“Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.” 

― Laurie Helgoe

Thanks to all our friends who've visited so far -- it's been wonderful to see everyone's face (well, the top half above the mask anyway) and we're so grateful to everyone who has been so respectful of our policies!

Curbside Pick Up: Daily, 3PM-7PM

On Corruption in America & Break ’Em Up!

Register for the event on Crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/breakupcorruption

Porter Square Books is pleased to host a virtual talk with Sarah Chayes, author of On Corruption in America, and Zephyr Teachout, author of Break 'Em Up! This event is hosted on Crowdcast, and is free and open to all to attend.

From the prizewinning journalist, internationally recognized expert on corruption in government networks throughout the world, On Corruption in America is a major, unflinching book that looks homeward to America, exploring the insidious, dangerous networks of corruption of our past, present, and precarious future. Corruption, as Chayes sees it, is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private-sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their main objective: not to serve the public but to maximize returns for network members.

From the titans of America’s Gilded Age (Carnegie, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, et al.) to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal; from the Clinton policies of political favors and personal enrichment to Trump’s hydra-headed network of corruption, systematically undoing the Constitution and our laws, Chayes shows how corrupt systems are organized, how they enforce the rules so their crimes are covered legally, how they are overlooked and downplayed–shrugged off with a roll of the eyes–by the richer and better educated, how they become an overt principle determining the shape of our government, affecting all levels of society.

Break ’Em Up is a passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy. Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break ’Em Up.

In Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, first-generation American LatinX Liliana Cruz does what it takes to fit in at her new nearly all-white school. But when family secrets spill out and racism at school ramps up, she must decide what she believes in and take a stand. 

Former Boston Public School teacher and debut author Jennifer De Leon has a goal: she wants to put a free copy of her book in the hands of every ninth grade student at the O'Bryant High School in Boston. Help us reach this goal by donating a copy to a student! Porter Square Books will gather all donations and bring them over to the O'Bryant School once we've reached our goal.

In 1945 director William Wellman (a member of the French Foreign Legion Flying Corps in World War I) directed The Story of G.I. Joe based on the work by Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The movie made a star of Robert Mitchum, who was nominated for an Oscar.  Based on the novella Glory for Me (1945) by MacKinlay Kantor, Samuel Goldwyn produced The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946; the winner of seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor Frederic March, Score and Editing. Interesting trivia:  Harold Russell is the only performer to win two Oscars for the same performance; he was presented with an honorary Oscar and then won in the Best Supporting Actor category.

Twentieth Century Fox produced a version of author Desmond Young’s book, Rommel: The Desert Fox in 1951.The movie, titled simply The Desert Fox, starred James Mason and Jessica Tandy. The Broadway play, Stalag 17 (1951) was made into a film in 1953 adapted by Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum. The film starred Don Taylor, Peter Graves and in his Oscar winning performance, William Holden.

1953 brought James Jones’s bestselling debut novel From Here to Eternity (1951) to the screen.  Adapted by Daniel Taradash, the film starred Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr and won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director Fred Zinnemann, Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor nods to Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed. Interesting trivia: the title comes from an 1892 Rudyard Kipling poem Gentlemen-Rankers. Humphrey Bogart starred in the Navy drama The Caine Mutiny in 1954 from the 1951 novel by Herman Wouk. An epic war picture, The Longest Day was released in 1962. Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 nonfiction book told the story of the D-Day and the movie starred John Wayne and Henry Fonda.

The Dirty Dozen was an adaptation of the bestseller (1965) by E. M. Nathanson and released by M-G-M in 1967 and stared Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine.  Two years later Derek Wood and Derek Dempster’s book The Narrow Margin was adapted into Battle of Britain starring Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Michael Caine. Interesting trivia: Inspired by the movie The Caine Mutiny, Maurice Micklewhite changed his name in 1954 to Michael Caine. A 1980 French film written and directed by François Truffaut, The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro) tells the story of Occupied France beginning in 1942.  The movie won ten Césars (the French Oscar) and starred Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Interesting trivia: Renée-Jeanne Simonot, the mother of Catherine Deneuve, is 108 years old and lives in Paris.

Steven Spielberg directed Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Written by Robert Rodat and set during the invasion of Normandy, the film is known for its graphic portrayal of war. Starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, the movie was nominated for eleven Oscars and received stellar reviews and box office. Two of the most recent films made about World War II are Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour, both released to acclaim in 2017.  Dunkirk, written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan, starred Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, and Mark Rylance. And The Darkest Hour, written by Anthony McCarten, starred Kirsten Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar.

                                                                Winston Churchill June 4, 1940

There can be a lot of creative potential in constraints. As anyone who has ever written a sonnet or a villanelle knows, the challenge of finding a word or line that fits with the structure can force your brain into creativity. By this point we've all become experts of sorts in creativity within constraints. (How's your sourdough starter?) Oulipo was a literary movement that took this idea of writing to their logical extremes, designing exercises with intricate constraints. If you're stuck in your writing, these techniques can be great ways to force your brain into creativity. They also have a number of techniques that use chance to build poems and stories so you can "write" something without having to come up with your own words. Here are a few Oulipo exercises to get your writing.

Take a poem or piece of writing that already exists, either your own or someone else’s, and substitute each noun with the one that occurs seven nouns away in the dictionary. Like a particular line this generates? Follow where that line leads. N+7 not giving you good words? Try N+1 or 5 or whatever you like.

Start with a one-word line or sentence. Then write a two-word line or sentence. Then three. Then four. Then five. If you find a sentence or line you really like, drop the technique and see where that line leads.

This probably the most famous Oulipo technique. Pick a vowel to exclude from the piece and describe something in your day. So, if you pick "a" and want to describe your breakfast, you can't have "apples" or "cereal" or "orange juice" and you can't even say "breakfast." George Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter "e."

This technique comes from the idea that prisoners needed to conserve paper and so could only use letters that would neither rise above or sink below the lines of lined paper. So no b,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,p,q,t, or y. You might feel a little bit like a prisoner now, too, so use this technique to write a letter to "someone on the outside."

Our "get 3 paperbacks" bundle options have expanded to include Caleb, Meaghan, Shana, and Sarah! Get 3 paperbacks handpicked by the bookseller that fit in with their theme. You can find all bundles.

Looking around the internet a bit, we found this full episode of Reading Rainbow from 1989 on YouTube. Get the theme song stuck in your ("Butterfly in the skyyyyy...."), enjoy the late 80s fashion, and spend some time with one of the great celebrations of books and reading.

They're our family, and they could use a hand. If you are able, please considering donating to the Cafe Zing GoFundMe; 100% of proceeds go to baristas. What might you have spent at Zing over the past weeks if it we were in normal times? If that $10 is still in your wallet, consider putting it in their tip jar. We love you, Zing!

New month, new discounts! Check out what our booksellers are loving this summer.

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