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The
Odyssey Gallery
Pictures of recent events
The Odyssey Bookshop is one of five independent
bookstores participating in WAMC's Roundtable on Tuesday mornings,
just after the 10:00 news. People from the Odyssey will be on about once a
month, talking about our favorite books.
Click
here to see the list of the books we have talked about.
The Odyssey Bookshop
9 College St.
S. Hadley, MA 01075
413-534-7307
800-540-7307
fax 413-532-3654
email odysseybks@aol.com
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February Calendar of
Author Appearances and Events
All events are free and
open to the public and are held at The Odyssey unless otherwise noted.
Call (413) 534-7307 to
reserve a space. If you can’t
attend, we can reserve a signed book for you.
Print
the Month-at-a-Glance
Printer friendly
Calendar with details
New:
Reserve a seat online.
Please take a moment to
reserve your seat for any of these events online. Reserving helps us
better plan for the event, and helps you by assuring that if there are any
changes or cancellations, you will be contacted immediately. Please
note that we cannot take reservations for those events taking place
outside of the Odyssey Bookshop (i.e. Mount Holyoke College).
Click Here to
reserve your seat.
You may also reserve a seat by calling 534-7307
Please call the Odyssey
at 534-7307 or email us to reserve a place for an event. (If emailing,
please give us your phone number.) If we have your name and telephone
number, we'll be able to call you with last-minute cancellations or
changes. Click on an event in the
calendar for details.
Late January/February 2010
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Jan 17
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18 |
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20 |
21 7:00 p.m.
Sadie Jones,
Small Wars |
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23 |
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28 |
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January
21 • Thursday •
7:00
pm
Sadie Jones
Small Wars
Fresh
off her triumphantly assured debut novel The Outcast, award-winning author Sadie
Jones has again delivered a quiet masterpiece in Small Wars. Set on the
colonial, war-torn island of Cyprus in 1956, Jones tells the story of a young
solider, Hal Treherne, and the effects of this “small war” on him, his wife
Clara, and their family. Reminiscent of classic tales of love and war such as
The English Patient and Atonement, Jones’s gripping novel also calls to mind
the master works of Virginia Woolf and their portrayal of the quiet desperation
of a marriage in crisis. Small Wars is at once a deeply emotional, meticulously
researched work of historical fiction and a profound meditation on war-time
atrocities committed both on and off the battlefield.
“Sadie Jones has a long literary future
ahead of her.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl
Earring
February 8
• Monday • 7:00 pm
The Odyssey Crime Club will discuss The
Jugger by Richard Stark. You probably
haven’t ever noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice “everything.”
That’s their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making
note of the tellers’ work habits, the positions of the security guards.
Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds.
Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the
racetrack. They’re thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They’re pros, and
Parker is far and away the best of them. If you’re planning a job, you want
him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is
the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t
want to cross him, and you don’t want to get in his way, because he’ll stop
at nothing to get what he’s after. Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard
Stark’s eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters
in hardboiled noir. This
month’s selection is discounted 20%.
February
13 • Saturday •
11:00 am
Valentine's Day Story and Craft Hour
Join the Odyssey
Bookshop for a special Valentine’s Day story and craft-time with children’s
manager, Rebecca Fabian and children’s book author and Mount Holyoke College
Professor, Corinne Demas.
February
15 • Monday • 7:00
pm
The Odyssey Open Fiction Book Group will
discuss Sonata for Miriam by Linda Olsson. Olsson’s first novel,
Astrid & Veronika, introduced readers to the author’s extraordinary
understanding of human relationships. With her second work, she once again
charts that terrain in a haunting tale of loss, love, and human connection.
The month’s
selection is discounted 20%.
February 16
• Tuesday
•
7:00
pm
Philipp Meyer
American Rust
Set
in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American
Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as
the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arises from its loss. From
local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to
the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who
dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.
“Philipp Meyer’s American Rust
is written with considerable dramatic intensity and pace. It manages an
emotional accuracy, a deep and detailed conviction in its depiction of
character. It also captures a sense of a menacing society, a wider world in the
throes of decay and self-destruction.” — Colm Tóibín, author of The
Master
February 17
• Wednesday
•
7:00
pm
Steve Yarbrough
Safe from the Neighbors
Luke
May teaches local history—his lifelong obsession—at his old high school in
Loring, Mississippi. Having been mentored by his hometown newspaper’s
publisher, a survivor of the civil rights turmoil, he now passes these stories
along to students far too young to have experienced them. But when a long-lost
friend suddenly returns to Loring, where years ago her family had been consumed
by an act of spectacular violence, Luke begins to realize that his connection
with her runs deeper, both personally and politically, than he ever imagined.
Just children in 1962, they had no sense of what was happening when James
Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss provoked a bloody new battle in the old
civil war, much less its impact on their fathers’ ambiguous friendship. Once
his daughters leave for Ole Miss, Luke’s investigation of this decades-old
trauma spills over into his own life. With his parents unwilling, or unable, to
help him unlock secrets whose existence he had never suspected, this amateur
historian is soon entirely consumed by an obscure past he can neither explain
nor control—a gripping reminder that the past isn’t dead, or even past.
“Once again Steve Yarbrough powerfully
evokes—as David Guterson put it—‘not only historical grief but the grief
of our own time.'" – Random House
February 1 8
• Thursday
•
7:00
pm
Charlie Bondhus
What We Have Learned to Love
Hot
yet sensitive and sometimes funny love poems by a rising star among gay poets. What
We Have Learned to Love is the winner of the 2009 Stonewall Chapbook
Competition.
“Charlie Bondhus, in the poems of What
We Have Learned to Love, updates the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg with
energy, passion, and confession. The verve of these poems is palpable.”
-- Kenny Fries, author of The History of My Shoes and The Evolution of
Darwin's Theory
February
21
• Sunday
• 11:00
am
Sundays with Shakespeare
The monthly
Shakespeare discussion group, led by UMASS English professor Arthur F. Kinney,
will discuss The Winter's Tale. The month’s selection is discounted
20%.
February 2 3
• Tuesday
•
7:00
pm
Joe Hill
Horns
Ignatius
Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next
morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns
growing from his temples. At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination,
the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a
lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams,
who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown
would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing
natural about the horns, which were all too real.
February 2 5
• Thursday •
7:00
pm
Christina Asquith
Sisters in War: A
Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq
Caught
up in a terrifying war, facing choices of life and death, two Iraqi sisters take
us into the hidden world of women’s lives under U.S. occupation. Through their
powerful story of love and betrayal, interwoven with the stories of a
Palestinian American women’s rights activist and a U.S. soldier, journalist
Christina Asquith explores one of the great untold sagas of the Iraq war: the
attempt to bring women’s rights to Iraq and the consequences for all those
involved.
“Christina Asquith’s description of
the wild incompetence–and dedication–of early American efforts in Iraq reads
like a great novel but with the added weight of history. And her focus on women,
both American and Iraqi, makes this book uniquely valuable among the many on
this long war. Asquith is a fine writer and, clearly, a very brave reporter. She
has filled in several crucial pieces of the Iraq puzzle, and done it
beautifully.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm
February 27
• Saturday • 11:00 am
Dr. Seuss Birthday
Party!
It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday, so
come celebrate with games and a special story-time at the Odyssey Bookshop.
Upcoming Events at the Odyssey!
March:
March 2: Heidi Durrow, The
Girl Who Fell from the Sky
March 4: Jedediah Berry (The Manual of Detection)
and Paul Tremblay (No Sleep Till Wonderland)
March 8: Howard Frank Mosher, Walking
to Gatlinburg
March 10: Jerome Charyn, The
Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
March 23: Ellen Fitzpatrick, Letters
to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation
March 24: Dr. Lewis Cohen, No Good Deed
April:
April 1: Michael White,
The Beautiful Assassin
April 8: Dave Bonta, The New Solar Home
April 14: Pete Nelson, I
Thought You Were Dead
April 15: Sue Miller, The Lake Shore Limited
April 20: Stephen Strom, Earth
Forms
April 28: Alexander McCall Smith, The
Double Comfort Safari Club: The New No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Novel.
(Location and ticket information yet to be determined. Please check back
after the first of the year!)
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