Monday, April 22, 2019

Boswell event blog - Elizabeth Minchilli sold out, Christopher Castellani with Liam Callanan and Milwaukee Opera Theatre, David Ranney, Grace Lavery, Independent Bookstore Day, Kevin Henkes, Stephen Anderson, Anna Quindlen with Carole E Barrowman

It's time for a Daniel's out of the office what's going on at Boswell blog. Is this our upcoming events page? It is!



Alas, registration has closed for the Bartolotta dinner with Elizabeth Minchilli at the Italian Community Center on Tuesday, April 23. 

Signed copies of The Italian Table may be available after this event at Boswell. No walk-up tickets available.

Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
Wednesday, April 24, 7:00 pm, at Boswell
Christopher Castellani, Artistic Director of GrubStreet Writing Center and author of All This Talk of Love, chats with Liam Callanan, UWM Professor of English and author of Paris by the Book about his latest, a glittering novel of desire and ambition, set against the glamorous literary circles of 1950s Italy that illuminates one of the great love stories of the twentieth century - Tennessee Williams and his longtime partner Frank Merlo.
This event is cosponsored by Milwaukee Opera Theatre, who will present a scene reading before the conversation.
Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes:“Blazing... casts a spell right from the start. This book is a kind of poem in praise of pleasure. Its author knows a great deal about life; better, he knows how to express what he knows. But this is an alert, serious, sweeping novel. To hold it in your hands is like holding, to crib a line from Castellani, a front-row opera ticket.”
Christopher Castellani is Artistic Director of GrubStreet Writing Center. He is author of A Kiss from Maddalena, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in 2004, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award, as well as the essay collection The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Thursday, April 25, 7:00 pm, at Boswell
Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago, David Ranney shares his experiences working in the factories of southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana, one of the heaviest industrial concentrations in the world.
Ranney walks through the heart of Chicago's South Side, observing the noise, heavy traffic, the 24-hour restaurants and bars, the rich diversity of people on the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the smell of the highly polluted air. Factory life includes stints at a machine shop, a shortening factory, a railroad car factory, a structural steel shop, a box factory, a chemical plant, and a paper cup factory. Along the way there is a wildcat strike, an immigration raid, shop-floor actions protesting supervisor abuses, serious injuries, a failed effort to unionize, and a murder.
Ranney focuses on race and class relations, working conditions, environmental issues, and broader social issues in the 1970s that impacted the shop floor. Forty years later, Ranney returns to Chicago's South Side to reveal what happened to the communities. Living and Dying on the Factory Floor discusses the nature of work, race and class, and our ability to create a just society.
David Ranney is professor emeritus in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois Chicago. Ranney has also been a factory worker, a labor and community organizer, and an activist academic. He is the author of four books and many other published works.

Boswell Celebrates Independent Bookstore Day with Kevin Henkes, author of Sweeping Up The Heart
Saturday, April 27, 2:00 pm, at Boswell
Saturday, April 27, is Independent Bookstore Day, and Boswell is the perfect place to celebrate all day long. We’ll have all kinds of Independent Bookstore Day exclusives for sale starting at our 10:00 am opening – first come, first serve, no holds – like exclusive book releases, enamel pins, prints, literary tea towels, vinyl, and author-autographed goods.
At 2:00 pm, Wisconsin’s own Kevin Henkes, author and illustrator of more than fifty books, including multiple Caldecott and Newbery Honor titles, will talk about his latest novel, Sweeping Up the Heart, another instant Henkes classic about loss, loneliness, and friendship. We love this book! As much of the book is set in a pottery studio, we’ve partnered with one of the East Side’s hidden gems, Murray Hill Pottery Works, and during the event we’ll highlight their studio, a unique environment dedicated to learning, fun, and the appreciation of clay art.
Instead of going on spring break, Amelia is stuck at home with her father and the babysitter. The week ahead promises to be boring, until Amelia meets Casey at her local art studio. Amelia has never been friends with a boy before, and the experience is both fraught and thrilling. When Casey claims to see the spirit of Amelia’s mother, who died ten years before, the pair embark on an altogether different journey in their attempt to find her.
Kevin Henkes has received multiple Caldecott Honors, Geisel Honors, and two Newbery Honors. He lives in Wisconsin.

Stephen Anderson, author of The Dream Angel Plays the Cello
Monday, April 29, 7:00 pm, at Boswell
Prize-winning Milwaukee poet Stephen Anderson visits Boswell with his new collection of poetry, The Dream Angel Plays the Cello.
Anderson has traveled widely, taking notes, gathering landscapes and images, and his poetry reflects his travels to Europe and the Caribbean, his time spent in residence abroad as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile, and a university lecturer in London. Lyrical and often ekphrastic, in his poems you will find Isadora Duncan, Winslow Homer, Wim Venders, Mozart and Lorca, all challenging the current political myopia, offering cultural critique, and turning back to reminiscence on time passing.
Anderson’s poems mingle the qualities of the mystical, philosophical and political. Mostly observations, the poet casts his keen eye on the complexities of the modern world while considering what it is that makes us human. Dream-like and ethereal, Anderson creates a world constructed of the concrete and the transcendent.
Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and author of Montezuma Resurrected And Other PoemsNavigating in the Sun, and In The Garden Of Angels And Demons. His work has appeared in Southwest ReviewTipton Poetry Journal, and Verse Wisconsin, and many of Anderson’s poems have been featured on WUWM’s Lake Effect.

Anna Quindlen, author of Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting, in conversation with Carole E Barrowman
Tuesday, April 30, 7:00 pm, at Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, 19805 W Capitol Dr, in Brookfield's Mitchell Park
The Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, Oconomowoc's Books & Company, and Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company present a grand evening with Anna Quindlen, the acclaimed novelist and journalist known for her candid, frank, and illuminating writing. She’s now appearing for Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting, a bighearted book of wisdom, wit, and insight, celebrating the love and joy of being a grandmother. Quindlen will be in conversation with author, critic, and Alverno Professor Carole E. Barrowman.
Tickets are $31 and include admission to the event, all taxes and fees, and a copy of Nanaville, available atquindlenwi.bpt.me.
Before blogs even existed, Anna Quindlen became a go-to writer on the joys and challenges of family, motherhood, and modern life, in her nationally syndicated column. Now she’s taking the next step and going full nana in the pages of this lively, beautiful, and moving book about being a grandmother. Quindlen offers thoughtful and telling observations about her new role, no longer mother and decision-maker, but secondary character and support to the parents of her grandson. She writes, “Where I once led, I have to learn to follow. Eventually a close friend provides words to live by: Did they ask you?”
Everything you love about Anna Quindlen is here in this special new book - her singular voice has never been sharper or warmer. With the same insights she brought to motherhood in Living Out Loud and to growing older in Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, this new nana uses her own experiences to illuminate those of many others. Carole E Barrowman is Director of Creative Writing Studies at Alverno College and presents the book feature on The Morning Blend.


We do have one other event to tell you about. The Friends of Art History Lecture featuring Grace Lavery is on Thursday, April 25 at 5 pm. This talk will be at Mitchell Hall, Room 191. The talk will be on the subject of Lavery's new book, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan. Lavery is Assistant Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley. It is free and no registration is needed.

More information available at the UWM event page

More event information available on our upcoming events page.

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