Shelf Stable: August 12th
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“Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.”
― Laurie Helgoe
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Today is my 1 year anniversary of working at Porter Square Books.
From September 2018 to last August, I was on the road with my former partner, living in a 1965 travel trailer we named Sancho, and driving around the country visiting national parks. It was my partner’s dream and, well, he was going with or without me. So I quit my job, we packed up our apartment, and off we went. And it was great. Until it wasn’t.
I decided I would visit indie bookstores in all the cities we went to and blog about it. I didn’t do very well with the blog part -- unless I have a deadline that someone will be upset with me for missing, I rarely keep things like this up -- but I did go to so many bookstores. By necessity, I started to freelance, but it was never quite enough. On top of everything else, it was a year of constant pitching and job-hunting and rejection. When I was really frustrated, I would tell my partner that I just wanted to stop moving and be a bookseller. And then we’d pick up and go to the next place.
By this time last year, I had just come back to Boston, I was crashing at my parents’ house, I was broke, and I was freshly out of the relationship that had brought me on the road in the first place. But I did get to be a bookseller. And while that felt like the only thing I had, it’s proven to be the thing I needed (you know, general employment aside).
Because it isn’t just the job, it’s every kind and intelligent person on staff, whom I’m happy to now consider my friends. It’s the community I’ve been welcomed into, the kind of bookish community I’d been looking for but had never quite found. It’s being able to go to work and talk about books on the hard days. It’s having a job I actually want to go to.
I’d have dragged myself from last August to this one somehow, but I wouldn’t be doing so well if I didn’t get to be a bookseller.
Thanks for having me, PSB. It means the world.
--Meaghan
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Read our reopen policies and updated hours!
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Thanks to all our friends who've visited so far -- it's been wonderful to see everyone's face (well, the top half above the mask anyway) and we're so grateful to everyone who has been so respectful of our policies!
Updated In-Store Shopping Hours:
Monday: CLOSED
Tuesday-Friday: 3PM-7PM
Saturday: 9AM-6PM, with 9AM-11AM set aside for vulnerable customers
Sunday: 3PM-7PM
Curbside Pick Up: Daily, 3PM-7PM
We really appreciate your support!
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Join our next virtual events!
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Sarah Chayes and Zephyr Teachout
Thursday, August 13 at 7PM
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Porter Square Books is pleased to host a virtual talk with Sarah Chayes, author of On Corruption in America, and Zephyr Teachout, author of Break 'Em Up! This event is hosted on Crowdcast, and is free and open to all to attend.
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From the prizewinning journalist, internationally recognized expert on corruption in government networks throughout the world, On Corruption in America is a major, unflinching book that looks homeward to America, exploring the insidious, dangerous networks of corruption of our past, present, and precarious future. Corruption, as Chayes sees it, is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private-sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their main objective: not to serve the public but to maximize returns for network members.
From the titans of America’s Gilded Age (Carnegie, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, et al.) to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal; from the Clinton policies of political favors and personal enrichment to Trump’s hydra-headed network of corruption, systematically undoing the Constitution and our laws, Chayes shows how corrupt systems are organized, how they enforce the rules so their crimes are covered legally, how they are overlooked and downplayed–shrugged off with a roll of the eyes–by the richer and better educated, how they become an overt principle determining the shape of our government, affecting all levels of society.
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Break ’Em Up is a passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy. Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break ’Em Up.
This book is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today's progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power. Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.
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An Upcoming Event and a Request
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In Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, first-generation American LatinX Liliana Cruz does what it takes to fit in at her new nearly all-white school. But when family secrets spill out and racism at school ramps up, she must decide what she believes in and take a stand.
Former Boston Public School teacher and debut author Jennifer De Leon has a goal: she wants to put a free copy of her book in the hands of every ninth grade student at the O'Bryant High School in Boston. Help us reach this goal by donating a copy to a student! Porter Square Books will gather all donations and bring them over to the O'Bryant School once we've reached our goal.
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Want to show your love of Porter Square Books? Order your very own Porter Square Books T-shirt!
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Visit your friends at Cafe Zing!
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Did you know our beloved Cafe Zing is open for customers? Now you know!
Open Wednesday-Saturday, 8AM-2PM! See you and your extra-shot, biggest-size-you-have iced latte at the cafe.
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Hollywood Goes to War: WWII, Part 2
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Hollywood continued to produce films during and about World War II as the nature of war, although terrible, is filled with life and death drama – irresistible to Hollywood producers.
In 1945 director William Wellman (a member of the French Foreign Legion Flying Corps in World War I) directed The Story of G.I. Joe based on the work by Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The movie made a star of Robert Mitchum, who was nominated for an Oscar. Based on the novella Glory for Me (1945) by MacKinlay Kantor, Samuel Goldwyn produced The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946; the winner of seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor Frederic March, Score and Editing. Interesting trivia: Harold Russell is the only performer to win two Oscars for the same performance; he was presented with an honorary Oscar and then won in the Best Supporting Actor category.
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Twentieth Century Fox produced a version of author Desmond Young’s book, Rommel: The Desert Fox in 1951.The movie, titled simply The Desert Fox, starred James Mason and Jessica Tandy. The Broadway play, Stalag 17 (1951) was made into a film in 1953 adapted by Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum. The film starred Don Taylor, Peter Graves and in his Oscar winning performance, William Holden.
1953 brought James Jones’s bestselling debut novel From Here to Eternity (1951) to the screen. Adapted by Daniel Taradash, the film starred Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr and won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director Fred Zinnemann, Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor nods to Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed. Interesting trivia: the title comes from an 1892 Rudyard Kipling poem Gentlemen-Rankers. Humphrey Bogart starred in the Navy drama The Caine Mutiny in 1954 from the 1951 novel by Herman Wouk. An epic war picture, The Longest Day was released in 1962. Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 nonfiction book told the story of the D-Day and the movie starred John Wayne and Henry Fonda.
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The Dirty Dozen was an adaptation of the bestseller (1965) by E. M. Nathanson and released by M-G-M in 1967 and stared Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine. Two years later Derek Wood and Derek Dempster’s book The Narrow Margin was adapted into Battle of Britain starring Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Michael Caine. Interesting trivia: Inspired by the movie The Caine Mutiny, Maurice Micklewhite changed his name in 1954 to Michael Caine. A 1980 French film written and directed by François Truffaut, The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro) tells the story of Occupied France beginning in 1942. The movie won ten Césars (the French Oscar) and starred Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Interesting trivia: Renée-Jeanne Simonot, the mother of Catherine Deneuve, is 108 years old and lives in Paris.
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Steven Spielberg directed Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Written by Robert Rodat and set during the invasion of Normandy, the film is known for its graphic portrayal of war. Starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, the movie was nominated for eleven Oscars and received stellar reviews and box office. Two of the most recent films made about World War II are Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour, both released to acclaim in 2017. Dunkirk, written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan, starred Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, and Mark Rylance. And The Darkest Hour, written by Anthony McCarten, starred Kirsten Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar.
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!
Winston Churchill June 4, 1940
Next Up: A Tribute to Olivia de Havilland
-Nathan
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There can be a lot of creative potential in constraints. As anyone who has ever written a sonnet or a villanelle knows, the challenge of finding a word or line that fits with the structure can force your brain into creativity. By this point we've all become experts of sorts in creativity within constraints. (How's your sourdough starter?) Oulipo was a literary movement that took this idea of writing to their logical extremes, designing exercises with intricate constraints. If you're stuck in your writing, these techniques can be great ways to force your brain into creativity. They also have a number of techniques that use chance to build poems and stories so you can "write" something without having to come up with your own words. Here are a few Oulipo exercises to get your writing.
N +7
Take a poem or piece of writing that already exists, either your own or someone else’s, and substitute each noun with the one that occurs seven nouns away in the dictionary. Like a particular line this generates? Follow where that line leads. N+7 not giving you good words? Try N+1 or 5 or whatever you like.
Snowball
Start with a one-word line or sentence. Then write a two-word line or sentence. Then three. Then four. Then five. If you find a sentence or line you really like, drop the technique and see where that line leads.
Lipogram
This probably the most famous Oulipo technique. Pick a vowel to exclude from the piece and describe something in your day. So, if you pick "a" and want to describe your breakfast, you can't have "apples" or "cereal" or "orange juice" and you can't even say "breakfast." George Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter "e."
The Prisoner's Constraint
This technique comes from the idea that prisoners needed to conserve paper and so could only use letters that would neither rise above or sink below the lines of lined paper. So no b,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,p,q,t, or y. You might feel a little bit like a prisoner now, too, so use this technique to write a letter to "someone on the outside."
-Josh
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We want to hear from you!
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It's going to be an...interesting holiday season. What can we do to help you shop with us?
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Lots of recommendations on social media
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PSB books for sale at other local businesses
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Free Local Delivery for orders of $50 or more
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Porter Square Books is proud to partner with the Prison Book Program to help provide access to books to people in prison. Order any title off this wish list and select the "Curbside Pick Up" shipping option and we'll give to the Prison Book Program to distribute.
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Antiracism Books: A Place to Start
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Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline, read by Michelle St. John
A bold and brilliant new indigenous voice in contemporary literature makes her American debut with this kinetic, imaginative, and sensuous fable inspired by the traditional Canadian Métis legend of the Rogarou—a werewolf-like creature that haunts the roads and woods of native people’s communities.
“Cherie Dimaline’s latest novel packs a wallop of a story. Absolutely stunning in every way, this latest offering follows the story of Joan, whose husband has disappeared, and her courage when confronted with truths and lies. She and her husband, Victor, live in a Métis community, close and tight knit. As Joan deals with the fallout of her emotions after Victor disappears, she comes across another man, Eugene Wolff, who bears her husband’s face. He does not carry Victor’s memories and insists he has no idea who Joan’s husband is. Turning over rocks to find the truth, Joan reaches out to whomever she can in her community for help. What waits for her at the end of her quest is incredible. This novel will have you at the edge of your seat!” --Annie Carl, The Neverending Bookshop
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Digital Audio Books:
A terrific way to support local indies!
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Want book recommendations, personalized just for you?
Fill out our form with your likes and dislikes, genres and favorites, and we'll crowdsource a bunch of great picks for you with our crack team of real life booksellers. Give it a whirl!
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Our "get 3 paperbacks" bundle options have expanded to include Caleb, Meaghan, Shana, and Sarah! Get 3 paperbacks handpicked by the bookseller that fit in with their theme. You can find all bundles.
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EXPANDED OPTIONS:
Journals, Stationery & Crafts
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Sometimes a new notebook is what it takes to get the juices flowing!
We have now made a much wider variety of notebooks, journals, and even calendars available for order from our website, like this classic Moleskin. Now, along with items with an inventory status of "On Our Shelves Now," you can order journals, notebooks, diaries, calendars, planners, and more with an inventory status of "Available at Warehouses."
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Face Masks
Face coverings are going to be with us for a while, so we’re now offering non-medical grade cloth masks (including kid size) from a variety of makers. Right now quantities are limited, but additional styles are on the way. We’ll keep you posted!
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Additional Book Bundle Offerings
Make your shopping easy by buying bundles, handpicked by our expert booksellers!
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Looking around the internet a bit, we found this full episode of Reading Rainbow from 1989 on YouTube. Get the theme song stuck in your ("Butterfly in the skyyyyy...."), enjoy the late 80s fashion, and spend some time with one of the great celebrations of books and reading.
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Support Cafe Zing Baristas!
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Although Cafe Zing is its own business separate from ours, we really don't see it that way: Zing workers are part of the Porter Square Books family. They keep us well supplied - very well supplied - with caffeine, kindness, and some great tunes. Sometimes they give us staff picks; sometimes we give them exact change because we've bought the same, perfect, comforting, delicious beverage twice a day five days a week for how long, now?
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New month, new discounts! Check out what our booksellers are loving this summer.
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Featured Staff Pick for Children
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The perfect late summer romantic comedy
-Rebecca
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Featured Staff Pick for Adults
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The way these characters and this family unfold around you is both exhilarating and tender. There's a feeling of both incredible momentum and a peaceful stillness that should be at odds with each other in one book, yet they dovetail together to celebrate the mingled beauty and terror of life and mortality, in particular one life: that of the unique and wonderful and tragic Vivek Oji.
-Leila
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See you next time here at Shelf Stable!
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Did you miss an installment, or want to share with a friend? The Shelf Stable Archive has all our past issues!
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And don't forget to subscribe to our Events Newsletter for the full line up of events coming up, and our Kids Newsletter for all the latest on events, new books, reviews, and more for young and young-at-heart readers.
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Looking for other ways to keep up with us? Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube:
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25 White St. Cambridge, MA 02140
617-491-2220
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