TUESDAY, MAY 1
7:00pm

Join us as we welcome poet Ed Bok Lee, who will read from and discuss his new book. A reception and book signing will follow.

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PEN/Open Book Award winner Ed Bok Lee explores the dangerous gifts of globalization in his newest book, Whorled: Poems.

Publisher Comments

What does it mean to be a Global Citizen in an era of constant war, rampant industrialization, and ever-advancing technology? Lee's ever-wandering cultural and spiritual nomads struggle to make sense of what it means to be a citizen of an increasingly homeless world. In a world where "all love is immigrant, Whorled confronts and celebrates the many complications of global politics through meditations on war, migration, and culture. In settings from San Francisco to Seoul, the Midwest to Kazakhstan, Ed Bok Lee considers what it means to be a citizen in a world where "you can't win the past / or stalk redemption."

Raised in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, Ed Bok Lee is the author of "Real Karaoke People," which won the PEN Open Book Award. He is an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

TUESDAY, MAY 8
7:00pm

Author Michael Natkin brings his love for meatless cuisine to Books on the Square with his new cookbook for foodies, HERBIVORACIOUS, with recipes taken from his blog, herbivoracious.com. A reception and book signing will follow.

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Publisher Comments

Some of the most creative new minds in the kitchen and the most exhilarating new voices in food writing come from the world of blogs. Michael Natkin, creator of the wildly popular Herbivoracious.com, indisputably fits both of those descriptions. In "Herbivoracious: A Vegetarian Cookbook for People Who Love to Eat, " Natkin offers up 150 exciting recipes (most of which have not appeared on his blog) notable both for their big, bold, bright flavors and for their beautiful looks on the plate, the latter apparent in more than 80 four-color photos that grace the book.

This is sophisticated, grown-up meatless cooking, the kind you can serve to company--even when your guests are dedicated meat-eaters. An indefatigable explorer of global cuisines, with particular interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and in East and Southeast Asia, Natkin has crafted, through years of experimenting in his kitchen and in loads of intensive give-and-take with his blog readers, dishes that truly are revelations in taste, texture, aroma, and presentation. A third of the book is taken up with hearty main courses, ranging from a robust Caribbean Lentil-Stuffed Flatbread across the Atlantic to a comforting Sicilian Spaghetti with Pan-Roasted Cauliflower and around the Cape of Good Hope to a delectable Sichuan Dry-Fried Green Beans and Tofu.

An abundance of soups, salads, sauces and condiments, sides, appetizers and small plates, desserts, and breakfasts round out the recipes. Natkin, a vegetarian himself, provides lots of advice on how to craft vegetarian meals that amply deliver protein and other nutrients, and the imaginative menus he presents deliver balanced and complementary flavors, in surprising and utterly pleasing ways.

The many dozens of vegan and gluten-free recipes are clearly noted, too, and an introductory chapter lays out the simple steps readers can take to outfit a globally inspired pantry of seasonings and sauces that make meatless food come alive.

THURSDAY, MAY 10
7:00pm

Author Kate Schapira lives and writes in Providence. Come listen to read some of her poetry in her latest collection, How We Saved the City. In it, she examines gentrification, ghosts, and concurrent and successive cities in her chosen hometown. A reception and book signing follows.

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Through a range of formal strategies and imagined dialogues, these poems raise urgent and timely questions: who decides what a city and its people need? Who has power, in various forms, to make real their versions of the city and themselves? Racketeers, artists, criminals, activists, profiteers and lovers cross and recross, build and rebuild the contested terrain of property, gender, habitation and change.

SATURDAY, MAY 12
7:00pm

Editors Kyle Therese Cranston and Jenn Dlugos return to Books on the Square with a new collection of tales that will make you laugh, cringe, and shake your head in disbelief as comedians and humor writers from all over the country spill the beans on their most humbling, hilarious, and harebrained travel moments.

Come hear them read from Woe of the Road and stay for a book signing and reception afterward.

TUESDAY, MAY 22
7:00pm

New author Stephanie Reents will be here to read from her debut novel, THE KISSING LIST, about a group of women navigating through young adulthood. A book signing and reception follows.

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Publisher Comments

An inventive debut that recalls the imagination of Aimee Bender and the sardonic wit of Lorrie Moore.

The interlocking stories in The Kissing List feature an unforgettable group of young women - Sylvie, Anna, Frances, Maureen - as their lives connect, first during a year abroad at Oxford, then later as they move to New York on the cusp of adulthood. We follow each of them as they navigate the treachery of first dates, temp jobs and roommates, failed relationships and unexpected affairs - all the things that make their lives seem full of possibility, but also rife with potential disappointment.

Shot through with laugh-out-loud lines, yet still wrenchingly emotional and resonant, The Kissing List is a book about women who bravely defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary.

THURSDAY, MAY 24
7:00pm

OH BABIES!

This is the book author Jane Roper wished she had when she found out she was having twins. Come listen to her recount the ups and downs of a multiple pregnancy from her new book, Double Time: How I Survived---And Mostly Thrived---Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins, and stay afterward for a book signing and reception.

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Publisher Comments

What do you do when you find out you're pregnant - times two?

When Jane Roper found out she was pregnant with twins, she searched high and low for a memoir of the first years with multiples, but came up empty-handed. Four years later, she wrote the book she wished she'd had as a new mother of twins.

Double Time is an entertaining, up-close and very personal look at Jane Roper's first three years raising twin daughters. From trying to get pregnant to processing the idea of twins, from round the clock feedings and diaper changes to the joy of watching "twinteractions" between her girls as their (very different ) personalities emerge, Jane tells all. Meanwhile, she struggles to keep a history of depression under control--and find answers when her symptoms get worse. All this while falling steadily in love with her duo as they grow from sleepy newborns to mischievous toddlers with a penchant for potty talk.

Full of warmth, honesty, occasional advice, and more than a little humor, Double Time is a smart and engaging account of the first three years with multiples, as well as a refreshingly candid and vulnerable look at parenting, clinical depression, and the quest for work-family balance. It's Jane Roper's story, but it's one that will resonate with countless women--especially those parenting in double time.

THURSDAY, MAY 31
7:00pm

Author Susan Mondshein Tejada will be at Books on the Square to read from and discuss her new book, In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World. A reception and book signing follows.

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Publisher Comments

It was a bold and brutal crime--robbery and murder in broad daylight on the streets of South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. Tried for the crime and convicted, two Italian-born laborers, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, went to the electric chair in 1927, professing their innocence. Journalist Susan Tejada has spent years investigating the case, sifting through diaries and police reports and interviewing descendants of major figures. She discovers little-known facts about Sacco, Vanzetti, and their supporters, and develops a tantalizing theory about how a doomed insider may have been coerced into helping professional criminals plan the heist.

The author takes a panoramic view of the case, allowing the reader to see the personalities as individuals. She also paints a fascinating portrait of a bygone era: Providence gangsters and Boston Brahmins; nighttime raids and midnight bombings; and immigration, unionism, draft dodging, and violent anarchism in the turbulent early years of the twentieth century.

In many ways this is as much a cultural history as a true-crime mystery or courtroom drama. Because the case played out against a background of domestic terrorism, in a time that echoes our own, we have a new appreciation of the potential connection between fear and the erosion of civil liberties and miscarriages of justice.