“Lungfish is a force of nature—a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best.” —Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent...
Mar 20, 2023•38 min
Morgan Talty and Gregory Brown are live at Bunker Brewing Co. discussing “Night of the Living Rez”, Talty’s highly anticipated debut collection of short stories at the Spotlight Lecture Series. How do the living come back to life? Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, au...
Jul 11, 2022•50 min
Join PPL at Bunker Brewing for a conversation between Chris Busby, editor of The Mainer, and John Duncan about Duncan’s new book “Take it Easy: Portland in the 1970’s”. Masks are strongly recommended. In the 1970s, decades before this working-class Maine city was reborn as one of the trendiest and priciest small cities in America, Portland stood anxiously at an inflection point. Moribund and neglected, it was walking a knife’s edge toward an uncertain future as urban renewal efforts demolished a...
May 19, 2022•51 min
Join us for a Literary Lunch conversation with author Stephanie Cotsirilos and the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project’s (ILAP’s) Sue Roche. Co-sponsored by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Cotsirilos and Roche will discuss Cotsirilos’ debut novella, My Xanthi. A deeply personal story echoing global displacements – whether at the Mexican border, refugee camps, or in too-often ignored colonial American history – My Xanthi centers on a Greek immigrant woman whose wartime secrets teach a crimina...
Mar 24, 2022•55 min
Portland Public Library is excited to partner with Maine Inside Out to present Ravi Shankar in conversation with Shreerekha Subramanian about his new book Correctional . The first time Ravi Shankar was arrested, he spoke out against racist policing on National Public Radio and successfully sued the city of New York. The second time, he was incarcerated when his promotion to full professor was finalized. During his ninety-day pretrial confinement at the Hartford Correctional Center—a level 4, hig...
Mar 24, 2022•57 min
Portland Public Library partnered with Harvest on the Harbor to present a delicious Literary Lunch with the authors of the Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook, Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz in conversation with Don Lindgren. If there’s one thing that brings Mainers together, it’s the flavors of this great state. Whether we’re teaching our kids to cook family recipes, or gathered together and sharing them at the table, we know that our food traditions bring us together as a community. The M...
Nov 22, 2021•59 min
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Sep 21, 2021•57 min
This program was held live on Monday, Jan 25 - Monday, January 25 at noon. About the book: Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change, as the goddess comes and goes erratically from our warming world. Persephone began as the libretto of an experimental opera. Through lyric verse, magical-realist prose poems, and speculative crypto-studies of the Anthropocene, this ecopoetic collection explores both environmental crisis and the nature of story itself...
Sep 21, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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Sep 21, 2021•55 min
This program was held live on Monday, October 19th at noon. About the Book: It’s September 1999 and the world is on the cusp of a new millennium. In rural Maine, Gordon St. Onge, known as “The Prophet”, presides over his controversial Settlement, a place rumored to be a cult, where his many wives and children live off the grid and off the land. Out in greater America, Bruce Hummer, the aging CEO of multinational corporation Duotron Lindsey, lays off workers by the thousands. Meanwhile, the newes...
Jul 02, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 3
This program was held live on Wednesday, September 16th at noon. About the book: Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for that seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction ...
May 20, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 2
This program was held live on Thursday, September 10 at 3:00pm About the book: In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Richard Ford presents a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to console the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey ...
May 20, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 1
This program was held live on Wednesday, November 18 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm About the book: When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm, where his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are buried under the old pines. Their lives follow the calming rhythms of the land—chores in the cow barn, haying the fields, tending their gardens—and in this they find immeasurable joy....
May 20, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 3
