Upcoming Events
We are committed to providing our loyal customers and passionate readers to an ongoing series of author talks throughout the year. Scroll down to see some of the terrific authors—including Heather Cox Richardson, Louise Penny, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Hood, and Martin Walker— we hosted in 2024.
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Keep Posted
Free Event
Murray Carpenter
WHEN: Tuesday, March 25 at 6:30pm
WHERE: Left Bank Books
Murray joins us to celebrate the release of Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick. As a journalist focusing on science, health, climate, and environmental stories, Murray has reported for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and Maine Public Radio. His work has taken him across the United States, and to Guantanamo, the Colombian llanos, and a factory town in China.
Marshaling the findings of extensive research and deep investigative reporting, Murray describes in Sweet and Deadly the damage Coke does to America's health—and the remarkable campaign of disinformation conducted by the company to keep consumers in the dark. He details how the Coca-Cola corporation's sophisticated shadow network has masterfully spread disinformation for decades to hide the health risks of its product from consumers—risks disproportionately borne by Black, brown, and low-income communities. This eye-opening book finally and fully reveals the truth behind that aura.
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, writes: “The story of Coke is a case study in brilliant marketing, greed, and unchecked corporate power. Carpenter tells the story well, exploring how an industrial mixture of sugar water and coloring agents and flavor additives has conquered the world—at the expense of our health.”
Murray holds an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and lives in Belfast, Maine.
Free Event
Christine Murphy
WHEN: Friday, April 4 at 6:30pm
WHERE: Left Bank Books
Christine, who has been called “an author to watch” by Kirkus Reviews, will join us to discuss her debut novel, Notes On Surviving the Fire, an unbelievably propulsive and darkly funny story about feminist rage, vengeance, and the insidious nature of rape culture.
The story follows Sarah Common who grew up in the forests of Maine where she learned how to stalk prey and kill, but only when necessary. Now a PhD student in California studying violence within Buddhist traditions, Sarah is assaulted and finds herself fantasizing about revenge. In the end, she must decide if revenge can ever be sweet.
Christine is an utterly fascinating person. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies and has lived, worked, and traveled in more than one-hundred countries. She spent eleven months in a tent travelling across the African continent and a year as a resident in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas. She was inspired to write her book in the wake of surviving an assault herself and says she wanted to write “a hell of a story that looked at violence and violation” outside the usual tropes found in most revenge fantasies. Notes on Surviving the Fire is a hurtling ride of a novel.
Free Event
Maureen Stanton
WHEN: Thursday, April 17 at 6:30pm
WHERE: Left Bank Books
When Maureen’s boyfriend, Steve, at age 29, was diagnosed with cancer, the two of them embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. This is Maureen’s story about their odyssey through the difficult but exquisite terrain of love—romantic, brotherly, spiritual—in the face of illness.
The Murmur of Everything Moving won the 2024 prestigious Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. It was hailed as “Beguiling, vivid, and rich…The writing is precise and excellent—there are certain lines so good you want to write them down so you don’t forget…”
An excerpt from Maureen’s book appeared in the Sewannee Review and won the magazine’s 2023 nonfiction contest. The contest judge wrote: “What I loved most about this was the way it moved along the same storm systems of high agony and the quiet routine of daily despair. It is moving and tortuous without being cloying or sentimental. The ending is simple and spare and poignant and made my mouth go dry.”
Andre DuBus III, author of Ghost Dogs, House of Sand and Fog, and Townie, writes: “Like all great memoirs, [Murmur] plumbs far deeper than its immediate subject… This viscerally moving memoir is a long song and a tribute… It is also heartbreakingly beautiful, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”
Maureen’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, The Sun, and many others. She has received the Sewanee Review prize, Pushcart prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She is a professor of creative writing at UMass Lowell.
Free Event
Melissa Olson
WHEN: Wednesday, April 23 at 6:30pm
WHERE: Left Bank Books
In her book The Rose by Another Name, Melissa weaves fictional narrative with historic documents to make a compelling case for attributing the Shakespeare canon to the pen of Christopher Marlowe. She agrees with scholars who argue that Shakespeare did not have “the education, exposure to foreign cultures, associations with members of the upper classes, and evidence of extreme personal conflict [that equate] with the level of genius in his work.”
Christopher Marlowe, she argues, was “a poet, playwright, government agent, atheist, and exile [who had] “the ability, experience, opportunity and motive to write. [He] was a brilliant, well-educated playwright who died a tragic death at the age of 29, before many of the ‘Shakespeare’ plays were written. But what if Marlowe didn't die? What if his death was faked?”
She became interested in the authorship question in 2001 when she saw the PBS Frontline documentary "Much Ado About Something" by Michael Rubbo. Her "gentle obsession" has lasted ever since.
Melissa has an MA in History Museum Studies from SUNY Oneonta and is the director of the Alice Pendleton Library on Isleboro Island off the coast of Maine.
Recently at LBB
March 20, 2025
Tess Garritsen
Some one hundred of Tess’s fans gathered at The First Church in Belfast to hear the internationally best-selling writer talk about The Summer Guests, her just-released mystery set in mid-coast Maine. This is the second book in Tess’s new espionage series (she’s just completed the third!) that features retired CIA operative Maggie Bird and her redoubtable colleagues who comprise the Martini Club.
Tess read excerpts from a Yankee magazine article about the community of retired CIA spies who live in Camden, the town that Tess has called home for more than thirty years. The article’s author, Jon Marcus, wrote this when interviewing Tess: “One night, Gerritsen was talking to a neighbor at whose house her son was attending a sleepover. ‘Oh, you must be one of those retired spies,’ she joked. There was a long pause. ‘Who have you been talking to?’ the neighbor asked. Gerritsen still isn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke, too.”
Audience members were delighted to learn that book #3 in the series will be published in the fall of 2026, and that a limited television series featuring the Martini Club members is in the works.
Finally, Tess shared some her writing habits, including that she doesn’t plot in advance, she writes the first draft longhand on “old-fashioned paper,” and she never revises during that time. The Summer Guests is her thirty-second book, so she seems to have nailed a system that works for her!
Recently at LBB
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Elizabeth Strout and Lily King
Almost 300 people filled The First Church in Belfast to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout discuss her latest book Tell Me Everything, in which she brings together three of her greatest characters: Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton, and Olive Kitteridge.
Fans learned that Olive came to Liz “fully formed” while she was unloading the dishwasher, and that she never starts a book at the beginning—instead, she writes, in longhand, “scene by scene with no idea where I’m going. If a scene has a heartbeat, it stays. If not, it ends up on the floor.”
In speaking about how much she loves Bob Burgess, the character we first met in The Burgess Boys (2013), Liz read the opening paragraph from Tell Me Everything:
“This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine. . . [who] has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”
After a standing ovation, more than one-hundred people stood in line for Liz’s signature and to have their pictures taken with her. It was a stellar night, filled with laughter, admiration, and all things literary.
Recently at LBB
Monday, September 30, 2024
Martin Walker
An almost-full house was enthralled as Martin shared stories about the Perigord region in France where he and his wife, Julia, live and where he has set his wildly popular Bruno mystery series.
“The Perigord,” Martin said, “never fails to inspire me.” He spoke at length about thow the world-famous Lascaux caves, discovered in 1940, are especially moving for him. “The caves show us that the Perigord is home to ancient archaeological vestiges that extend back nearly 350,000 years.” Martin also spoke about how the caves show us their original inhabitants were “so sophisticated” and “share so many connections with us.”
Of course, he couldn’t talk about his beloved Perigord without telling us tempting stories about the delicious foods the region is known for. He loves crafting the food scenes but gives full credit for those to Julia, an award-winning internationally known food writer.
From caves to caviar, Bruno’s love life to Martin’s love of history, gardening and cooking, and above all, friends and laughter, the evening was an overwhelming delight.
Signed copies of A Grave in the Woods, the latest Bruno mystery, are available at the bookshop. (And we’re happy to ship!)
Recently at LBB
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Ronald C. White
A large crowd greeted New York Times bestselling historian and biographer Ron White to learn how he came to write the acclaimed biography, On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Ron, who has also written biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, explained how he wanted to write a “cradle-to-grave” biography of Chamberlain instead of “simply” focusing on the general’s accomplishments at Gettysburg.
On Great Fields has been widely hailed as the definitive biography of Chamberlain, Maine’s own history-altering Civil War hero. But as Ron explained, Chamberlain was also a stuttering young boy who came to be fluent in nine languages and a trained minister who found his way to the battlefield. From his youth in rural Maine to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership, presidency of Bowdoin College, and governorship of Maine, Ron eloquently traced the narrative arc of Chamberlain’s life.
Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries “The Civil War,” but in this book, Ron captures the complex and inspiring man behind the hero. Following his talk, Ron took questions that further illuminated the work of a biographer and the incredibly rich life of Joshua Chamberlain.
Recently at LBB
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Sam Sifton & A.O. (Tony) Scott
Sam and Tony, two long-time colleagues at The New York Times, held a conversation that informed, entertained, and captivated the 150 audience members lucky enough to be in attendance. By evening’s end, fans were asking the two critics to “please return” for an encore.
Their wide-ranging conversation covered topics as diverse as the role of critics in the media, writing on deadline, how they came to write for the Times, differences between cooking professionally and cooking for family and friends, their shared love affair with the state of Maine, and a hilarious discourse on zucchinis and “quotidian carrots.”
Sam is the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking. For two years he was the paper’s restaurant critic and shared some behind-the-scenes stories about that experience. Sam has also written three cookbooks: See You on Sunday: A Cookbook for Family and Friends, The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes, and Thanksgiving: How to Cook it Well.
Tony was the long-time (2000-2023) film critic for The New York Times before joining the Book review where he now writes essays that explore the intersection of culture, history, technology, and myth. In 2010 Tony was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.
Recently at LBB
Thursday, May 9, 2024
Monica Wood
From her opening remark—”Please excuse the way I look. I’m having a bad hair day”—Monica enchanted and delighted a rapt and enthusiastic audience.
Monica’s talk and book signing was part of a whirlwind series of weeklong events to celebrate her long-awaited new novel, How to Read a Book (published May 7), which has received widespread glowing reviews. The New York Times wrote “This novel is a reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world,” and People magazine, which chose it as one of the “Best Books to Read in May,” called How to Read ”An utter gem; funny, sweet and moving.”
We couldn’t agree more and predict that How to Read a Book will be one of our shop’s best sellers this year. The story of how three disparate and lonely people form an unlikely friendship inspires laughter, tears, and love. This is a book to read more than once, and to give as a gift again and again. It’s that good.
Recently at LBB
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Applause rang throughout the First Church of Belfast when internationally acclaimed historian, educator, and author Heather Cox Richardson entered the room. For the next hour and 15 minutes, she informed, educated, enlightened, and captivated the minds and hearts of the 250 lucky audience members. (The free event reached capacity enrollment three hours after it was announced.)
In addition to her wildly popular books—Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America and How the South Won the Civil War, among others—Heather writes a daily Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, that has some one-and-a-half million subscribers.
Through her self-deprecating humor, vast knowledge base, and passion for the lessons history teaches us, Heather explained why, despite the current political climate, she has hope for the future. At the end of an extensive question-and-answer period, this brilliant, warm, and funny woman was given a prolonged standing ovation. Brava, Heather. Brava!
Wall of Fame
We are deeply grateful to the hundreds of authors — of local, national and international acclaim — who have taken time to visit our bookshop, meet our faithful customers, speak about their work, and sign their books.
Thank you!
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