Shelf Life

Rosamond Purcell's photo of a broad-tailed hummingbird nest found on a rope ''swing'' in a Colorado cabin. (''Egg and Nest'')

Literary Salem
Salem - the setting for two acclaimed new novels - is celebrating its literary heritage and promise. Brunonia Barry's "Lace Reader" (Morrow) is a contemporary tale about women who can divine the future in patterns of lace. Last week a novel based on the life of Martha Carrier, hanged as a witch in Salem, hit bookstores. "The Heretic's Daughter" (Little, Brown) is by Kathleen Kent, a 10th-generation descendant of Carrier.

On Friday and Saturday, the Literally Salem festival will honor native son Nathaniel Hawthorne, who made the House of Seven Gables - now a popular tourist attraction - famous in his fiction. A number of authors, including Hawthorne expert John Hardy Wright, will speak at the festival. A Scrabble tournament, lit-themed mixer, critique of fiction manuscripts, and workshop on writer's block are also on tap. Details at www.salemlitfest.com.

Avian creations
Photographer Rosamond Purcell has made a career out of creating intriguing images of decaying objects. For three of her books, the local artist collaborated with the late Stephen Jay Gould to shed new light on musty specimens from the back rooms of natural history museums.

Her new book, "Egg and Nest" (Belknap/Harvard University), focuses on one of the world's premier collections of bird eggs and nests, located at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, near Los Angeles. Nests are held together with whatever materials the birds could find: spider webs, fishing line, mud, and condensed saliva. Eggs, too, are varied: green, blue, speckled, covered by a swirl of markings.

Purcell will talk about her work Oct. 7 at 6 p.m. at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge.

Birds are a recurring theme of the museum's fall author series, which kicks off Saturday with a talk about the natural history and cultural evolution of pigeons. Additional subjects include the biology of color and the future of conservation. Details at www.hmnh.harvard.edu.

Stanzas delivered
There may be a bit of mischief in the air when students selected by the New England Poetry Club read from their work at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge at 2 p.m. next Sunday.

For 25 years, the club has awarded prizes for poems by students in grade school through college. This year, Diana Der-Hovanessian, club president, particularly enjoyed a batch of poems that parodied "This Is Just to Say," by William Carlos Williams, and has invited some of the poets to join the celebration. In Williams's poem, the narrator seeks forgiveness for eating plums that someone else might have been saving for breakfast. The 12-line poem ends with a tasty review of the plums.

Boston poet laureate Sam Cornish and Cambridge poet populist Peter Payack will also read.

Coming out