Boswell Events This Week: Harvey J. Kaye at Turner Hall on Tuesday, Rachel Kapelke-Dale and Jessica Pan at Boswell on Wednesday, a Ticketed Event with Jessica Vealitzek on Wednesday as Well.

We're open Memorial Day from 10 am to 5 pm. We've also helping host three events this week. Here's more info.

Tuesday, May 27, 7 pm, at Turner Hall, 1034 N. Fourth St. 53203:
Harvey J. Kaye, author of The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great.

In The Fight for the Four Freedoms, Harvey J. Kaye challenges us to remember what conservatives have never wanted to acknowledge and liberals have all too often forgotten: that the Greatest Generation was also America’s most progressive one. Franklin Roosevelt, their iconic and beloved president, endowed Americans with the promise of the “Four Freedoms:” freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In their spirit, the United States confronted the Great Depression and pursued the labors and struggles of the New Deal. Those Four Freedoms became the aims that mobilized Americans to defeat the Axis Powers and strengthen America’s prosperity after the Second World War.

Kaye calls the children and grandchildren of that generation, the inheritors and guardians of those dearly earned freedoms, to take up the fight for them again. By making America more progressive, the Greatest Generation had their true rendezvous with destiny. And Kaye convinces readers that to honor them, it is time for today’s generation of Americans to follow suit, before it is too late.

"Harvey Kaye has done it again. The Fight for the Four Freedoms reaches back into history - to Franklin Roosevelt's vision of a truly just and fair America - for inspiration about how we can re-imagine a progressive future. Just as he did with his important work on Thomas Paine, Kaye shows how the victories and defeats of the 1930s and 1940s - the struggle of our parents and grandparents - contain the bricks and straw for rebuilding democracy. Once again, he tells a spirited story written for you and me.” —Bill Moyers

Wednesday, May 28, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Rachel Kapelke-Dale and Jessica Pan, authors of Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults, in conversation with Milwaukee Magazine’s Claire Hanan.

After graduating from Brown University in 2007, Rachel Kapelke-Dale and Jessica Pan made a pact: to stay in touch and never gloss over the bad stuff. Graduates in Wonderland is the epistolary account of what happened to them on the road to adulthood in the frank and stark manner in which good friends relate the details of their lives despite the time and distance that separate them.

A coming-of-age story told through two friends’ most intimate emails about the winding path to adulthood, from New York to Beijing to Paris to Melbourne, Graduates in Wonderland exposes the good days and bad dates depicted with epic hilarity in the vein of Lena Dunham’s Girls. Jess and Rachel gamely navigate language barriers, romantic flirting and flattening, workplace success, abandoned jobs, networking pitfalls, fragile friendships, office love, general pangs of loneliness, and bouts of youthful euphoria, all with open hearts and wry asides.

Self-aware and ever-hopeful, Graduates in Wonderland traces the young women’s journeys from their beginnings as fresh-faced graduates to their later incarnations as (almost) adults. But most of all, Graduates in Wonderland is about the endurance of friendship throughout the turbulent years of one’s twenties.

Milwaukee-raised Rachel Kapelke-Dale is pursuing a PhD in cinematographic studies at University College London. She has a BA in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University and a master’s in Cinema Studies from the Université de Paris VII. Jessica Pan has a BA in Psychology and Literary Arts from Brown University. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She was the editor of a magazine and a TV reporter in Beijing.

Moderating this discussion will be Claire Hanan, assistant editor at Milwaukee Magazine. Hanan’s writing has appeared in FutureClaw Magazine, MSN.com (UK), Mizzou Magazine, and Vox magazine.

Also on Wednesday, May 28, 7:30 pm, a ticketed event at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 W. Brown Deer Road, 53217: A ticketed event with Jessica Null Vealitzek, author of The Rooms are Filled.

This event is produced by Milwaukee Reads, and co-sponsored by Bronze Optical and Localicious. Tickets are $22 ($18 for Lynden Sculpture Garden members) and includes light refreshments and a copy of The Rooms are Filled. Doors open for mix and mingle at 7 pm; the talk begins at 7:30.

Set in 1983, The Rooms are Filled is the heart-wrenching story of two castaways brought together by vastly different circumstances. At 39-old, Michael Nygaard is transplanted from his Minnesota farm, and the sacred wolf-filled wilderness that surrounds him, to small-town Ackerman, Illinois after his father dies abruptly. Simultaneously, Julia Parnell escapes to Ackerman in hopes of beginning her life anew after a failed attempt to live openly with her lifelong girlfriend, Rose.

In his new town, Michael doesn’t fit with the characters that surround him. He finds temporary refuge with his proper, young—closeted—teacher, Miss Parnell. When Julia’s secret is exposed, she faces a choice: accept herself or deny her true nature. Michael must also choose whether to simply endure or fight back. Coming of age will take bravery from these two lost souls and if they cannot find the strength to change, neither will have the life they deserve and desire. Boswellian Jen found The Rooms are Filled to be "a touching, character-driven story."

A former communications director for a gubernatorial candidate and an exhibit writer, Jessica Vealitzek writes for Rebellious magazine, Great New Books, and PDXX Collective. The Rooms are Filled is her first novel.

And looking ahead to next week:
Tuesday, June 3, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Joël Dicker, author of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.
This event is co-sponsored by Alliance Française de Milwaukee. Mr. Dicker will be reading in French and English. At the event, you can enter to win a drawing of the French edition, La Vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert.

Winner of three French literary prizes and having alerady become a international bestseller, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, cinematic literary thriller and global phenomenon about the disappearance of a 15-year-old New Hampshire girl and, thirty years later, a young American writer’s determination to clear his mentor’s name while finding the inspiration for his next bestseller. To save his mentor Harry, his writing career, and eventually even himself, Marcus Goldman must answer three questions, all of which are mysteriously connected: Who killed Nola Kellergan? What happened one misty morning in Somerset in the summer of 1975? And how do you write a successful and true novel?

“This sprawling, likable whodunit [is] obvious ballast for the summer’s beach totes…Dicker keeps the prose simple and the pace snappy in a plot that winds up with more twists than a Twizzler…[An] entertaining debut thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A literary murder mystery that is expertly paced over 600-plus tautly written pages…A powerful novel about passion, jealousy, family, redemption, friendship and love, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a Great American Novel—written by a European.” —The Bookseller

Here's Stefanie Cohen in The Wall Street Journal on the book's journey to America.

Joël Dicker was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and spent his childhood summers in New England, where he later studied law. He lives in Geneva. Like his character, he is a handsome young man who has become a literary sensation.