Gulf of Maine Birthday Party

Gulf of Maine Books opened on Maine Street in Brunswick in February, 1979. There was a bad ice storm that day, but we were open, serving waffles and orange juice to anyone who showed up. We will have a birthday party for the bookstore on Saturday, Feb. 25, at 3 PM. On Friday the 24th and Saturday the 25th all books will be 30% off, to celebrate 3 decades of bookselling. At 3 PM on Saturday we will have a birthday party with food and drink, door prizes, and readings by Camden poet Kristen Lindquist (from her new book of poems Transportation) and Bath native and Theater Project alum Morgan Callan Rogers (reading from her new novel ruby red heart in a cold blue sea).
The event is free, open to the public, and we hope that you will come and help us celebrate 33 years of independent bookselling in Brunswick!

gulf of maine poetry site

To start the new year, we have created a Gulf of Maine Books poetry site, where we will post one or two poems a week, with links to more information about the poem or poet. We hope that you will view the site, keep it as a favorite, return often, and forward it to friends. You can connect to it
here

Holiday Season

Hello friends,
This holiday season will be a new experience for us. For the first time in our 32 years as a bookstore we will be the only bookstore in town for Christmas. We will trying a few new things, repeating a lot of older things, and trying to provide books quickly for our customers.
We will be open Friday nights until 8 PM and Sundays from 10-4, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, with events on several Fridays and Sundays. We welcome special orders,but advise that if you want a book before Christmas you should order it from us by December 15.
Our events schedule follows:
Sunday, Dec 4, 4 PM, a book publishing party for Spindleworks Speaking - a new anthology of writing from Spindleworks, with readings and a signing
Friday, Dec. 9, 7 PM David Solmitz reading from his memoir Piecing Scattered Souls: Maine, Germany, Mexico, China and Beyond, and Howard Waxman, author of the new novel Venceremos (set in 1970 in the US, Canada, and Cuba).
Sunday, Dec. 11, 4 PM - Martha White reading from her book In the Words of E B White - Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers. Martha is E B White's granddaughter and literary executor.
Sunday, Dec. 18, 4 PM - Pam Burr Smith reading from her new book of poems Heaven Jumping Woman, from Moon Pie Press.

Once again we have a wide variety of Christmas cards, advent calendars, and 2012 calendars. We have recently received "We are the 99%" stickers and buttons, as well as "61%" stickers and several other Gov. LePage related stickers for good stocking stuffers.

For Holiday charitable giving, this year we are suggesting the Brunswick - Trinidad (Cuba) sister city's Library Project. We have been sending boxes of books in Spanish to our sister city public library. They have lots of readers, but no money for books. Now we are trying to raise $5000 for basic repairs and some air conditioning to protect the books once they are in the library. Donations can be made via Gulf of Maine.

So, now, on to lists of new and recommended titles for the holiday season:

In the Maine section we have two new books by Crash Barry - his novel Sex Drugs and Blueberries and his new Tough Island - True Stories from Matinicus, two new E B White titles - In The Words of E B White (edited by his grand daughter Martha White) and The Story of Charlotte's Web, a new book of writing from Spindleworks called Spindleworks Speaking, two Maine mysteries by Paul Doiron - The Poacher's Son and Trespasser, two Frances Perkins titles - her book The Roosevelt I Knew and a bio of her called The Woman Behind the New Deal, a new Landscape History of New England and The Best Nature Sites of Mid-Coast Maine. We have a new edition of New Maine Cooking by Jean Ann Pollard, Desserted - Recipes and Tales from an island chocolatier by Kate Shaffer (a book that comes highly recommended by Bowdoinham chef Sam Hayward), Shells by photographer Joyce Tenneson, August Gale by Barbara Walsh, Settled in the Wild by Susan Shetterley, Eva Murray's Well Out to Sea, and Jeff Foltz's novel Birkebeiners.

New non-fiction includes two Hemingway related titles - Hemingway's Boat and Letters of Hemingway 1907-1922, Wade Davis' book on Mallory and Everest called Into the Silence, Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore, Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy, Blue Nights by Joan Didion, Boomerang by Michael Lewis, The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs,Greg Palast's Vultures' Picnic, Leslie Silko's Turquoise Ledge, 1493 by Charles Mann, Midnight Rising (John Brown) by Tony Horwitz, The Swerve, as well as the book it chronicles: Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Colin Woodward's American Nations, Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic,and new biographies of Van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Coco Chanel, the Keats Brothers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Catherine the Great, Joe Hill, Alfred Jarry, William Carlos Williams, Jessica Mitford, Jack London, Jane Fonda, Karl and Jenny Marx, Cleopatra, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X and even Rin Tin Tin.

New fiction includes The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman,Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, Trick of the Light by Louise Penny, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Great Leader by Jim Harrison, Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed, Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks, Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, and Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. New fiction in paperback includes Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Venceremos by Bath Author Howard Waxman.

New titles in the nature section include The Fungal Pharmacy, Becoming Animal by David Abram, Nature as Measure - selected essays by Wes Jackson, Eaarth by Bill McKibben, Eels by James Prosek, a new illustrated edition of Food Rules by Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin's Folks This Ain't Normal, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, Cro Magnon, Beeconomy - What Women and Bees Can Teach Us About Local Trade and the Global Market,and a new paperback version of Jon Turk's The Raven's Gift. For the animal lovers in your life we have the Puppy Diaries, How the Dog Became A Dog, and the great gift book of animal photographs Unlikely Friendships.

New titles in the poetry section include Pam Burr Smith's Heaven Jumping Woman, Kristen Lindquist's Transportation, Beauty Is A Verb - the new poetry of disability,
A Happy Life by David Budbill, Bern Porter's Found Poems, Jonathan Skinner's Birds of Tifft, Nobel winner Tomas Transtromer's Great Enigma, Solar Throat Slashed by Aime Cesaire and arguably the loveliest book published in Maine this year -Robert Gibbons' This Time (from Nine Point Publishing) and a really great new issue of the Cafe Review.

New titles in the children's area include Lost Trail - the graphic novel version of Don Fendler's story of being lost on a mountain in Maine, a new Dahlov Ipcar Wild Animal ABC book and her My Wonderful Christmas Tree, A House In The Woods by Inga Moore, Sammy in the Sky by Barbara Walsh and Jamie Wyeth,I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen, Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner, Chris Van Dusen's new King Hugo's Huge Ego, Shel Silverstein's Every Thing On It, Pig Scramble by Jessica Kinney, Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, The Boy Who Bit Picasso, Fairy Houses of the Maine Coast, and lots and lots of Tin Tin.

We hope that you have a wonderful Holiday season, and we hope to see you in the bookstore!
Beth and Gary

Fine Art By Margaret Leonard

Margaret Leonard has worked here with us at the bookstore over the last 32 years, but her real work, her creative work, is as a painter. You can see her work online
here
or by appointment (207-833-6051)
We encourage you to take a look!

summer bookstore events

Here is a list of Summer Events at Gulf of Maine Books
134 Maine Street, Brunswick 729-5083
All events are free and open to the public.

July 2, 4PM - reading/booksigning with Susan Conley and Joseph Dane
Susan Conley's new book is The Foremost Good Fortune - a memoir of her family's two year stay in China, a narrative which becomes more complicated when Susan learns that she has cancer. Publisher's Weekly said that she "pulls the reader into her world like a close friend." Susan is the co founder of The Telling Room in Portland.
Joseph Dane's new book is a memoir, Dogfish Memory. Joseph is a Maine native who has recently been teaching at the University of southern California, but returning each summer to Harpswell, to write and to sail. Carolyn Chute said of Dogfish Memory that it is "not a ghost story, but there are ghostly and foggy desires, epiphanies and yearnings wavering in and out of ordinary days...A memoir like no other." Franklin Burroughs said the book "combines memoir, elegy, quest narrative, sailing chronicle, and a love story, and is held together by a remarkable voice." In Chris Bohjalian's review of the book he says that "It also made me want to see Maine. I think Henry Miller would have been pleased."
The makers of Dogfish Ale have promised to provide liquid refreshment.

July 9, 4 PM Watersheds and EcoPoetics
a poetry reading and booksigning with Kathleen Ellis and Jonathan Skinner.
Kathleen Ellis is a poet and professor at the University of Maine. Her new book is Narrow River to the North, a beautifully done celebration of the Penobscot River watershed, using poetry, prose and photographs. Baron Wormser said of these poems "Ellis has deep feeling for the trembling energy that informs life on earth."
Jonathan Skinner is the editor of the journal ecopoetics (dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings). Jonathan's latest book of poems is With Naked Foot. He lives in Bowdoinham.

Date changed to July 18, 7 PM
Emily Dickinson Out Loud!
Marion Jeffery reads the poems of Emily Dickinson
Marion Jeffery is performing in The Belle of Amherst, a play based on the life of Emily Dickinson, at Centennial Hall in Harpswell July 12- July 26. She will share an evening of Dickinson's poetry with us for this one evening.

March Gulf of Maine Book Events

Here is our book event schedule for March:

Friday evening, March 18, 7 PM at Frontier Cafe - a book table to accompany the showing of the film JFK & The Unspeakable - Why He Died and Why It Matters by James Douglass - sponsored by PeaceWorks - $5 admission

Saturday, March 19, 3 PM at Gulf of Maine - a talk by Tricia Shapiro, author of Mountain Justice - Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal,For the Future of Us All. Tricia Shapiro has been closely following and writing about efforts to end large-scale strip mining for coal in Appalachia since 2004.Her book tells a number of first hand stories about living with mountaintop removal and offers on-the-scene and behind-the-scene reporting of what people are trying to do to stop it. She lets the victims of mountaintop removal and their allies tell their own stories, allowing moments of quiet dignity and righteous indignation to share the stage.
Mike Roselle, one of the founders of the Earth First! movement, and author of Treespiker, has said "Shapiro is one of the few writers on this subject who actually understands the strategy, the tactics, and the internal politics of a dynamic and growing movement. This is environmental journalism at its best." To see a short video on a recent anti-mining violations protest click here

Also Saturday,March 19, 7-9 PM at Curtis Library, Brunswick, a publishing party for Maria Padian and her new young adult novel Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best. Check out Maria's website here

Saturday, March 26, 4 PM -at Gulf of Maine Books - a dramatic reading from the novel Ancient Rage, with author Rev. Mary Lee Wile and guest readers Emily Vail and Diana Krauss.
In the novel the author looks at Mary, mother of Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, as they deal with grief, suffering, and the silence of God. This brief dramatic presentation will focus on the heated argument between the two widows, now childless, who struggle to come to terms with their deeply human grief.

Friday evening, April 1, Curtis Memorial Library, a book table for a talk by author Izzeldin Abuelaish, and his book I Shall Not Hate - A Gaza Doctor's Journey On the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

Gulf of Maine Birthday

In February we will celebrate 32 years in business on Maine Street in Brunswick.
To celebrate we will have 2 events in the bookstore:

Sat., Feb. 19, 3 PM
Maine author Chris Van Dusen will be here. Chris is the author of The Circus Ship, Learning To Ski With Mr. Magee, Down To The Sea With Mr. Magee, A Camping Spree With Mr. Magee, If I Built A Car, and is the illustrator of the Mercy Watson. One of his first books as an illustrator was Silas The Bookstore Cat, based on the true story of Silas, a large white cat who lived in our bookstore space back when it was MacBeans Bookstore. Chris lives in Camden, Maine

Sat., Feb. 26, 3 PM
a birthday party for the store featuring a publishing party for two new books from Blackberry Books:
Artifacts of Ice Age Maine by Stephen Petroff
Medvedb's Journal revised and expanded) by Kendall Merriam

Both events are free and open to the public.