Gibson's Bookstore
It's the most wonderful time of the year: Rep Night! Join us for an evening of publisher reps sharing the titles they are most excited about! Bring a friend and be prepared to shop! We will have publisher reps from Hachette, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and more, presenting their favorite books for holiday gifting this year!
Howard Mansfield returns to Gibson's Bookstore with his latest book, Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past! ABOUT THE BOOKWe don’t look at most of the monuments and memorials around us. They disappear from view. Think of all the mute memorials you may pass in a week that are unseen, a blurred background to your daily commute: the green-mottled great man on his horse, hosting only pigeons; the curious obelisk looking like a stunted Washington Monument; the historical marker crowded with so many words it looks like a warning label written by a cadre of liability lawyers. So much narrative left out in the weather, so much storytelling that has lost its way. Any monument that we stand before asks something of us. Think of monuments as the first part of a call and response, as in music, as in worship. We bring our sense of history to the present, otherwise the granite/marble/limestone/bronze before us will be mute.A few monuments aren’t invisible. They speak to us, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and in another era, the Cenotaph in London that brought forth the strong emotional response after World War I.Each chapter explores the invisibility of monuments: The forced invisibility of the African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which have been rediscovered. These graveyards were destroyed in keeping with America’s “mortuary apartheid.”The sad fate of the Irish immigrants building America’s railroads in the nineteenth century, many killed on the job to be buried in unmarked graves.A grieving family’s memorial to a son lost in World War II, built stone by stone on the family’s farm, which still draws thousands to an outdoor “Cathedral of the Pines.”A Ferris wheel, stopped forever after a tragic accident, abandoned to rust, which becomes a private monument for a five-year-old boy.A celebrated, much-pictured monument for the Battle of Bunker Hill that doesn’t have the emotional charge and significance it once held.An unusual monument, a tribute to the future—a clock being built deep in a mountain, a clock that is meant to run for 10,000 years.And lastly, a monument hiding on museum walls. The great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, sometimes called the Hudson River School, weren’t out to just paint pretty pictures. They were chasing a moment of insight when they would see this new nation clearly. Their paintings taught Americans how to see wilderness and laid the bounds for many of our national parks. The goal with these stories is similar to the landscape painters: the author refreshes our sight so we look anew at the monuments around us, and so we can engage in a call and response with our history. ABOUT THE AUTHORHoward Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Bones of the Earth, The Same Ax Twice, Chasing Eden, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, and In the Memory House which The New York Times called “a wise and beautiful book.”In Mansfield’s most recent book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II, he “breaks through the wall of silence some war veterans maintain,” said Booklist. “The result is an impeccably researched and beautifully written account of the stories his father wouldn’t tell. Readers will find themselves in heated sheepskin flight suits and oxygen masks, high in the sky over enemy territory…. A vital and moving history of all that is left unsaid in the aftermath of war and how that affects the next generation.”Mansfield has been honored by the N.H. Humanities Council as “a gem in our granite landscape” and this fall he will receive the Sarah Josepha Hale Award. He has won a Gold Medal for Commentary for City and Regional Magazines, a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was a City and Regional Magazine Feature Story Finalist. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Franklin Pierce University.He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and has co-written a forthcoming documentary film.“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian.”
The first Friday of every month, Gibson's will be staying open until 8pm. Join us during those extra hours for some quiet audiobook time! Bring a quiet craft, a puzzle, a coloring book, or just yourself, pop in your headphones and get some quality audiobook listening time! Support Gibson's with your Audiobook Purchases from Libro.fm!
In November the Gibson's Book Club is reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang.Bookseller Kat is our Book Club Leader. Our book club is free and open to the public. We welcome newcomers and one-timers with open arms! Our eclectic and ambitious book club selections are chosen democratically by the members each year. Join us for our next meeting!
Kathleen Carr Foster visits Gibson's to present her debut Historical Fantasy novel, The Jewel of Corlivo. She will be joined in conversation by fellow author, Luna McNamara. If you loved The Odyssey but wished the women had more screentime, this book is for you. It's an epic fantasy adventure inspired by the Byzantine Empire that doubles as a passionate defense of libraries and the women who care for them. There's even a slow-burn love story with a surly adventurer. What more could you possibly want?ABOUT THE BOOKIn a reimagined Byzantine empire, a runaway courtesan and her disgraced suitor are on the hunt for ancient treasure. But in Kathleen Carr Foster’s glittering debut, what they find will be far more troublesome . . .Raised for the most luxurious pleasure house in mountain-ringed Corlivo, Anna has no illusions about her future. She’ll be a courtesan, as her mother was before she disappeared—and like her mother, gamble that her charms attract a patron rich enough to pay her debts.But when a gruff explorer with connections at the capital notices Anna, it’s her sharp eye that draws him in. Sebastianus thinks Anna’s found a clue within the pages of an ancient book to the lost city of treasure he seeks, and she might well discover more.Together they escape to the imperial court, where marvels are commonplace—and so is treachery. Anna’s courtesan training has hardly prepared her for the dangers of court life, let alone for delving into artifacts from the empire’s past. But when she uncovers a secret tied to her mother’s fate, Anna realizes more than her life is at stake. She holds the key to untold possibilities not only for herself, but for any of the women of Corlivo . . . if she can use it.“Part sexy love story full of yearning, part feminist adventure, all wrapped in a passionate defense of libraries . . . The Jewel of Corlivo caught hold of my heart and refused to let go.” --Caroline Woods, The MesmeristABOUT THE AUTHORKathleen Carr Foster has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize and was nominated for Best New American Voices. She has also received an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her short stories have been published in Slice Magazine, on Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories website, and in 236, BU Creative Writing’s Literary Journal. While an undergraduate at Wellesley College, she won the Davis Prize for Fiction. She teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts and lives in the Boston area with her family and an anxious rescue dog named Wendy. The Jewel of Corlivo is her debut novel.Luna McNamara is the author of Psyche and Eros and The Witch and the Huntress, which have been translated into fourteen languages. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard University with a focus on women and gender in world religions, and has studied ancient Greek language and philosophy. By day she works in social services, and by night she writes about historical women and forgotten gods. She lives in Boston.