Upcoming Events

Join us for a National Small Press Month reading with two literary fiction writers.  In Tarah Masih's impressive debut collection, Where the Dog Star Never Glows,  she shows an intimate sense of understanding her characters’ innermost feelings, creating a memorable map of diverse characters that span the globe and several eras. Ghosts dance, butterflies swarm, men crystallize, the sun disappears, and water plays a role in both destruction and repair of the soul. With an unflinching eye, a mythical awareness of the natural world, and poetic, crafted prose, Masih examines the dark recesses of the mind and heart, which often leads to a small or great triumph or illumination that will resonate long after the last page is turned.

In Clifford Garstang's In An Uncharted Country, the award-winning stories that make up this linked collection showcase ordinary men and women in and around Rugglesville, Virginia, as they struggle to find places and identities in their families and the community. They experience natural disasters, a sun-worshipping cult, Vietnam flashbacks, kidnapping, addiction, and loss. The book's opening story, "Flood, 1978," follows Hank, who comes to understand his father's deep sense of grief over the death of his wife. Later, in "Hand-painted Angel," Hank's sons see the family spinning apart as their father ages and family secrets are disclosed. In "The Clattering of Bones," Walt mourns the collapse of his marriage after the loss of a child, but in the collection's title story he recognizes his emotional need for family. The concluding story, "Red Peony," unifies the collection, as many of the book's characters come together for a tumultuous 4th of July Celebration.  

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The series "A Winter's Tale," featuring autobiographical tales told without notes before a live audience, returns to The Red Door Lounge and Martini Bar, 107 State Street, March 14th, 7 - 9 PM. Eight local performers and writers present unscripted true-life stories around the theme "Waiting". A $5 admission fee goes towards Seacoast Local's (H)EAT campaign, which provides heating and food assistance to local people in need. Doors open at 6:00; space is limited; first come, first served. Event co-sponsored by RiverRun Bookstore and The Wire.

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Join us at SecondRun Bookstore, located at 7 Commercial Alley in downtown Portsmouth.  The third Monday of the month is Scrabble Night. Bring a board, a friend, or just yourself and test your Scrabble skills.

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In The Whatever Girl: A Poetic Novella Kendra tells her compelling story of grieving, healing and recovery through a unique collection of poignant vignettes: short, descriptive poems chronicling her experience of surviving loss, which became a journey of self-discovery.  The title of the collection refers to the ability to adapt to life’s unexpected turns with dignity and grace – doing ‘whatever’ it takes to overcome challenges and adversity.   
 

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To visit a city is to wander through its stories and glimpse its ghosts. This book evokes Paris from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century through the stories of sixteen exceptional women whose lives intersected with Paris in remarkable ways and whose eventual fame depended on the city itself.  Often the traces of these women have faded; even those who seem to have disapeared have not—one must only look harder and piece together the clues like a detective.

The women profiled include: Geneviève,  Héloïse, Christine de Pizan, Marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Maintenon, Madame du Châtelet,  Madame Roland,  Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Rachel, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Camille Claudel, Marie Curie, Colette, Coco Chanel, and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Everyone is welcome to join RiverRun Bookstore on the fourth Monday of the month for a lively town-hall style discussion using the Socratic Method.  The group will be following along with the topics being aired on New Hampshire Public Radio.  The meetings are interesting, thoughtful and complex as ideas surface and questions tangle into unexpected ways. The Socratic method is used in universities, at cafes and bookstores and by journalists and academics across the country in order to engage ideas.

RiverRun Bookstore's Socrates Exchange is moderated by Donna Kirk, a former intern of New Hampshire Public Radio and former member of UNH's Socratic Society. She is the director of The Seacoast Writers Circle and founder of The Workshop, A Studio For Writers. She studies literature, ethics, modern politics and is working on her first novel.

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Jackie MacMullan will discuss her journalistic challenges covering Boston sports for 25 years, take your questions and sign copies of her new book.  This event will take place at the Levenson Room of the Portsmouth Library.

In 1999, MacMullan collaborated with Larry Bird on his autobiography Bird Watching: on Playing and Coaching the Game I Love. Her most recent book is When the Game was Ours, a collaboration with Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird. With intimate, fly-on-the-wall detail, this book transports readers to an electric era of basketball and reveals for the first time the inner workings of two players--Larry Bird and Earvin "Magic" Johnson--dead set on besting one another.

JACKIE MACMULLAN is a freelance newspaper sportswriter and NBA columnist for the sports website ESPN.com. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where she was captain of the women's basketball team, MacMullan was a columnist and associate editor of the Boston Globe until she took a buyout from the paper in March 2008. She began writing for the Globe in 1982. From 1995 to 2000 she covered the NBA as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. MacMullan has been a correspondent for several cable television networks including ESPN, CNNSI, and NESN, as well as WHDH-TV in Boston. She is a regular panelist on the ESPN program Around the Horn. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and 2 children.

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John Gillespie will be at RiverRun to discuss the book he co-authored. Using their extensive original reporting and interviews with high-level insiders, John Gillespie and David Zweig -- both Harvard MBAs with thirty-plus years of Fortune 100 experience at investment banks and media companies -- expose what happened, or failed to happen, in the boardrooms of companies such as Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Bear Stearns, and Countrywide and how it has resulted in so much financial devastation. They reveal how the byzantine yet indestructible web of power and money has brought on collapse after collapse, with fig-leaf reforms that feebly anticipate last year's scandal, but never next year's.

Money for Nothing shows how the game is played, and how you can help to demand real change in a badly broken system.

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The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now endless controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces, the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about “truthiness,” literary license, quotation, appropriation.

Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year.

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