderland masterfully explores and elucidates the line between helping family and hurting ourselves.” 

Nicole Treska’s short fiction has appeared in New YorkTyrant magazine,Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and then some. She lives in Harlem with her husband, James, and their three-legged dog, Nadine.

Author Talk Specifics

When: 2/26/25 at 6:30pm, refreshments + book signings at 7:30pm

Where: Union Church Connection Room

485 Columbus Ave

Books for sale by Parkside Books

Free to All.  Come in person or attend virtually via Zoom

 TO CONNECT VIA ZOOM:

Email info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org to receive the ZOOM info.

FOSEL subscribers will receive the ZOOM link in our Mailchimp newsletter just before the event.


 
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Mar
26
6:30 PM18:30
Author Series

EDEN UNDONE BY ABBOTT KAHLER

Join us on March 26th for an exciting interview of Abbott Kahler (formerly known as Karen Abbott*) who writes both fiction and nonfiction.  Her earlier nonfiction works include Ghosts of Eden Park, Liar Temptress Soldier Spy, American Rose, and Sin in the Second City. 

 

About Eden Undone
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.

As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian Baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The Baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists.
The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder. 

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

About Abbott Kahler

Abbott Kahler (formerly Karen Abbott) is the author of four New York Times bestselling works of narrative nonfiction. A search for an ancestor who went missing in 1905 led her to write Sin in the Second City, which tells the true story of two sisters who ran the world’s most famous brothel and the nationwide battle to shut them down. Her interest in Gypsy Rose Lee, the subject of American Rose, stems from stories her grandmother shared about Rose from the1930s and 40s. Liar Temptress Soldier Spy was inspired by a six-year stint in Atlanta, where the ghosts of the Civil War still seem omnipresent. The HBO show Boardwalk Empire introduced her to bootlegger George Remus, the subject of The Ghosts of Eden Park and a character much more fascinating than Al Capone. 

She was nearing the end of a draft for Eden Undone when she learned that the legendary Ron Howard was directing a movie on the very same subject. Titled EDEN, Howard’s movie—starring Sydney Sweeney as Margret Wittmer, Jude Law as Friedrich Ritter, and Ana de Armas as the Baroness—will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September.

Abbott’s books have featured as Indie Next picks, Amazon’s best books of the year, Library Journal’s best books of the year, and Smithsonian Magazine’s best history books of the year. She has also been a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, the Goodreads book award for history, and the Ohioana Book Awards, the second oldest state literary prize in the country.

She has written for newyorker.com, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications, and has appeared on the History Channel, CBS Sunday Morning, AMC’s "Making of the Mob,” the Discovery Channel, and other media outlets. Her books have been optioned for television and film, and her podcast about George Remus, REMUS: THE MAD BOOTLEG KING, is forthcoming from iHeartRadio.

Abbott is a native of Philadelphia, where she spent six years as a journalist, covering crime, advocating for abused women, and hanging out with mafia bosses and baseball wives. She lives in New York City and in Greenport, New York, where she’s convinced her little bungalow is haunted. She appreciates a good poker hand, an old bottle of wine, and the never-ending hunt for new stories to tell.​

*Read the strange story behind her name change here.  You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or sign up for her (monthly or so) Wicked History newsletter.  click here for her website

 

Author Talk Specifics

When: 3/26/25 at 6:30pm, refreshments + book signings at 7:30pm

Where: Union Church Connection Room

485 Columbus Ave

Books for sale by Parkside Books

Free to All.  Come in person or attend virtually via Zoom

TO CONNECT VIA ZOOM:

Email info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org to receive the ZOOM info.

FOSEL subscribers will receive the ZOOM link in our Mailchimp newsletter just before the event.

 

 
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Apr
23
6:30 PM18:30
Author Series

THE GUILT PILL BY SAUMYA DAVE

On April 23rd our third and final book/author event for the Spring series will feature Dr. Saumya Dave, writer, psychiatrist, and mental health advocate in a captivating conversation with FOSEL’s Sara DiVello about her latest novel which explores “What if women could get rid of their guilt?”


About The Guilt Pill

Maya Patel has it all—her own start-up, a sexy, doting husband, influencer status, and now, a new baby. Or does she? Because behind closed doors, Maya’s drowning. Her newborn’s taking a toll on her marriage, her best friend won’t return her calls, and her company’s hanging on by a thread. The worst part? It’s all her fault. If she could just be a better boss, mother, wife, daughter, friend… Maybe she wouldn’t feel so guilty all the time.

Enter: #Girlboss Liz Anderson, who introduces her to the “guilt pill,” an experimental supplement that erases female guilt. At first, it’s the perfect antidote to Maya’s self-blame and imposter syndrome, and she finally becomes the unapologetic woman she’s always wanted to be. But there’s a catch: for Maya to truly “have it all,” she needs to be ready to risk it all. And as Maya falls deeper and deeper down the pill’s guilt-free rabbit hole, her growing ruthlessness could threaten everything she’s built for herself—and the family she’s worked so hard to protect. 

Electric, taut, and sharply observed, The Guilt Pill is a feminist exploration of motherhood, race, ambition, and how the world treats women who dare to go after everything they want. 

Select Reviews

The Guilt Pill is a sharp, insightful, funny and deeply human meditation on motherhood and being your own person and where they intersect. Saumya Dave is one of my favorite writers and she has written her best novel yet. —Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me

The Guilt Pill is the answer to the age-old question of whether a woman can do it all—and whether she should. A powerful rallying cry, a juicy glimpse into startup and influencer culture, and a surprising, intimate portrait of a family strained to breaking by the weight on a new mother's shoulders. Saumya Dave has written a book that's as addictive as its untested supplement. You'll want to share it with everyone you know. —Katie Gutierrez, bestselling author of More Than You'll Ever Know 

The Guilt Pill is book club fiction at its finest, a story full of complicated characters you can’t help rooting for. An incisive, ominous, and ultimately hopeful take on the all-too-pervasive guilt that accompanies motherhood, this one is not to be missed. I can’t wait to read whatever Dave writes next. —Stephanie Wrobel, internationally bestselling author of The Hitchcock Hotel

A gripping and deeply empathetic portrayal of modern-day motherhood… The Guilt Pill will have readers thinking about Maya’s story long after they’ve turned the final page.  —Kirthana Ramisetti, author of GMA book club pick Dava Shastri's Last Day

The Guilt Pill is a brilliant meditation on modern-day motherhood and what happens when women are pushed beyond their limits. Saumya Dave masterfully explores the complexities and absurdities of early motherhood, confidently walking the line between satirical and all-too-real. The Guilt Pill is bold, sly, suspenseful, and bitingly funny. Everyone is going to be talking about this book. —Julia Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of The Writing Retreat

About Saumya Dave

Saumya Dave enjoys exploring the unique dynamics that exist in families. Her second novel, What a Happy Family, was published in June 2021 and a book club pick for Good Housekeeping Magazine, Emily Giffin, Spines and Vines, and Brown Girl Therapy.  Her debut novel, Well-Behaved Indian Women, was featured in The New York Times Book Review, ELLE, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and more. Saumya’s essays, articles, and poetry have been in outlets including The New York Times, ABC News, Refinery29, and HuffPost, among others.

Saumya has a passion for women’s mental health and wellness. She and her husband, Samir Sheth, founded thisisforHER, a nonprofit which uses art therapy to improve mental health awareness and education for women and girls in low- and middle-income countries. She is a practicing therapist, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai, where she teaches Narrative Medicine.

Saumya was born in India and grew up in Atlanta. In her seventh-grade journal, she wrote: “I will be a psychiatrist and writer someday”. She is a graduate of Georgia Tech and the Medical College of Georgia, where she was an inductee into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She completed her Psychiatry Residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, where she was a Chief Resident and an inductee into the AΩA Medical Honors Society. She completed a Psychoanalytic Fellowship with the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Author Talk Specifics

When: 4/23/25 at 6:30pm, refreshments + book signings at 7:30pm

Where: Union Church Connection Room

485 Columbus Ave

Books for sale by Parkside Books

Free to All.  Come in person or attend virtually via Zoom

TO CONNECT VIA ZOOM:

Email info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org to receive the ZOOM info.

FOSEL subscribers will receive the ZOOM link in our Mailchimp newsletter just before the event.


 
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Oct
8
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Daniel Barbarisi: Chasing the Thrill

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On Thursday October 7th, SEW will welcome Daniel Barbarisi, veteran journalist and author with over 15 years in newspaper journalism at The Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Wall Street Journal, and now The Athletic, where he is currently a senior editor. Barbarisi has covered crime, politics, news, and sports. He joined the staff of the Wall Street Journal in 2010, where he spent five years as the beat writer covering the New York Yankees. He left the WSJ at the end of 2015 to pursue his first book project, Dueling with Kings, and joined The Athletic in 2018. 

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Barbarisi will be sharing from his new book, Chasing the Thrill, which was released in May of 2021.  Chasing the Thrill is a full-throttle, first-person account of the treasure hunt created by eccentric millionaire art dealer –and, some would say, robber baron– Forrest Fenn, that became the stuff of contemporary legend. 
When Forrest Fenn was given a fatal cancer diagnosis, he came up with a bold plan: He would hide a chest full of jewels and gold in the wilderness, and publish a poem that would serve as a map leading to the treasure’s secret location.  But he didn’t die, and after hiding the treasure in 2010, Fenn instead presided over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune. 
 Barbarisi first learned of Fenn’s hunt in 2017, when a friend became consumed with decoding the poem and convinced Barbarisi to document his search. What began as an attempt to capture the inner workings of Fenn’s hunt quickly turned into a personal quest that led Barbarisi down a reckless and potentially dangerous path, one that found him embroiled in searcher conspiracies and matching wits with Fenn himself. Over the course of four chaotic years, several searchers would die, endless controversies would erupt, and one hunter would ultimately find the chest.  But the mystery didn’t end there.  Full of intrigue, danger, and break-neck action, Chasing the Thrill is a riveting tale of desire, obsession, and unbridled adventure. 

Barbarisi is a native of Rye Brook, NY.  He holds a bachelor's degree in history and political science from Tufts University and a Master of Public Affairs from Brown University. He and his wife, Amalie Benjamin, live in Boston. 

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 “Barbarisi tells the story so well that you should resist any form of peeking ahead and leave the matter in his capable hands.”
—Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post

“Barbarisi’s exploration of the who and how and why of those who hunted for the hidden treasure left by Forrest Fenn confronts fascinating questions about the sometimes indistinct realms of adventure and obsession.”
—The Boston Globe, Summer Reading 2021

“An engaging adventure story . . . A well-reported insider’s study on the engrossing and alarming fervor a search can inspire.”
—Kirkus

 
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Nov
10
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Sue Miller will read from her widely praised new work of fiction "Monogamy"

Acclaimed author Sue Miller will be hosted by Sara Divello as she returns to South End Writes on Tuesday, November 10 at 7:00 PM to read from her widely praised new work of fiction, Monogamy. In a laudatory reprise of the novel, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan described Miller as “one of our most emotionally profound and nuanced writers.” Miller will be introduced by her colleague, Lilly King, whose recent novel, Writers and Lovers, is on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2011, King was at the South End library to present an earlier novel, Father of the Rain.

Miller has a long and distinguished history with FOSEL’s South End Writes program, both as an author who presented several of her remarkable novels, The Lake Shore Limited in 2010 and The Arsonist just a few years ago, but also as someone who generously invited many of her literary colleagues to talk about their literary works at the South End library. Jack Beattie, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Hoffman, Edith Pearlman, Doug Bauer, Anita Shreve and many other of Miller’s literary friends and associates made their way to the tiny South End branch where they were warmly welcomed by enthusiastic Southenders, delighted to meet such luminaries right here in their ‘hood.’. The novelist, who lived in the South End for many years, currently resides in Cambridge.

Monogamy, also prominently featured in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review, is a “rich, complex book,” according to bestselling author Richard Russo, “an old-fashioned slow burn of a novel that allows readers to dream deeply.” It describes a Cambridge couple, photographer Annie and bookseller Graham, whose thirty-some year marriage has long been the envy of their friends and acquaintances. When Graham suddenly dies, Annie discovers that shortly before his death Graham had an impulsive, brief affair he was trying to end. She spirals into darkness wondering if she truly knew the man who loved her. Monogamy delves into the secrets families keep from one another, a mesmerizing work of fiction in which Miller reflects on the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. “A thoughtful and realistic portrait of those golden people who seem to have such enviable lives,” said Kirkus Review.

The author’s has ten previous novels that have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986) was more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts. Subsequent novels include three Book-of- the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Senator’s Wife. Her last one was The Arsonist. Her non-fiction book, The Story of My Father, was described as a “beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease.”

Miller was recently awarded a 2020 spot in the Writers-in-Residence program at The Mount, the Berkshire estate of author, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Her previous honors include Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. She was on the board of PEN’s American Center and chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among other places, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. She currently lives in Cambridge.


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Oct
6
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Dorothy Keeney - Annie McKay Boston's First School Nurse

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South End resident, Dorothy Keeney, will talk with FOSEL’s Yvette Jarreau at South End Writes via ZOOM on Tuesday, October 6 at 7:00 PM, about the history of Boston public school nurses, The Untold Story of Annie McKay and the Boston Public School Nurses, 1905-1988 (details below). Herself a retired public-school nurse, Keeney spent many years researching the subject, and wrote about it for, among other outlets, the Boston Union Teacher; the South End Historical Society Newsletter; and professional nurses’ publications. Keeney became the unofficial historian for the Boston School Nurses and was the former historian for the Massachusetts School Nurse Organization.

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The subject of Keeney’s book, Annie McKay, was appointed by the Boston School Committee in 1905 as the first public-school nurse in Boston and Massachusetts. She taught basic hygiene in, among other places, several South End schools, including the Quincy, Way Street and Andrews schools. After her first eight weeks on the job, McKay recorded 215 cases, made 576 home visits and helped more than 70 children obtain glasses. The experiment was considered such a success that the Boston School Committee hired 25 more nurses for Boston’s elementary schools and, within a short time, the state mandated school nurses throughout Massachusetts.

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McKay was born in 1867 in Ontario, Canada, and began her career as a school teacher but switched to nursing. She attended, among other places, the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary. She lived in Boston and worked with the Red Cross in Europe during WW I. For a while she lived at 1525 Washington Street in the South End, where a plaque commemorates her legacy. She died in Ontario in 1944.

Keeney, a longtime Massachusetts resident who received a masters degree in Health Care Administrationj from Framington State University, described the nurses’ struggle for pay equity and a five-day work week, and their transformation to professional status from the stereotypical profile of a doctor’s handmaiden. Today, she says, school nurses are the clinical health experts in the school, the health care providers for students and staff during the school day, and advocates for preventive care and health maintenance. 

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Lauren Francis - Sharma - Book of the Little Axe
Sep
22
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Lauren Francis - Sharma - Book of the Little Axe

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Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants, continues to explore the story of her Caribbean ancestors’ history in her new novel, Book of the Little Axe. She will be hosted on South End Writes via ZOOM on Tuesday, September 22, at 7:00 PM (details at the bottom of the page).

Her new work of fiction was preceded by the 2014 ‘Til the Well Runs Dry, a first novel that was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize. It won the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was also chosen as an O, The Oprah Magazine Summer Reading Pick and lauded by the New York Times, USA Today, Essence Magazine, and People Magazine among other publications. Inspired by her grandmother’s journey from Trinidad to the United States, Francis-Sharma’s debut novel was the subject of feature articles about her Caribbean ancestry in the Washington Post  and the Baltimore Sun in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

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The author’s short story, Demented, is featured in the anthology Us Against Alzheimer’s: Stories of Family Love and Faith, edited by Marita Golden. Before becoming a novelist, Francis-Sharma worked as a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney; currently, she is the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working space dedicated to both published and aspiring writers. She is also the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College and a MacDowell Fellow.

Lauren lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. with her husband and two children and “is always working on another book.”

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Stephen Kinzer and Christopher Lydon - How Our Presidential Election Could Reshape the World:
Sep
15
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Stephen Kinzer and Christopher Lydon - How Our Presidential Election Could Reshape the World:

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Award-winning foreign policy journalist, Stephen Kinzer, will return to the virtual version of South End Writes on Tuesday, September 15 at 7:00 PM via ZOOM with a talk titled: How Our Presidential Election Could Reshape the World. Kinzer will be introduced by Christopher Lydon, the erudite host of the WBUR radio show, Open Source.

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A Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, he is the author of a dozen books about foreign affairs. They include All the Shah’s Men (reportedly a go-to book for former Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry) and The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War.

Kinzer most recently presented, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, at the South End library in October 2019. He told the audience that although he had seen a lot in his life and career, in researching the book he was “shocked by what he found.” Kinzer is an Opinion Columnist at The Boston Globe and has been a South End resident since the 1970s, except for when he was New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Istanbul and Berlin. At the moment, Kinzer told FOSEL, he is doing something different from writing books: He’s reading them.

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Heidi Pitlor - Impersonation
Sep
8
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Heidi Pitlor - Impersonation

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Novelist Heidi Pitlor, for many years the series editor of The Best American Short Stories, will be on South End Writes via ZOOM, Tuesday, September 8, at 7:00 PM to talk about her newest work of fiction, Impersonation. “A smart behind-the-scenes tour of the murky world of publishing, politics, and the good people who get caught in the cross-fire,” says novelist Chris Castellani (Leading Men). “Pitlor’s voice is witty and brisk, bringing warmth and light to questions of identity, independence and, yes, intellectual property. Who owns your stories? How much are they worth?” declares the New York Times Book Review.

The author of two earlier novels, The Birthdays, a Boston Globe bestseller, and The Daylight Marriage, a crime thriller centered on a failed marriage, which was optioned for the movies. Pitlor is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Her other writings have been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, and the story collections It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. Heidi Pitlor lives outside Boston. 

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Alli Frank and Asha Youmans - Tiny Imperfections
Aug
25
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Alli Frank and Asha Youmans - Tiny Imperfections

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The bi-racial writing team of Alli Frank and Asha Youmans will join South End Writes on Tuesday, August 25 with their debut novel, Tiny Imperfections. Set in the  minefield of Kindergarten admissions in the San Francisco Bay Area, the writing team, former educators themselves, takes a withering look at it all through the eyes of three generations of Black women, themselves navigating the private-school shoals. Kirkus Review described it as a ‘fun, snappy read.’

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Josie Bordelon, director of admissions at San Francisco's most sought after private school, is determined to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter, Etta, from making the same mistakes she did. Another relative has her daughter’s back. And as admissions season heats up, Josie discovers that when it comes to matters of the heart--and the office--the biggest surprises lie closest to home.

The authors worked in education for more than twenty years. Good Housekeeping Magazine listed Tiny Imperfections as one of the 20 Best New Fiction Books of 2020 and Good Morning America declared it one of the Mother's Day in Quarantine Books to Buy.

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Caroline Leavitt - With or Without You
Aug
18
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

Caroline Leavitt - With or Without You

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New York Times bestselling writer, Caroline Leavitt, will talk with Sara DiVello about her new novel With or Without You, on South End Writes via ZOOM, Tuesday, August 18 at 7:00 PM.  With or Without You received a starred Kirkus Review. The Minneapolis StarTribune’ praised Leavitt’s “fearlessness with plot.” The novelist’s earlier novels include Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World.

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The novelist is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Fiction and the Goldenberg Fiction Prize. She was also a National Magazine Award Nominee in Personal Essay; a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Awards; and a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. She reviews books for The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and People, and has published essays and articles in numerous publications, including New York Magazine, Psychology Today, More, Redbook, and Parenting. Her novel, Cruel Beautiful World, an Indie Next Pick, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by BlogCritics and by The Pulpwood Queens. Pictures of You was named one of the Best Books of the year by Ihe San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, and Bookmarks. Kirkus Reviews listed as one of its top five books.

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L. Annette Binder - The Vanishing Sky
Aug
11
7:00 PM19:00
South End Writes

L. Annette Binder - The Vanishing Sky

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L. Annette Binder  will be back for South End Writes via ZOOM on August 11, 2020 to present her first novel of historical fiction, The Vanishing Sky. She will be joined in the conversation by Sandell Morse, the Maine-based award-winning author of The Spiral Shell: A French village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II. Binder first read at the South End library in October 2012 from her short-story collection, Rise, a 2011 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards. For Zoom information, please go to the bottom of this page.

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The author, a former attorney and a classics major, was born in Germany but raised and educated in Colorado where her parents moved when she was a child. Her novel is inspired by her family's experiences in World War II Germany. She knew that her father had spent time in the Hitler Youth but they never spoke of it. He died when she was sixteen. As a writer, she told South End Writes in 2012, she finds the seeds of her materials from "something I hear on the street," or "a blip in the newspapers," but that what drives her stories is "character."

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In The Vanishing Sky, Binder takes the reader back to a rural setting in Germany near the end of World War II, where Etta Huber and her two young sons have become entrapped by the brutally re-ordered world of the Third Reich. The elder, Max, returns from the Eastern Front, haunted by what he has seen. Georg, Etta’s younger son, is off at a camp run by the Hitler Youth, digging trenches as the Allied armies approach.

"…The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I've never seen it in fiction... Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn't one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty…," wrote Larry  Zuckerman for Historical Novels Review. Binder "uses Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a rural village, as a means of feeling her way back into the past, channeling the anguish and uncertainty of the final months of the fighting," said Alida Becker for the New York Times Book Review’s Summer Reading recommendations.

Binder has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review and others. 

TO JOIN THE MEETING VIA ZOOM:

 https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82665265376

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Saumya Dave - Well Behaved Indian Women
Jul
28
6:30 PM18:30
South End Writes

Saumya Dave - Well Behaved Indian Women

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Saumya Dave , a psychiatrist and mental health advocate, will present her debut novel, Well-behaved Indian Women, on Tuesday, July 28 at 6:30 PM, via ZOOM (details below).  As a writer, Dave explores the unique dynamics of immigrant families, and Well-Behaved Indian Women was inspired by the strong women who surrounded her.

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In the novel, three generations of women struggle to define themselves as they pursue their dreams. Simran Mehta has always felt harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it comes to her little "writing hobby." The mother, for her part, strived to create an easy life for her children in America while putting up with her husband's demanding family and the casual racism of her patients. Nandini’s mother, Mimi Kadakia, feels she failed her daughter in ways she'll never be able to fix­—or forget. As life begins to pull Nandini and Simran apart, Mimi is determined to be the bridge that keeps them connected, even as she carries her own secret burden.

Dave’s essays, articles, and poetry have been featured in The New York Times, ABC News, and Refinery 29, among other places. A practicing therapist, she’s the co-founder with her husband of thisisforHER, a nonprofit that uses art therapy to improve mental health awareness and education for women and girls in low- and middle-income countries. An Adjunct Professor at Mount Sinai, Dave lives in New York City with her family.

TO JOIN THE ZOOM MEETING;
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Meeting ID: 872 0106 3724
Password: 758483
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Meeting ID: 872 0106 3724
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Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcBDJ3svvR

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Lis Wiehl - Hunting the Unabomber,
Jul
21
6:30 PM18:30
South End Writes

Lis Wiehl - Hunting the Unabomber,

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Lis Wiehl was a Fox News legal analyst for 15 years and a reporter/legal analyst for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered, before that. She has come out with her second historical thriller in The Hunting Series, titled Hunting the Unabomber: The FBI, Ted Kaczynski, and the Capture of America’s Most Notorious Domestic Terrorist.

The first in the series, Hunting Charles Manson, co-written with Caitlin Rother, was based on a re-examination of the 50-year-old case with new interviews, reviews of original source materials and  dozens of parole hearing transcripts. Wiehl, a former Federal prosecutor, relied on those same research methods to take a fresh look at the search for Theodore Kaczynski, an effort rife with inter-agency law enforcement conflicts that was almost shut down by the 150-member FBI team on the case before a stroke of luck led to the arrest of the criminally insane math prodigy. By that time, Kaczynski had killed three people and maimed more than a dozen others with bombs sent in the mail to random individuals. Wiehl, who lives in New York, is a professor of law at the New York Law School, a private law school in Tribeca, NYC.

To join us on Tuesday, July 21, at 6:30 PM, please click on the Facebook link below:  https://www.facebook.com/FriendsoftheSouthEndLibrary

ZOOM info will be emailed to our subscribers.

To subscribe, email us at info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org.


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Martin Espada - Recent Work
Jul
14
6:30 PM18:30
South End Writes, Other Events

Martin Espada - Recent Work

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Before Martín Espada was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Republic of Poetry or, for that matter, before he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2018 for outstanding lifetime achievement and recognition of his contribution to poetry, he was a tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community. The experience barges through in a searing poem, Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge, from his forthcoming collection Floaters, due out in January 2021. And it did so again in his recent Op-Ed piece in The Boston Globe, linking racism to the devastation among the residents of Chelsea by the Covid-19 pandemic. Martin Espada is the featured speaker for South End Writes via Zoom on Tuesday, July 14, at 6:30 PM. He will read from the 2021 Floaters; the 2016 Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, winner of the 2017 Massachusetts Center for the Book Poetry Award; and his 2019 anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, featuring 93 poets, including Danielle Legros George, Richard Blanco and Donald Hall.

The poet will be introduced by South End State Rep., Jon Santiago.

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(Zoom contact information is at the bottom of this page).

Espada grew up in New York City, the son of Frank Espada, a documentary photographer and civil rights activist born in Puerto Rico. Now a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst., Martin Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, among them The Trouble Ball (2011),  Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). His many honors also include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, a 2018 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Espada was the first Latino recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, since it was founded more than three decades ago.

A 1998 book of essays and poems by Espada about social injustice, Zapada’s Disciple, was banned in Arizona and Texas. A new edition by Northwestern University Press won the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Award for Essay / Creative Nonfiction.

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To join the July 14 ZOOM meeting:

Topic: South End Writes hosts poet Martin Espada
Time: Jul 14, 2020 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82175584426?pwd=ZVZRTkdDKzhaSmIzaXVJZnpUS1hjZz09

Meeting ID: 821 7558 4426
Password: 141323
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Meeting ID: 821 7558 4426
Password: 141323
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbmMIZKFf

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Barbara Shapiro - The Collector's Apprentice
May
26
6:30 PM18:30
South End Writes

Barbara Shapiro - The Collector's Apprentice

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Barbara Shapiro, a New York Times bestselling author who has written several historical thrillers set in the art world and based on true events, will return to the South End Writes program via ZOOM on Tuesday, May 26, 6:30 PM, with her most recent work of fictionalized sleuthing, The Collector’s Apprentice. (Details of the ZOOM meeting are at the bottom of the page. )

Also known as B.A. Shapiro, the part-time South End resident has written seven novels,  including  The Muralist and The Art Forger. The latter novel of suspense, about the unsolved 1990 art theft of irreplaceable works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, won the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Boston Authors Society Award for Fiction.

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The Collector's Apprentice is inspired by the controversial story of Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation art collection, which the author crafted into a thriller that plays out in Paris and Philadelphia in the 1920s. It’s a tale about the lengths to which people will go for their obsession, whether art, money, love, or vengeance:  Nineteen-year-old Paulien Mertens finds herself in Paris—broke, disowned, and alone. In her native Belgium everyone, including her own family, believes she stole millions in a sophisticated con game perpetrated by her then-fiancé, George Everard. She creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman named Vivienne Gregsby, and sets out to recover her father’s art collection, prove her innocence—and exact revenge on George. She becomes the assistant to an eccentric American art collector, Edwin Bradley and helps him build an art museum near Philadelphia. Caught up in the Parisian world of post-Impressionists and expatriates—including Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse, with whom Vivienne becomes romantically entwined, she is eventually arrested for the alleged murder of Bradley. Tantalizing scenes from the trial are cleverly placed throughout the narrative.

Suspense writer, Barbara Shapiro, featured at the South End Writes program in 2013, signing copies of The Art Forger.

Suspense writer, Barbara Shapiro, featured at the South End Writes program in 2013, signing copies of The Art Forger.

Several years ago, Shapiro talked about The Art Forger before a standing-room-only crowd at the South End library. The author recounted how she became intimately familiar with every aspect of the tragic art theft as she transformed the particulars of the case into crime fiction. When she was asked what she thought had happened to the artworks, she said she had come to believe they had been destroyed.

Her earlier suspense novels include The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless and Shattered Echoes. The novelist also wrote four screenplays, Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline and Shattered Echoes.

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 847 8951 3448
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Dial by your location
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Meeting ID: 847 8951 3448
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdj5GIelzM


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Laura Zigman - Separation Anxiety
Apr
14
6:30 PM18:30
South End Writes

Laura Zigman - Separation Anxiety

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Author and yoga teacher, Sara DiVello, who is hosting South End Writes for FOSEL, has generously arranged to present our booked authors remotely. She will bring you our popular series via Zoom.

After a hiatus of 14 years, novelist Laura Zigman just came out with her latest work of fiction, Separation Anxiety, which The Boston Globe hailed as a “triumphant return.” Its main character, Judy, a children’s book author going through a rough stretch in her life, finds her 13-year-old son’s baby sling while sorting through stuff in the basement. She puts her dog, Charlotte, inside, and finds it oddly comforting. She decides to keep carrying the dog around for a while.

The New York Times, in a review titled Don’t Mind Me While I Wear My Dog, says Zigman’s latest work of semi-autobiographical fiction “has brought her ur-self firmly into middle age.” The Boston Globe reviewer reports the book captures “an astonishing level of empathy.” “By the time you get into your 40s and beyond, you’re dealing with loss,” Zigman is quoted as saying. “You have a lot of empathy for the people who are helping you through it, and for the people you know who are going through it themselves.”

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Laura Zigman grew up in Newton, MA, and, yes, owns a Sheltie. After working for ten years as a publicist for other authors, she wrote the semi-autobiographical Animal Husbandry in 1998. It became a New York Times bestseller and was turned into a movie starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman, Someone Like You. She has penned three other, also semi-autobiographical novels: Dating Big Bird (2000); Her (2002); and Piece of Work (2006).

Zigman has been a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post. She also produced a popular online series of animated videos, Annoying Conversations, and was the recipient of a Yaddo residency. 

NOTE: The Friends of the South End Library will present the reading as a REMOTE event. To access the meeting, please read the instructions below and download Zoom in advance.

The Zoom  event is a FREE videoconferencing program. If you have never used Zoom before, it may take about three minutes to install. It also may require you to restart your computer after the installation. 

NOTE about purchasing copies of Separation Anxiety: Amazon is NOT shipping books during the pandemic as they are not considered "necessities" (how wrong they are!) but our local Indie Bookstore, Trident Booksellers and Cafe, on Newbury Street, will provide you with copies of Separation Anxiety if you order on-line. They have FREE SHIPPING. If you want to order something from their cafe they can include a book along with your food order. Please support our beloved small businesses. Please contact them via this link.

NOTE from Anne Smart:

The BPL owns 5 copies of the book and there are 33 titles on request.  I will request a few more copies.  Thanks!! Anne

Thank you for your support. 

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