Latest news with #BrooklineBooksmith
Boston Globe
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Book lovers take note: These are the 10 best bookstores around Boston
.bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Brookline Booksmith Brookline Booksmith Ellen Johnson No Boston book lover needs to be told about six-plus-decade-old Brookline Booksmith — it's beloved for a reason. It's huge, with more than 50,000 books including the used book cellar, and holds stellar events in-store or across the street at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Buy a book recommended by the veteran staff or a gift from the way-above-average bookstore tchotchke section. Then hit the cellar and join the people standing, heads cocked, scanning the classics bookcase for something they've been meaning to read. Address: 279 Harvard Street, Brookline Phone: 617-566-6660 Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Frugal Bookstore Frugal Bookstore Erin Clark/Globe staff/File In the heart of Roxbury, Frugal is the place to buy popular anti-racist titles, deep dives into the history of the African diaspora, and children's books that feature characters of color. Come for the readings with poets and thinkers, then stay for the expansive clearance section. Frugal also regularly hosts clothing drives, library story times, and book club meetups for the community. Address: 57 Warren Street, Roxbury Phone: Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Harvard Book Store Harvard Book Store Michael Casey No, this 93-year-old stalwart is not affiliated with the Ivy League school across the street that shares its name. But the 5,500-square-foot shop — co-owned by John Henry, owner of the Globe — still has a hallowed, scholarly feel, thanks to floor-to-nearly-ceiling shelves packed with bestsellers, academic titles, and much more. For extra credit, catch a big-name author doing a reading near the sizable children's section, or descend into the used book cellar, where the walls are festooned with bookmarks and other relics discovered inside pre-loved titles. Address: 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Phone: Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } JustBook-ish Lane Turner/Globe staff It's easy to spend an afternoon in the cushioned window nooks at this Dorchester bookshop cafe, the brainchild of former Boston poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola. Its collection — a curated hodgepodge of fiction, philosophy, and children's books — is a celebration of writers of color whose work 'challenges political paradigms.' Not in the mood to read? Swing by for a poetry open mic that goes well into the evening. Address: 1463 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester Phone: Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Katherine Small Gallery Katherine Small Gallery Devoted to graphic design and typography, this bright and tiny bookstore/art space is curated by designer and proprietor Michael Russem, who brings an eye for the elegant to a selection of books you won't find elsewhere — such as a gorgeous Soviet-era children's book collection of typographic messages of protest, or a colorful look at the lunar cycle. It's a singular jewel on the Boston bookstore scene. Address: 108 Beacon Street, Somerville Phone: Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Lovestruck Books Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff The primary feeling sparked by Harvard Square's Lovestruck Books is joy. The joy of a quiet patio, tucked under a cheerful floral trellis, offering space for conversation and coffee (or wine and charcuterie). The joy of a selection curated to both its core audience and general readers — there's Emily Henry and Alice Walker on these shelves. Among romance's core tenets is the HEA — happily ever after — and Lovestruck delivers. Address: 44 Brattle Street, Cambridge Phone: Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } More Than Words More Than Words Tucked near Chinatown, the industrial South End storefront is a treasure trove of leather-bound finds (in the back), carts of $1 used paperbacks (outside), and the usual slate of new releases (everywhere else). Each purchase benefits underprivileged youth from foster care or those coming out of the court system, who also help run and manage the $4 million enterprise. The shop has a second location in Waltham. Address: 242 East Berkeley Street, South End Phone: 617-674-5565 Find online: Related : .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Papercuts Bookshop Papercuts Bookshop Behind Papercuts' unmissable lavender front door is a nook piled high with feminist literature and buzzing with uber-friendly staff. The woman-owned bookshop in Jamaica Plain offers an unmatched lineup of events with female and queer authors. Plus, it runs the indie Cutlass Press (with several in-house titles available for purchase) and sells adorable merch emblazoned with the Orange Line and Papercuts' signature chickadee. Address: 60 South Street, Jamaica Plain Phone: 617-522-3404 Find online: .bofbpic img { width: 100%; height: auto; } Porter Square Books Porter Square Books We miss the slightly shabby old Porter Square Books location, but the newer, shinier store on the Lesley University campus is still a delight: a menagerie of trinkets, cards, and, of course, books. You'll find handpicked reads, new releases, and themed sections that rotate regularly. Many of the staff are writers themselves and give fantastic recommendations. Oh, and the store offers complimentary gift wrapping. (PSB also has a second location in the Seaport.) Address: 1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Phone: Find online: Boston Globe Best of the Best winners for 2025 were selected by Globe newsroom staff and correspondents, and limited to Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline. We want to hear from you: ? 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Boston Globe
15-04-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
11 in Greater Boston win 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships
Six are affiliated with Boston University. Louis Chude-Sokei will be visiting Brookline Booksmith to discus his memoir. Sharona Jacobs Advertisement Emerson professor Tulasi Srinivas. Lakshmi Srinivas Three recipients teach at Harvard University. Wellesley College historian James (Jay) Morton Turner. Lisa Abitbol Among projects the foundation has supported are Zora Neale Hurston's novel Advertisement A complete list of 2025 fellows is available at Mark Feeney can be reached at
Boston Globe
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali's assistant Laurie Woolever tells all, in a moving memoir of her own
She'll talk about it all at Brookline Booksmith alongside restaurateur Tiffani Faison on Friday, March 21. We chatted about the book in advance of the event. Advertisement What was the impetus to make yourself vulnerable in this way? This is just the truth of my story. The books that I've read — memoirs in particular that I've read that moved me, or that I could really take something from, that compelled me, were the ones that were the most honest and didn't spare the writer from the same scrutiny that maybe they gave to the people around them. So I thought: 'Well, I've got a lot of stories to tell. I've had an interesting career, an interesting life, and there's no point in telling those stories if I'm not really honest about my own behavior, mistakes, things I've done that I regret.' I don't want to compare myself to Tony and Mario, but I think there are some similarities. We're all kind of humans [with] a lot of ambition [who] made mistakes and got carried away with different levels of consequence. Advertisement I remember a scene in your book where Mario Batali came into work and swung his passport at you because it had been in the wash. You have a hangover, and you're on the phone getting him a new one. Did you feel like: Why am I doing this? Or did you love it? I think that what I brought to the workplace was humility. … You show up on time or early. You don't argue; you don't ask for anything. And so that was the context that I was working in with Mario and with Tony. I could always see the benefit, certainly with Mario: knowing that things were not great, that he was grabby, that he could be mercurial and difficult and he was not paying me very much money. I was aware of all that, but it was very much worth it, because of the access to power and the opportunities and the education that I was getting. So I was very willing to put up with the big personality and the ego. With Tony, our interactions were such that I was aware that he had a healthy ego, but he approached me with such respect and humility that I never personally felt oppressed by any sort of ego or outsized personality. He was so easy to deal with most of the time. Laurie Woolever's Care and Feeding is out now. Courtesy of Ecco Your book captures a very specific time and place, and certain behaviors. Do you think a Batali or a Bourdain could flourish today? That's a really interesting question. I've been working from home pretty consistently since 2009 so I'm a little bit removed from the day-to-day New York work culture. But, that being said, I've got plenty of friends and colleagues who are still immersed in it. I do think that the moment, the sort of total cultural dominance of those kinds of white men, is over. Advertisement There are certainly still plenty of opportunities for brash, confident white men to thrive and succeed in business in New York or anywhere else in the world. I don't think doors have been closed to them, necessarily. I think maybe they have to tread a little more carefully. I've been asked a lot: 'Have things changed in the restaurant business?' Again, I don't really know. I've been out of it for a long time. But my anecdotal information suggests that restaurants and other businesses have started to implement some control, things like HR, or at least a person who is sort of versed in HR, or just different standards of behavior in the workplace. I think a big personality can still definitely succeed and thrive, whether they're a white man or woman, but I think that people are probably proceeding with some modicum of caution that they didn't back in the late '90s. People have a fixation on Anthony Bourdain: Why did he end his life? What provoked him to take such drastic measures? He always seemed so smart and so introspective, and you knew him, arguably, better than most anybody else. He joked constantly about suicide, in a way that he was obviously joking: 'Oh, I had a terrible burger at Johnny Rockets. I'm gonna end it all,' to the point where you just sort of become inured to it. It's very hard to say. I thought that I knew him really well, but there was a lot I didn't know about him. When I did the oral biography that came out in 2021, I interviewed almost 100 people, and I learned something new about him from every single person I talked to. He was a lot more complex than the publicly available person, or even the person I knew as his assistant. Advertisement I think he just found himself in a tough spot with his relationship [with actress Asia Argento], and I think he didn't have the tools in his toolkit to get through a momentary spasm of grief, humiliation, romantic longing, all of these things. It was so intense and overwhelming. And, for whatever reason, he didn't have years of therapy or whatever tools that a person in the next generation might have. ... As I say in the book, he was a hopeless romantic. He was really in love, and he just couldn't survive what he was going through. It was just a perfect storm of solitude, humiliation, and heartbreak. What was the essence of Batali? What was the allure there? Charisma; I think that's the number one. He could be very charismatic. He knew how to flatter people. He's very, very smart, and he could be very, very generous. He's very skilled at handling people. He's a very skilled power broker, and he knew how to rein it in if he needed to. I mean, all kinds of people in positions of power have said to me, or have said on the record: 'I never saw any of that behavior. I had no idea; it was a total surprise to me.' Advertisement You behaved in ways, and you're very open about this, that probably weren't your finest nor your proudest moments. What was happening? Was it alcohol? Drugs? What was the fuel that kept you tethered to behavior that you might wake up the next morning and regret? Absolutely: having impulses that you know are very human, for pleasure and excess, that you know some people have more than others. Then alcohol certainly was a huge factor in: 'Well, this is what I want to do. And now I've had a couple of drinks, and I feel brave and loose and not really concerned about the consequences.' It was this pursuit of having an interesting life or being interesting. And I had a very young person's sense that the way to do that, to achieve that, or to amass those experiences, was to be extreme and outrageous and indulge every thought and desire and not think too much about the consequences. The idea of being boring or having missed an opportunity was very scary to me, in some ways. We have kids about the same age. Would your child ever read this book? How would that be? It's something I've thought about nonstop since I started this project: What will my son think? And he's 16, and he's just at the age where I'm really not interesting to him as a person. I'm interesting to him as a mom, in terms of: How can I meet his needs? How can I give him spending money and make sure that he's got food? I got a box of galleys a few months ago and opened them up, and I said, 'This is the book that I wrote. It's coming out soon. If you want to read it, there's a bunch of copies here. Feel free to take one. We can talk about anything you want. If you don't feel like reading it, that's fine, too.' And he has not read it, and I don't think he has any interest in it. At some point, maybe he will. You've had several years of sobriety now. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I don't at all miss the way things used to be, however much fun it was in moments. There was so much anxiety and regret and depression and just confusion and brain fog around being drunk and high so often and so much of the time. I don't miss it. I stay close to a 12-step program. I recognize that people do relapse. I feel like I'm in a really good place where it's not something that I wish I could still do. I joke that I retired from drinking because I got too good at it, which is, of course, not true. I was terrible at it. I did enough for a lifetime, and I know where it leads for me. People are always curious about: Who are the good people in the food business? Who do you really admire? Ryan Bartlow of Ernesto's; his restaurant is in New York. Now, I should say, we are writing a cookbook together. There's that. But I wouldn't be working with him if I didn't admire him. … He runs a very calm and happy kitchen, and he's successful. Mashama Bailey in Savannah, Ga., is running an extremely successful, extremely good restaurant. I've interviewed her a bunch of times. She's just really thoughtful about how to be in the world. Those are two examples. But I think there are plenty of great people. It's a business that's full of great people and some bad apples. Do they start out bad, or does the industry make them bad? What inspires them to act like that? It probably goes back to whatever makes up a person's personality: They bring that into the workplace, and then your attitudes about money and your sense of security and in yourself. You feel like you're constantly being threatened, then you become sort of defensive and tyrannical. Tony just had a different sense of security, and it was all kind of gravy; he never had to really threaten people or be like that. Is there anything that you wish more people knew about Bourdain that hasn't been asked? Is there anything that you'd like people to know? Like everyone else, he was a fallible human being. I think he's been sort of deified. It's a lovely impulse. People loved him so much and got so much out of his work that they want to deify him, but that can lead you to feel very disappointed, too, when a person like that makes a terrible decision, for instance, to end their own life. I think it's important for people to recognize that he was just a human being, just a guy trying to do the best that he could. Interview was edited and condensed. Kara Baskin can be reached at
Boston Globe
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Brookline author Nicole Graev Lipson unmasks the fictions that shape motherhood — and herself
Some books crack wide open our understanding of what it is to exist in this world. 'I wanted to explore the blurry boundary between truth and fiction when one is a woman,' Lipson, who lives in Brookline, said, 'and how easy it is to find ourselves performing fictional versions of who we are.' In 12 essays, Lipson mines her experience as a case study to peel away these fictions and reach for a deeper reality. Peppering her explorations with examples from literature, philosophy, and pop culture from Shakespeare to Eddie Vedder, from Maya Angelou's memoir 'Mom & Me & Mom' to the film 'Mean Girls,' she critiques herself and her relationships with candor and empathy, prompting the reader to awakenings of their own. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The award-winning writer and Emerson College MFA program alumna will discuss 'Mothers' with author Joanna Rakoff at an event for Brookline Booksmith at Advertisement Q . In the essay 'Thinkers Who Mother,' you shine a light on the often-unrecognized deep thinking that goes into mothering. How are mothers thinkers? A . The term 'mental load' is used a lot in terms of the minutiae that mothers have to contend with, the calendaring and remembering. It implies busy work. But if you think about a mother's day, and all of the resources we're drawing on in real time, observing our children and attuning to their needs and to the situation at hand, the complexity is profound. We're making hypotheses and calculations, and all of them have a rationale that comes from experience, from years of gathered wisdom, from what we've learned from our children, and they from us, in this complex symbiosis. There is this age-old distinction in western culture between thought and feeling, and historically, thought has been connected to the male realm and valued over feeling. Mothering requires both feeling and deep, deep thinking, happening together and fueling each other. Advertisement Q. In 'The Friendship Plot,' you argue against the idea that deep fellowship is experienced only by men, a concept reinforced by the likes of Montaigne and Plato. A. Few places in our culture have done justice to the incredible life-changing, soul-nourishing, politically meaningful power of close female friendships. Our closest friends can be the mirrors through which we discover ourselves; the bridges we cross to more fully become ourselves. So often, close female relationships, if not trivialized, are demonized. Gendered terms like 'cliques' in middle school or 'coven of witches' illustrate the ways our culture treats them with suspicion. In a patriarchy, close female friendships challenge the status quo. I wanted to step out of the fictions that our culture teaches us about drama between women and celebrate my long-term friendship. In some ways, friendship is the purest form of care and love because there is no obligation built into it. It is freely chosen. Q. In this book, you also examine cultural archetypes that apply to men, specifically as they relate to your son and your mothering of him. A. Yes, it's not simply women who have to contend with these fictional characters. Men have templates pressed upon them too, and I've thought a lot while raising my son about how to protect him from cultural messages about what makes a 'man.' Unfortunately, the dominant narratives about manhood still insist that men are stoic, tough, above feeling, and violent. In the essay 'Tikkun Olam Ted,' I write about a time when my worry about our culture's impact on my son gets turned toward him and in some ways taken out on him, as I interpret his actions — behaving in ways that were embarrassing to me at Tikkun Olam Day at Hebrew school, a day devoted to goodness and repair — through the lens of what I fear him becoming as opposed to what he actually is and the goodness that lives inside of him. My son, contrary to stereotypes, might just be the most deeply feeling of my three children, and I've often talked to him about how this is his superpower. Advertisement Q. You examine the concept of solitude and mothers' guilty cravings for alone time in 'A Place, and a State of Affairs.' What literary references helped you process this? A. I'm an introvert who needs a great deal of alone time in order to function, and having children is hard to reconcile with alone time for women. I tried to hold up my experiences chafing against the constant togetherness of family life within the broader context of the stories we've absorbed about solitude. Canonical works of American literature — whether it's 'Moby Dick' or Thoreau's 'Walden' — promote this romantic idealization of the solitary seeker. Becoming a mother brought home how this romantic ideal isn't accessible for women with children. In books like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', we see a woman who longs for solitude and some escape from her children. And ultimately, the only way she can get it is to walk into the ocean and drown herself. This is a recurring motif throughout literature, that the only way for mothers to access that silence is through death. What is lost when women caring for the next generation don't have access to solitude as a way of replenishing themselves? Advertisement Q. Later in the book, you question your relationship to aging when, in your 40s, you begin to obsess over becoming a 'hot mom.' How did your perspective transform? A. That essay helped me learn two things. One, how much women in our culture are trained to confuse desirability with desire. When I started to wear sparkly tank tops and do Pure Barre and buy expensive face creams, what I truly wanted wasn't to be 'hot,' but to feel like I was still vital and alive. And two, while I was holding up the 20-something Pure Barre instructors with shiny hair as models of womanhood that I should aspire to, I realized that the most powerful role models throughout my life have been older women: my high school English teacher, my college writing professor, my neighbor who's this brilliant rabbi and writer — all wise, experienced women with the inner strength to set the terms of their own mattering. Those are the people I genuinely long to be like one day. Interview has been edited and condensed.
