House of Books

Kerri Arsenault, "Mill Town" in conversation with Sumanth Prabhaker

Wednesday July 07, 2021 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Join us IN PERSON for an engaging conversation
with the critically acclaimed author of Mill Town!

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"In searching for her Acadian roots, Kerri returns to Mexico, Maine and remembers the pleasures of her childhood. With adult eyes she sees the main employer in town, the mill, and its disregard for environmental standards and the age-old canker sore of greed before responsibility. Maine has the highest incidence of cancer in the United States. This is a poignant and yet disturbing reflection on what is happening not only in Maine but across the country where large, industrial complexes ignore laws for profit. Kerri Arsenault narrates this book and her voice envelopes her words in smooth, clear tones adding a dimension that lifted me off the page and into Mexico, Maine." —Mary

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
One of O Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020

“A powerful, blistering, devastating book. Kerri Arsenault is both a graceful writer and a grieving daughter in search of answers and ultimately, justice.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.”

Mill Town is a personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxins and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

KERRI ARSENAULT is book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, contributing editor at The Literary Hub, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, which was won the Maine Literary award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. My work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review of Books, Air Mail, and the Washington Post.

SUMANTH PRABHAKER is the editor of the environmental magazine Orion. On the side, he runs the operations of Madras Press, a charitable publisher whose catalog includes work by Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and David Foster Wallace. He received an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for Ecotone. He lives with his wife and children in western Massachusetts.

Amy Poeppel, "Musical Chairs" in conversation with Fiona Davis, "The Lions of Fifth Avenue"

Thursday July 08, 2021 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Join us IN PERSON for an engaging conversation
with two best-selling authors!

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"Musical Chairs is one of those books I did not want to end. Bridget Stratton is a single mom, cellist, co-founder of the trio Forsythe, with her best friend Will, and the daughter of the world-renowned composer Edward Stratton. She is looking forward to leaving the city for the summer and spending time at her Connecticut home but the best laid plans go awry. Her twin twenty-something children show up unannounced, her ninety-year-old father is getting married, her house is in desperate need of repairs, the trio has lost their violinist and her boyfriend dumps her via email! The characters in Musical Chairs become like old friends and their stories cleverly weave together with joy, resentment, secrets and above all humor. Musical Chairs is a welcome comfort in these most unusual times and an engaging perspective on family life with all its trials and tribulations." —Mary

The “quick-witted and razor-sharp” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six) author of Limelight and Small Admissions returns with a hilarious and heartfelt new novel about a perfectly imperfect summer of love, secrets, and second chances.

“In this funny, profound, and brilliantly alive novel about all the messy, wise, and wonderful chords that love can strike in our lives, Poeppel gathers together fathers and daughters, old flames and new sparks, music, writing and gardening, to explore what it really means to feel at home, and how life can open you up in ways you never saw coming” (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author).

Amy Poeppel is the author of the novels Small Admissions, Limelight, and Musical Chairs. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Belladonna, and Working Mother. She and her husband have three sons, and they split their time between Kent, Connecticut and Frankfurt, Germany.

In New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis's latest historical novel, a series of book thefts roils the iconic New York Public Library, leaving two generations of strong-willed women to pick up the pieces.

It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. And when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may just lose everything in the process.

Fiona Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels set in iconic New York City buildings, including The Chelsea Girls and The Address. She began her career in New York City as an actress, working on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater. After getting a master's degree at Columbia Journalism School, she fell in love with writing, leapfrogging from editor to freelance journalist before finally settling down to write fiction. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages and she’s based in New York City.

Ann L. Buttenwieser, "The Floating Pool Lady"

Thursday August 05, 2021 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Join us IN PERSON to learn the history
of a very special urban development project with the Floating Pool Lady herself!

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Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? In The Floating Pool Lady, Ann L. Buttenwieser recounts her triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor.

When Buttenwieser decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. Buttenwieser wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East Rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As she describes in The Floating Pool Lady, Buttenwieser battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats as she brought her "crazy" scheme to fruition.

From dusty archives in the historic Battery Maritime Building to high-stakes community board meetings to tense negotiations in the Louisiana shipyard, Buttenwieser retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers.

Throughout The Floating Pool Lady, Buttenwieser raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. Her story and that of her floating pool function as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.

Ann Buttenwieser is an Urban Planner with a specialty in Waterfront
Planning. After graduating with a PhD from the Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, she worked at the
NYC Department of Planning, the NYC Department of Parks and
Recreation, and the NYC Economic Development Corporation, all
agencies with a waterfront portfolio. Buttenwieser is also an urban
historian and has published three books: The Floating Pool Lady A
Quest to Bring a Public Pool to New York City’s Waterfront, Three
Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2021;
Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor, Syracuse University
Press, 2009; Manhattan Water-Bound: Planning and Developing the
Manhattan Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present,
NYU Press, 1987, Paperback edition, Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Kurt Andersen, "Evil Geniuses" in conversation with Kerri Arsenault

Saturday August 14, 2021 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Join us IN PERSON to celebrate
the paperback release of Evil Geniuses

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future.

“The one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci

Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.

Only a writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

KURT ANDERSEN is a writer. His latest book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America (2020) is about how U.S. society was re-engineered during the late 20^th century to serve big business and the well-to-do at the expense of everyone else. It was a New York Times bestseller, like its companion volume Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (2017), Andersen's prize-winning history of America's weakness for exciting untruths. In addition, he’s the author of four critically acclaimed, bestselling novels –– You Can't Spell America Without Me (2017), True Believers (2012), Heyday (2007) and Turn of the Century (1999). Andersen co-created and hosted the Peabody Award-winning weekly public radio program Studio 360, and most recently co-created and narrated Nixon At War, a podcast documentary series released in the summer of 2021. He also writes for television, appears regularly on MSNBC and contributes to the New York Times. He co-founded Spy magazine, and was a columnist and critic for The New Yorker, New York and Time, as well as editor-in-chief of New York. He lives with his wife Anne Kreamer in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, and Brooklyn.

KERRI ARSENAULT is book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, contributing editor at The Literary Hub, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, which was won the Maine Literary award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. My work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review of Books, Air Mail, and the Washington Post.

Jonathan Wells, "The Skinny"

Thursday August 19, 2021 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Join us IN PERSON for an event with critically acclaimed poet, Jonathan Wells!

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“Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn’t feel as if my body was really mine...” At age fourteen, Jonathan Wells weighs just sixty-seven pounds, triggering a scrutinizing persecution of his body that will follow him into adulthood.

Upstate New York in the 1970s: A boy in preparatory day school suffers a harrowing attack by a teacher offended by his failure to put on weight. For the first time in his young life, Jonathan Wells is forced to question his right to take up space in the world. Jonathan’s father, reading his weight as a clear and deeply concerning deficit of masculinity, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn’t help, he has Jonathan seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming heis in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: the boy is simply too skinny.

Jonathan’s complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, unwittingly, plays a divisive role. As a result, Jonathan is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where he manages to establish an identity of his own among the child exiles and outcasts that make up the student body. And yet, his father’s obsession follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space hehas painstakingly won for himself.

The critically acclaimed poet and author of the collectionDebris, Jonathan Wells gives us a candid, powerful, and quietly humorous memoir about the universal exploration of adolescence and self-image, the frailty of masculinity, and all the places we seek comfort in a world that tries to define us.

Jonathan Wells has published three collections with Four Way Books: Debris,Train Dance, and The Man With Many Pens. His poems have appeared inThe New Yorker,Ploughshares,AGNI and The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program and many other journals.The Skinny, is his first book of prose.