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Reminder: Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and take place at Baker Books, located at 69 State Road (Route 6) in No. Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Questions/Comments? Call (508) 997-6700 or email events@bakerbooks.net. Baker Books is wheelchair accessible.

Finny, Justin Kramon
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 7:00pm

How often is it that we have the opportunity to hear a promising young author read at the start of their career? Catch this one while you can. Baker Books is thrilled to welcome up and coming novelist Justin Kramon, author of Finny.

A love story and a coming-of-age tale, Finny is a novel about a young woman embarking on the hilarious and heartbreaking adventures of life. Finny is a wickedly funny odyssey, with a moving and original love story at its core. It introduces us to an unforgettable heroine, a charmingly intricate world, and an uncommonly gifted young novelist.

Publisher's Weekly says: "In his impressive debut, Kramon takes on a number of familiar coming-of-age plots-smalltown fish-out-of-water adolescence, frustrated first love, boarding school friendships, big city escapes-and pulls it all off with flair and humor...Kramon is at his best sending up Finny's innocence by means of an endearing, Dickensian coterie of side characters...Combining snappy dialogue, frank attention to sex, and convincingly detailed characters-eccentric and sympathetic, but not sentimental -Kramon is clearly a find."

Justin Kramon lives in Philadelphia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has published stories in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Boulevard, Fence, TriQuarterly, and others. He has received honors from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, Best American Short Stories, the Hawthornden International Writers' Fellowship, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He teaches at Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City and at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio.


The Chester Chronicles, Kermit Moyer
Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 7:00pm

Chester Patterson is an "Army brat" who grows up in the 1950s and comes of age in the 1960s. Chester is always in transit, the perennial outsider, stuck with a name that feels like a running joke and plagued with Oedipal anxieties and existential doubt yet nonetheless convinced of his heroic destiny. Each chapter is a discrete story that chronicles a pivotal moment in Chester's life, taking him a little deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century.

The New York Times Book Review called Kermit Moyer's collection of stories, Tumbling, "a work of ringing authenticity" and welcomed him as "an impressive new voice." Now, in The Chester Chronicles, Moyer again explores the rocky terrain of childhood and adolescence but this time from a single window: the perspective of Chester "Chet" Patterson.

Like Chester, Kermit Moyer grew up an Army brat in the 1950s. He got his BA, his MA and his PhD in English from Northwestern University and in 1970 joined the faculty of American University in Washington, DC, where he taught literature and creative writing for the next 37 years. His short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review, and he is the author of TUMBLING, a collection of stories published by the University of Illinois Press. He lives with his wife Amy and their dog Zora on Cape Cod.


Whaling City Review LIVE Poetry Series and Baker Books Present: Poets and Writers from the Newport Review
Saturday, August 14, 2010 at 7:00pm, Whaling City Review LIVE and Baker Books welcome poets and writers from the Newport Review. The reading will take place at 7:00 PM in Baker Books' Bean & Leaf Cafe. Featured readers will include: Lisa Borders, Mary Callahan, Becky Hemperly, Melissa MacLeod, Kathryn Kulpa, and Maggie Cleveland. The reading will be followed by an open mic.

The Newport Review is an independent online journal of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and visual art founded in Newport, RI in the 1980s. It publishes innovative, language-rich fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, including prose poetry, one-act plays, graphic stories and experimental forms. For more information and to read the latest issue, visit http://www.newportreview.org.


Father of the Rain, Lily King
Monday, August 23, 2010 at 7:00pm

In her most ambitious novel to date, author Lily King sets her sharply insightful family drama in an upper-middle-class East Coast suburb where she traces a complex and volatile father-daughter relationship from the 1970s to the present day. A provocative and masterfully told story of one woman's life-long, primal loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities, mercurial contours, and magnetic pull of families.

The New York Times Book Review says: "King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together, wanting others to see them as whole. Whether they're children, teenagers or adults in their 40s, 50s and older, they demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn't always end."

Lily King grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University, where she won the Raymond Carver Prize for fiction. A MacDowell Colony fellow, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. Her first novel, The Pleasing Hour, was a Book Sense selection, a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Lily King is also the author of The English Teacher, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a People magazine Critics' Choice. A Whiting Award winner and recipient of the Maine Fiction Award, she lives with her family in Maine.


"Coffee Party" Activist Author Erin McHugh
Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 7:00pm
Coffee, Tea, or Kool-Aid: Which Party Politics are You Swallowing?, Erin McHugh

In 2009, disgruntled Americans started a new movement called the Tea Party. Named after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists decried "Taxation Without Representation", the new Tea Party originally lashed out at President Obama's new stimulus package. Protests, marches, even a convention abounded, until January 26th of this year when Annabel Park, angered at the media's portrayal of Republicans as the only citizens who cared about government accountability and issues that affect all of us, said, "Enough already." Just like that, the Coffee Party was born. Since then, the Coffee Party Movement has catapulted past 200,000 Facebook followers, and hosted hundreds of organizational Coffee Party gatherings.

Coffee, Tea, or Kool-Aid is the one book that examines the issues and helps Americans tell the parties apart while they laugh all the way to the polls. Filled with party history and characters, side-by-side comparisons and contradictions, as well as memorable quotes, slogans, and scorecards, this little guide spells it all out and injects a little humor back into the political conversation.

Erin McHugh is a former publishing executive and the author of nearly twenty books. She first went canvassing door to door for a political candidate when she was still too young to vote.


Summer Conversations

Summer Conversations is a series based at the historic Apponagansett Quaker Meeting House. Each year, we gather a diverse range of speakers to share their unique ideas on the important topics of the day and foster a more informed dialogue in the local community. Summer Conversations are brought to you by the Allen's Neck Friends Meeting, Westport Friends Meeting, and Smith Neck Friends Meeting.

Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 7:00pm
In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street One Sleepover at a Time,
Peter Lovenheim
At the Apponagansett Meeting House

Peter Lovenheim had lived on the same street in suburban Rochester, New York much of his life. But it was only after a brutal murder-suicide rocked the neighborhood that he was struck by a fact of modern life in contemporary American communities: No one really knew anyone else. Thus began Peter's search to meet and get to know his neighbors. Being inquisitive, he did more than just introduce himself. He asked, ever so politely, if he could sleep over. Lovenheim's bridge-building experiment has drawn national attention, with interviews and reviews in many of the top media outlets. One review calls Lovenheim's writing, "elegantly detailed, revealing much about his subjects-issues of class, relationships, likes and gripes, obsessions and everyday struggles-that would be easy to miss."



Click for more details: Summer Conversations