It’s good to have a team to root for. I get moved by pride. The clips of city streets erupting into cheers at a team’s good win make me cry. It’s been neat seeing New York go nuts with joy for the Knicks. World Cup-wise, there’s a clip from a someone riding a bicycle through Buenos Aires when Argentina won the World Cup in 2022. The quiet city street, the final penalty shot, and then the roar. Eeesh, well, tears again now re-watching it. The seasons collect, another World Cup, and it’s almost the summer solstice. This Thursday evening, June 18 at 6 pm, I’ll be reading from my book Summer Solstice outside under the awning of the lovely shop Pod in Cambridge. It’ll be relaxed and summery. Come say hello. I’d love to see you. We’ll celebrate the long light. And now for the literary news.
“Unrestrained contact” and a search for home
A desire for home is shared, argues Cambridge-based philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, by all living beings. And in his inviting, compelling new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World (Yale), he investigates “belonging, loneliness, alienation, at-home-ness,” and the experiences of “real, open, unrestrained contact” available to us. He lays bare the “sad and dangerous sabotage built into the foundations of the American self,” and suggests that the search for home is not a matter of hoarding wealth and power for individual ownership but “a deeply communal and never-finished quest that requires a softening” of the borders that only seem to separate us from each other, from nature, and “from the deeper currents that animate our shared world.” He brings in poetry, literature, philosophy, theology, economic theory, a tiny bit of science, discussing competition, isolation, participation, the erotics of friendship, the material and the spiritual and how both are intertwined in our search to understand “community and cosmos.” He’s forthright in his diagnosis of the grim and isolated states we’re existing in, but the book is deeply optimistic, showing the generational task of laying the groundwork for a new culture. New ways and new worlds — a sustained sense of belonging — are possible. “Here we all are, for a few short moments — tiny, brittle, ignorant, and unspeakably beautiful participants in a drama we could not hope to fully comprehend.”
Publishing as living practice at Harvard’s Carpenter Center this summer
This week marks the launch of a new annual summer program at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Salad Days is “dedicated to publication-based projects that explore publishing as an artistic, research-driven, and collaborative practice.” It’s not a traditional exhibition, it’s not artists’ books propped open under glass, it’s not hushed dull gallery space. Instead, the Carpenter Center will morph into an active publishing engine, part bookstore, part reading space, part research environment. A place to gather, talk, engage, view film screenings, participate in public programs. On display will be various writings, artists’ books, materials from the archives, all of which “foreground publishing as a mode of artistic production and exchange.” This first installment has been done in collaboration with indie publisher Primary Information which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Salad Days: Primary Information opens this Thursday, June 18, with a conversation between Primary Information co-founder James Hoff and Harvard professor of art, film, and visual studies David Joselit. The program runs through August 16.
2026 Maine Literary Award winners
The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance recently announced the winners of the 2026 Maine Literary Awards. The award for poetry went to Lily Brown for Blade Work. In fiction, Jud Widing won for Bud’s Dead. In non-fiction, Alix Morris won for A Year with the Seals: Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea’s Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures. In memoir, Michelle Lewis won for Spare. In YA, Robin Elsbeth Jenkins won for The Secret of the Catapus. In children’s lit, Joyce Sidman and Melissa Sweet won for Dear Acorn (Love, Oak): Letter Poems to Friends. Rylan Hynes took the award for Excellence in Publishing for their work at the Telling Room. And the MWPA Distinguished Achievement Award for “exceptional and steadfast contributions to Maine literary arts” went to poet Robert Farnsworth of Bates College and director of Island Readers & Writers Jan Coates. For the complete list of winners, click here.
A new bookstore in Sturbridge, Mass
The Cursed Page Bookstore has had its soft opening in Sturbridge, Mass, with a tight focus on gothic horror and dark academia in an old former mill. “We are more than just a bookstore,” the website notes; they’re “a sanctuary for the curious, the macabre, and the deeply literary.” Besides horror and dark academia, they carry “the chilling folklore of New England,” as well as some science and nature, gardening, cooking, and craft titles. Owner Amy Black has had a three-decade career in bookselling. “Books have never been just objects on a shelf to me,” she told Shelf Awareness. “They are doors and windows into other worlds, other lives, and ourselves.” As noted on the site, “At the Cursed Page, we aren’t just selling books — we are preserving the lore.” The Cursed Page Bookstore is at 559 Main Street, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.
Books of note coming out this week
On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen, translated from Faroese by Marita Thomsen (Transit).
Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body by Erin Maglaque (Astra House).
Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden by Hockley Clarke (McNally Editions).
Booksellers’ best: Staff picks from New England independent bookstores
Zoe at River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury, Connecticut, recommends Hollow Inside by Asako Otani, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Pushkin): “A really stellar non-western look into unconventional living—similar to dark-comedy Convenience Store Woman. Hirai and Suganuma face family, romantic, and societal pressure as two single women living in suburban Tokyo. A deeply moving almost-satire on the myth of “single-ideal” contemporary romantic love.”
Thank you as always for being here. Thank you for being part of this, for helping the health of the region’s literary ecosystem. Can you help me keep this work going with a paid subscription?
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