In his ecological writing, Henry David Thoreau took inspiration from the places in which he found himself. Always open to his environment, he nonetheless kept coming back to himself, meaning that his writing projects often overlapped with one another. While Walden is the most famous of these projects, he also kept journals of his frequent trips through Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine. These works are certainly less familiar than Walden, in part due to circumstances......

Sloane Crosley Brookline Booksmith Tuesday, April 15 7:00 pm, free Sloane Crosley is a city dweller with a sharp wit who can make the most ordinary incidents, like trips to summer camp or moving, absolutely hilarious. Her essay collection, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, starts off with her unusual pony collection and takes the reader through a history of bitchy bosses, friends with gastrointestinal distress, and bridesmaid surprises. Bostonist grilled her for how she......

McIntyre & Moore Booksellers, whose wunderkammer of used books was recently exiled from Davis Square (and long ago displaced from Harvard Square), reopened today in Porter Square, at 1971 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. (They're in good company here: Bob Slate—purveyor of fountain pens and rampant Moleskinery—and Stellabella Toys are right upstairs.) They describe their stock as "uncommon titles in interesting subject areas, usually in fields in which it's very hard to be gainfully employed"—or, in a......

Jhumpa Lahiri Unaccustomed Earth Thursday, April 3rd, 6:00 p.m. @ CCT Theatre Note: This reading is sold out, but there will be a standby line and open book signing after the reading. Pulitzer prize winner Lahiri brings us a new collection of short stories exploring immigrant identity, exile, and coming of age. Her elegant writing pairs perfectly with her elevated themes. Some stories in the collection explore repeat meetings of acquaintances across time and......

Jorie Graham Sea Change Wednesday, April 2nd, 7:00 p.m., Harvard Book Store More Details Poet and Harvard prof Jorie Graham has just come out with a new book of poems, Sea Change, which she'll read from tonight at Harvard Book Store to help launch National Poetry Month. If you miss Graham's smart, refined verse this time around, be sure to catch the Pulitzer winner at Brookline Booksmith on April 28th instead.......

Amy Marcus Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 7:00 p.m., Brookline Booksmith Israel and Palestine have been in conflict for as long as most of us can remember, but Amy Marcus takes us back to a time before Israel's founding to reveal the roots of this bitter and enduring conflict. Former Wall Street Journal correspondent Marcus shows how Muslims and Jews moved from working together to battling one another, highlighting the roles of......

Joshua Kendall The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus Monday, March 24, 7:00 p.m. Brookline Booksmith Do u luv txtspk? Do u IDK ur BFF Jill? (Don’t worry, we know nobody does that, except in commercials.) R u totes 4gtg rl wrds? Joshua Kendall wants to help. His thoughtful new biography of Peter Mark Roget, the man who wrote Roget’s thesaurus (in longhand, at that), reveals the importance......

Michael Patrick MacDonald Talking with Joe Keohane Friday, March 14--tomorrow Commonwealth Museum 220 Morrissey Blvd., Dorchester 7:30 pm, free Michael Patrick MacDonald doesn't just talk it, he's lived it. He grew up in South Boston and watched members of his family fall under the weight of poverty and violence, an experience he recorded in his first book, All Souls. His follow-up, Easter Rising, also revolves around MacDonald's life in Boston, but in this book he......

The bimonthly token award ceremony to ease the existential trepidations of writers wide and far has once again taken place, this time under the supervision of the National Book Critics Circle who have announced their champions of 2007. The decision came after several days filled with bloodshed and crying while trying to sift through the many fine publications that popped out of the pervious year. Warm surprises include the ineffably talented Mary Jo Bang taking......

Tears and sorrow fill the offices of mainstream publisher Riverhead books as another memoir delivered from the school of hard knocks turns out to be a complete fabrication. Love and Consequences, a memoir released last week by Margaret Seltzer (published under the silly pseudonym Margaret B Jones), which chronicles the author's difficult life story of foster families, drug running, and all around thuggin' on the mean streets of L.A., turns out to be a complete......

Books Sarah Boxer bravely prowled through the blogosphere to share its treasures with us in Ultimate Blogs. Of course, Go Fug Yourself makes the list. Brattle Theatre (via Harvard Book Store), 6:00 pm, $5. Edit: Event has been moved to Harvard Book Store --If you've been reading Bostonist for a while, you might know how we feel about the potential of wind power. A while ago, we read this barnburner of a book about......

Books Is it possible to be saved by the Sex Pistols? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Michael Patrick MacDonald will be reading from Easter Rising, an account of his youth in the Boston punk scene, at Brookline Booksmith. Bostonist had the opportunity to hear him read from the book when he spoke at UMass-Boston, and we say with great emphasis that this is a must-see, not just for those who love......

Dance Party JD Samson and Johanna Fateman, of the terribly missed Le Tigre, are now working it as a DJ duo known MEN. The new stuff definitely riffs off the best of Le Tigre, which still owns the award for best prom photo/album cover ever. Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, $12, 9:00 pm. Movies When we started writing about this happening, we swore we wouldn't do this, but "ARE YOU TALKIN' TO ME?" Taxi......

Books --Charles Bock's Beautiful Children isn't as delicate as it sounds. A couple reels after their child vanishes in the Las Vegas desert--only it's so, so much more than that, and it's received a flood of attention. The Globe thought Bock threw too much into his debut, but everyone seems to agree that he's ambitious. Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm, free. Speaking of free, he's letting you download the book without dropping a single dime.......

Daft Punk's Electroma Gus Van Sant, Isaac Asimov, and a French-loving raver walk into the desert... Not a joke, but the vibe of Daft Punk's art-house film debut that debuted at Cannes in '06. In what could either be called a long-form music video or a 74-minute silent movie, it's a beautifully-filmed story that touches on some classic human themes, but in a really twisted way starring robots. (It better have been filmed beautifully......

Music Atlas Sound, featuring Bradford Cox going solo during Deerhunter's hiatus, hits the Middle East tonight, riding a wave of praise for his new project. Cox's hometown weekly, Atlanta's Creative Loafing, raves, "Let the Blind contains Cox's most haunting and sad songs to date. It throbs with delirious depression, and is bursting with powerful, barely contained emotions." For those of you who can handle strong emotions in the bleak winter, Cox is your fella.......

Books Susan Choi draws on real-life, high-profile crimes for her literary works. Her last book was American Woman, based on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and now she's inspired by her father's real-life experience as a former colleague of the Unabomber in her latest, A Person of Interest. Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm, free. Movies Child of the Big City and Daydreams are two silent films from the vanguard of pre-revolution Russian cinema. The former......

This past Monday French avant garde novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet died at the age of 85. Robbe-Grillet is regarded as the theorist behind the "new novel", which rejects conventional storytelling techniques for surface narratives that focus on objects and details rather than the world at large. Truly, he could suck a story out of an electric shaver like no other. While a favorite name to drop in the literary lounge, Robbe-Grillet is best known......

Movies The MFA calls Les Saignantes "the first science fiction film to come out of Africa," which should be reason enough to see it. But did we mention that it has won comparisons to Russ Meyer? And that it's about a group of women determined to rid their distopian future world of all men? Cameroon director Jean-Pierre Bekolo wins Bostonist's seal of approval. Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, 6:00pm (also screening Sunday). $8/$9......

Samantha Hunt Harvard Book Store Tomorrow, January 21, 7:00 pm Free Hunt's Official Site Samantha Hunt's latest novel, The Invention of Everything Else, weaves together the true-life story of inventor Nikola Tesla's last days with the fictional story of a chambermaid working at the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla resides. Tesla's own real life is so absorbing that it might have been a novel. He had an idealistic vision of inventors that made it impossible......

A recent article in the New York Times pondered that constant buzzing question, are Americans willfully stupid? Though it may seem asking this question is a favorite pastime of the popular rag, a recent profile on a bevy of books on the subject argues Americans are less willfully stupid than they are openly hostile towards the smarty-pantses of the nation. Author Susan Jacoby, whose book The Age of Unreason came out last week, says she......

Books Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva follows a woman as she tries to find a life outside male expectations. Meera, a young woman in India, marries the man she desires, only to discover he's Mr. Wrong. Eventually, she throws all her hopes on her son, and the intensity of her feelings prompted the San Francisco Chronicle to call the work "a steamy, hot-out-of-the-oven offering of mother love." Whoa, there! Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm,......

Gary Vaynerchuk has a message for Bay Staters: Rise up against your oppressors. He says it’s a “sad state of affairs” that the place that hosted the Boston Tea Party allows itself to fall victim to “archaic wine shipping laws.” Vaynerchuk, the 30-something host of the wildly popular Wine Library TV podcast – “the Internet’s most passionate wine program” – says that “a few special interest groups have shut things down” and not allowed wine......

Music --The Willows bring to the Middle East Upstairs a brand of Americana country rock inspired by the seasonal carnival scene up in Salem. Alas, no salt water taffy is included in the price of admission. With The Vic Morrows, The Resonance, The Giant Melons. Middle East Upstairs, 472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, doors 9:00, 18+, $8. --While the show has been sold out for weeks, if there's any way you can get in we......

In a city packed with top colleges and brilliant thinkers, the word "nerd" is bound to strike a nerve. "Nerd" and "Geek" are commonly considered insults, but many Bostonians have shrugged off the label and are either enjoying success or are on their way to success in scholarly pursuits. So-called nerds live here in a fairly safe haven. But sometimes, nerd contempt bubbles up. Witness the anger against MIT student Star Simpson, who walked into......

Books --Self-described philosopher-comedians Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein discuss Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington. Imagine Jon Stewart after he stops shouting "Whaaaa??" takes some time off for a philosophy PhD, and returns to TV. Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm, free. --Find out why Drew Gilpin Faust is the president of Harvard, and you're not. Faust will discuss her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War at the Harvard Coop......

The cold weather is no excuse for you not to get out! Human Dogsledding No kidding. The 8th annual National Human Dog Sled Competition will start today in Lowell. You can learn more about other Lowell Winterfest events, which sound like fun. However, for Bostonist, it is all about the human dogsledding--and teams usually wear costumes. Challenger rounds will be tonight at 6:45 and 10:00 pm, and championship rounds will be tomorrow at 3:30 and......

James McBride, Song Yet Sung Friday, February 8, 2008 7:00 p.m. St. James Episcopal Church 1991 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140 Sponsored by Porter Square Books In an interview with Time magazine following her 1988 Pulitzer Prize win, Toni Morrison described thinking of Beloved as "the least read of all the books I'd written because it is about something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want......

Music Few acts in hip-hop's young guard come more correct than Berkeley, CA crew The Pack. Roiling, minimalist beats, raps about partying and sneakers, and a whispered menace that keeps you off guard: it's like degree zero of the art form. Sounds great on record (or Myspace), but can they rock an audience? Harper's Ferry, 158 Brighton Ave., Allston, 7:00 pm, $12/$14. Could your music options for tonight be any different? "Lady rapper" Leslie......

Paper & Chocolate Saturday, February 9, 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm Albertine Press & Taza Chocolate 561 Windsor Street, Somerville Feeling like that annual box of candy is a bit underwhelming? Find that giving a Hallmark card is a little like having your feelings interpreted by a eight year old with slightly better vocabulary? Step it up this year at the second annual Valentne's Day Paper and Chocolate, the infrequent celebration by Somerville's Albertine......