Winslow Homer's painting ''The Tent (Summer by the Sea),'' on display in the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont.
(From 'Art Museums Plus')
Shelf Life
Marblehead messenger
Winslow Homer's painting ''The Tent (Summer by the Sea),'' on display in the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont.
(From 'Art Museums Plus')
Katherine Howe's interest in the Salem witch trials is more than academic. A doctoral candidate in New England studies at Boston University, Howe is a descendant of two accused witches. Yet it wasn't until she moved to Marblehead that she felt the full force of New England's past, leading to her novel, "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane" (Voice), being published Tuesday.
Deliverance Dane was an accused witch from Andover who survived her trial. The novel moves back and forth from the present to 17th-century Salem as Connie Goodwin, a graduate student at Harvard, struggles to make sense of the words on a scrap of paper she finds in her grandmother's Marblehead house. Howe will read from her debut novel at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Abbot Public Library in Marblehead.
Readings by the river
Jean-Dany Joachim, a native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is Cambridge's new poet populist. Joachim, who began writing in English when he moved to the United States two decades ago, has translated poetry from and into Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, and English. Joachim and Peter Payack, who two years ago was named the city's inaugural poet populist, will join in a poetry reading at the Cambridge River Festival on Saturday at 3 p.m.Payack's most ambitious project was a community poem he put together from hundreds of couplets written about Cambridge over the past year. It will be on display at the festival's poetry tent.
Short-order book
Before there was Twitter, there was flash fiction, usually defined as a story of 250 to 1,000 words. Editor Tara L. Masih and other practitioners will be on hand when Rose Metal Press launches its new book, "Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field," at 7 p.m. Thursday at Brookline Booksmith.Treasures of N.E. art
Beyond New England's major art museums is a wealth of small collections well worth a visit. The new guide, "Art Museums Plus" (University Press of New England) by Traute M. Marshall, will help you find them.Marshall highlights famous as well as lesser-known artists, like sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin, who created the statues of Paul Revere opposite the Old North Church and of Anne Hutchinson at the State House. Dallin lived for many years in Arlington, home since 1998 to the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum.
The National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, R.I., has the largest collection of work by Maxfield Parrish (also a focus of the Cornish Colony Museum in Windsor, Vt.), and its Norman Rockwell collection is second only to the holdings of the artist's namesake museum in Stockbridge. The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., owns the Zimmerman House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright House in New England open to the public.
Coming out
Pick of the week
Mitch Gaslin of Food for Thought Books in Amherst recommends "Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood" by Michael Lewis (Norton): "Lewis has written a hilarious, yet moving account of his coming to terms with fatherhood. No mushy tribute to the joys of fatherhood, Lewis's book addresses the good, the bad, and the merely baffling about having kids."Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com. 
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