By Judith Maas

MONDAY: Joey Kramer signs “Hit Hard,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline … Short story writer Pamela Painter and artist Robert Henry speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown.

TUESDAY: Poet Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin (“Bed”) read at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline … Brian MacQuarrie reads from “The Ride,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge … John Stauffer and Sally Jenkins discuss “The State of Jones,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Poet Daisy Fried and artist Vicky Tomayko speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

WEDNESDAY: Jane Green reads from “Dune Road,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith … Delia Sherman reads from “The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Ron Currie reads from “Everything Matters!,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store … Joey Kramer signs “Hit Hard,” at 1 p.m., at Borders Downtown Crossing, 10-24 School St. … Poet Michael Klein reads at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

THURSDAY: Colum McCann discusses “Let the Great World Spin,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store … David Roberts discusses “The Last of His Kind,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Jennifer Haigh (“The Condition”) and Amy Hempel (“Collected Stories”) read at 7 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville.

FRIDAY: Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes, Dave Reidy, and others read at 8 p.m., at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge; barbecue at 6 p.m., music at 7 p.m.

SATURDAY: Romance authors Hannah Howell, J.M. Griffin, Maureen Fisher, and Leeann Burke sign their work from 1 to 3 p.m., at Annie’s Book Stop, 362 S. Main St., Sharon … Poet and novelist Jill Bialosky and poet Thom Ward read at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Events are subject to change.

Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. Check it out.

Chelsea Green, the Vermont publisher that specializes in books about sustainability and green-living, has a cool idea. It has set up a gift registry for libraries. Libraries list the new titles they'd like and library lovers buy them the Chelsea Green books they've listed at a 40 percent discount, with free shipping.

Simply put, Joan Wickersham is a writer, tapping out everything from a novel, "The Paper Anniversary," to short stories, NPR commentaries, even architecture columns.
But it was her most intimate narrative that proved the hardest to write, and took the longest. Last year Wickersham, who lives in Cambridge, published "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order." Her father had been a caring husband and loving parent. But one morning in 1991, the Connecticut businessman brought his sleeping wife a cup of coffee, sat down in an armchair in the study, and shot himself. Years later, Wickersham set out to learn why, and perhaps to find some peace through that search.
The result was an unconventional memoir, which is organized by indexed chapters. She learned that her father had been in debt from a failed business and had an unhappy childhood, but there was no clear cause. The book also chronicled the upended lives of family and friends and how they were forever changed by his death, and the manner of it. The memoir became a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.
Wickersham's writing is spare, wrenching, insightful. Here, she recounts her father's last morning alive: "We have to watch him from the outside. He leaves no clues, his whole life is a clue. What is he thinking when he gets up that last morning, showers, and dresses for work? He puts on a blue-and-white striped cotton shirt, a pair of brown corduroys, heavy brown shoes ... He's gone to his dresser and loaded his pockets: change, wallet, keys, handkerchief. Maybe he thinks he's going to work. Or maybe he knows, hopes, that in forty-five minutes he'll be dead."
Wickersham will appear Tuesday, June 30, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Coolidge Corner.

By Judith Maas

SUNDAY: Dick Lehr reads from “The Fence,” at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord … Christopher Lydon, X.J. Kennedy, and F.D. Reeve present a “Salute to John Updike,” at 4 p.m., at Longfellow National Historic Site, 105 Brattle St., Cambridge … Roxana Robinson (“Cost”) and Joan Wickersham (“The Suicide Index”) read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville … Walter Littell, Joel Johnson, and others read beginning at 3 p.m., followed by an open mic, at Concord Poetry Center, Emerson Umbrella for the Arts, 40 Stow St., Concord.

MONDAY: Steve Early reads from “Embedded with Organized Labor,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge … Dick Lehr discusses “The Fence,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline … Poet Cynthia Huntington and artist Rebekah Tolley speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown.

TUESDAY: Elijah Wald discusses “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Joan Wickersham discusses “The Suicide Index,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith … Gregg Hurwitz discusses “Trust No One,” at 7 p.m., at Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston St. … Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips and artist Joel Janowitz speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

WEDNESDAY: Jennifer Haigh reads from “The Condition,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith … Larry Tye discusses “Satchel,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Poet Henri Cole and artist Connie Imboden speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

THURSDAY: Susan Barry discusses “Fixing My Gaze,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store.

[No FRI or SAT listings]

Events are subject to change.

Even if you don't know Chip Kidd's name, I'm sure you know his striking book designs. He silhouetted a dinosaur for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" and stretched police tape across "Silent Witness" by Richard North Patterson. He's designed jackets for the books of dozens of well-known authors, from David Sedaris to Gish Jen, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, and Elmore Leonard.

Now he's agreed to design a poster for the Boston Book Festival coming up on Oct., 24. (Full Disclosure: The Boston Globe is one of the festival's media sponsors.) I'm excited to see what he comes up with.

I'm late in reading Joan Wickersham's "The Suicide Index," her memoir of coming to terms with her father's suicide in 1991. A finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, it has just come out in paperback. What a powerful book -- with a structure that is so perfect for the story it tells.

I heard Joan speak at Grub Street's conference back in April about the process of writing the book. In 1995, she started writing a novel about her father's suicide. It didn't work. On the first day of her residency at the MacDowell Colony up in N.H., she threw out 330 pages of her 400-page manuscript. It was there that she came up with the idea of organizing the book like an index. It may sound odd; it's certainly unconventional. But it works. Boy, does it work.

The Massachusetts Center for the Book has announced the winners of the 9th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. The awards go to books published by Massachusetts authors or that convey important Massachusetts themes.

Fiction
"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks, a powerful look at the mysterious history of a rare Hebrew manuscript.

Nonfiction
"Snow Falling in Spring" by Moying Li, an all-ages read that traces the author’s coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution and her eventual emigration to the U.S. in her 20s.

Poetry
"The Ghost Soldiers" by James Tate, a volume of masterfully crafted prose poems that explores, among other themes, hometown and the national consciousness in a time of war.

Children’s/Young Adult Literature
"One Hen" by Katie Smith Milway, a true story of Kojo, a young boy from West Africa, who turns one small micro-loan into a better life for his family and for his village.

One of the driving forces behind the election protests rocking Iran in the past week is the cutting-edge communications technology that now lets demonstrators instantly send each other Twitter feeds, text messages, and videos, easily bypassing the government's traditional controls on public dissent. You could credit Bill Wasik for proving the effectiveness of such lightning-quick, ground-level organizing.
Wasik is the writer and Harper's magazine editor who six years ago created "flash mobs," spontaneous gatherings of mirth makers who'd respond at a moment's Internet notice to participate in offbeat public displays that resembled performance art. Something of a merry prankster, Wasik asked his acolytes, who were mostly strangers to each other, to descend on a hotel lobby for 15 seconds of synchronized clapping, to visit a rug store and say they'd only make a purchase if they agreed as a group, and to swarm a shoe store while masquerading as tourists of a bus trip.
In addition to coordinating such antics, Wasik is a leading analyst on the rising impact of technology on everyday living, which he showcases in his new book, "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture." One of his precepts is that the Web's free-flowing nature means that trend stories now break out, grow, age, and die much like living organisms, with the number of mouse clicks they draw measuring their impact at every moment. Increasingly we're awash in what he calls "nanostories," such as Scottish singer Susan Boyle's overnight international breakout and eventual flameout.
Still, although Wasik is something of a prophet on technology, that doesn't mean he endorses every aspect of it. In a recent Salon interview, he mused, "I would say that if there's one thing" that's keeping "the novels of the world from getting written right now, it's surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing, and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves, to carve out spaces in our lives away from information, away from the sort of constant buzzing of the hive mind."
If you'd like to partially unplug from the relentless info-grid, Wasik will discuss these topics and more Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner.

1. When You Are Engulfed in Flames
By David Sedaris. Back Bay.
2. In Defense of Food
By Michael Pollan. Penguin.
3. Three Cups of Tea David Oliver Relin. Penguin.
4. Zagat 2009/2010 Boston Restaurants
By Zagat Survey. Zagat Survey.
5. Blink
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.
6. Bad Money
By Kevin Phillips. Penguin.
7. NFT Guide to Boston 2009
By Happy Mazza Media. Not For Tourists.
8. The Forever War
By Dexter Filkins. Vintage.
9. Slavery by Another Name
By Douglas Blackmon. Anchor.
10. The Billionaire’s Vinegar
By Benjamin Wallace. Three Rivers.

Source: Boston area bookstores

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Dial.
2. Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout. Random House.
3. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Quirk.
4. New Moon
By Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown.
5. Twilight
By Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown.
6. My Sister’s Keeper
By Jodi Picoult. Pocket.
7. The Beach House
By Jane Green. Plume.
8. Unaccustomed Earth
By Jhumpa Lahiri. Vintage.
9. Love The One You’re With
By Emily Giffin. St. Martin’s.
10. Summer Affair
By Elin Hilderbrand. Back Bay.

Source: Boston area bookstores

1. Red and Me
By Bill Russell and Alan Steinberg. Harper.
2. Outliers
By Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown.
3. Horse Soldiers
By Doug Stanton. Scribner.
4. The Girls From Ames
By Jeffrey Zaslow. Gotham.
5. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
By Steve Harvey. Amistad.
6. The Last Lecture
By Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow. Hyperion.
7. How the Mighty Fall
By Jim Collins. Jim Collins.
8. Excuses Begone!
By Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. Hay House.
9. Secret
By Rhonda Byrne. Atria.
10. The Bolter
By Frances Osborne. Knopf.

Source: Boston area bookstores

1. Eclipse
By Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown.
2. Breaking Dawn
By Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown.
3. Shanghai Girls
By Lisa See. Random House.
4. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dance
By Katherine Howe. Voice.
5. Relentless
By Dean Koontz. Bantam.
6. The Strain
By Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. William Morrow.
7. Gone Tomorrow
By Lee Child. Delacorte.
8. Dead and Gone
By Charlaine Harris. Ace.
9. Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
By Reif Larsen. Penguin.
10. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
By John Updike. Knopf.

Source: Boston area bookstores

By Judith Maas

SUNDAY: Adam Ried discusses “Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes,” at 2 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge … J. Courtney Sullivan reads from “Commencement,” at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord.

MONDAY: Carlos Ruiz Zafon discusses “The Angel’s Game,” with Christopher Lydon, at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Jeff Kreisler discusses “Get Rich Cheating,” at 1 p.m., at Borders Downtown Crossing, 10-24 School St. … Poets Kimiko Hahn and John Yau read at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown.

TUESDAY: Kate Christensen reads from “Trouble,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … AGNI contributors read at 7 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville … Dick Lehr (“The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide”) speaks at 6 p.m., at the Boston Public Library, Copley Square … Nelson George reads from “City Kid,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, Coolidge Corner, Brookline … Katherine Howe discusses “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store … Novelist Pam Houston and artist Betsey Garand speak at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

WEDNESDAY: Bill Wasik discusses “And Then There’s This,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith … Robert Wright discusses “The Evolution of God,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store … Margot Livesey (“The House on Fortune Street”) speaks at 7 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center.

THURSDAY: Debut novelists Reif Larsen, Ceridwen Dovey, and Ron Currie speak at 6 p.m., at the Boston Public Library, Copley Square … Marjory Wunsch and Glenna Lang (“Genius of Common Sense”) read at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Lisa M. Hamilton discusses “Deeply Rooted,” at 7 p.m., at Harvard Book Store … Keren McGinity discusses “Still Jewish,” at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith … Anthony Weller (“Wellers’s War”) and Patrick Tracey (“Stalking Irish Madness”) read at 7 p.m., at Newtonville Books … Jon Papernick (“The Ascent of Eli Israel”) reads at 7:30 p.m., at Waltham Public Library, 735 Main St., Waltham ... Katherine Howe reads from "The Physick Book of Deliverance," at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, One Worcester Road, Framingham.

FRIDAY: Karen Pryor discusses "Reaching the Animal Mind," at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble. Framingham ... Holly Robinson ("The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter") speaks at 7 p.m., at Jabberwocky Bookshop, 50 Water St., Newburyport.

SATURDAY: Children’s author Ann Alter reads from “Abigail Spells,” at 10:30 a.m., at Newtonville Books.

Events are subject to change.

The news out of Iran has heightened my interest in a new novel, "Censoring An Iranian Love Story" by Shahriar Mandanipour. It is a fascinating look at life, love, and censorship. It's a love story that has been censored so you see what the author has crossed out or merely imagined, knowing that certain things can never be published. This young couple takes extreme measures to express their feelings without bringing the wrath of the government down on themselves. Dara initially expresses his feelings for Sara by making purple dots under letters in a banned book to spell out his message. The novel is as witty as the censorship is horrifying.

This is Mandanipou's first novel to appear in English. His work was censored in Iran in the mid-1990s. He's been living in the States for a few years now.

It’s not often that a reader stumbles on a funny book by a constitutional law professor and divinity school graduate. (In fact, it’s improbable. Religion and the law are serious matters in American life, generally overseen by austere men in black, the color that most emphasizes gravitas.)
But author Jay Wexler has managed the unlikely with ‘‘Holy Hullaballoos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars.’’ Wexler, a onetime Supreme Court clerk who now teaches at Boston University, had an intriguing idea. What if he took a sabbatical year and traveled around America, visiting places that have played key roles in important Supreme Court decisions on religion, gauging the issues and their impact first hand?
On his resulting odyssey, Wexler (above) spent time with a Santeria religious sect in Florida, an ultra-Othodox Jewish community in New York, an Amish community in Wisconsin, and a Muslim school in Cleveland, all of them involved in significant court rulings on the church-state divide. Viewing their religious practices and issues up close, Wexler humorously but candidly discusses how their cases fit into American law, and often draws his own conclusions on where the boundaries likely should be. In so doing, he effectively combines the legal and the everyday, bringing high concepts down to ground level, which is, after all, where people spend their lives.
These are serious matters, but Wexler does like to have fun. At one point, he visits a Buddhist temple in Cleveland, where his legs freeze up in the lotus position, and his prayers become personal and pointed. Legs throbbing, he ‘‘silently implored the smiling Buddahs to deliver me serenity and relief.’’ At another, he travels to the U.S. Senate, desperately trying to reach the viewing chamber before the session begins. That’s because the whole point for Wexler is to hear the chaplain’s opening blessing. Hardly anyone ever shows up for that perfunctory moment, and soon he’s alone, and lost. A tiny directional sign points toward a painting, ‘‘like one of the traffic signs we have in Boston that seem deliberately intended to confuse visitors.’’
Wexler will discuss his travels, religion, and the law — likely with an overlay of jokes — Wednesday, June 17, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner.

I have a thing for short stories that lend insight into the lives of immigrants caught between two cultures. My favorite writers in this category have been Jhumpa Lahiri and Sana Krasikov.

Now I'm adding the Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, winner of a MacArthur genius grant and author of the novels, "Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun." Her collection of stories, "The Thing Around Your Neck," being published Tuesday, is beautifully written and heartbreaking. I'm halfway through it. I want to race through it because each story so far has been so powerful. And yet I want to go slowly, to savor her bringing me over to Nigeria and then back to the US, getting a glimpse of what it's like to be stuck in the middle, between the old and the new, the home of the heart and the home of the future.

She'll be reading from the new collection at Harvard Book Store at 7 p.m. next Friday, the 19th.

Good for Boston native Michael Thomas. Yesterday he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award which brings him about $150,000 for his debut novel, "Man Gone Down.''

The judges' citation starts like this: "We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, 'Man Gone Down,' will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.
The first person narrator in 'Man Gone Down' has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school."

My former Globe colleague David Mehegan interviewed Thomas back in the winter of 2007, just after "Man Gone Down" had been reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The award is open to novels written in any language and by authors of any nationality, provided the work has been published in English or English translation. Public libraries around the world nominate books for the award. In fact, it was a library on the island of Barbados that nominated "Man Gone Down."

Johnny Cash sang about a "A Boy Named Sue.'' But did you know that Orson Welles named his daughter Christopher?

She goes by Chris Welles Feder and she has a memoir coming out in November: "In My Father's Shadow" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). When she asked her father why he named her Christopher, he said, "You're the only girl in the world who is, and that makes you unique as well as beautiful."

Apparently Rose Kennedy liked to steer her children to fine literature though there's one series of books that her son John especially loved and it didn't exactly qualify as a classic at the time. It's Frances Trego Montgomery's series of books about a mischievous goat named Billy Whiskers. You'll find a copy in the gift shop at the John F. Kennedy house, a National Historic Site in Brookline.

Lillian Ross, who became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1945 and developed into a legendary interviewer, is known to cherish her privacy, even though her job is to detail the lives of others. How private is she? Ross, whose specialty is blending into the background of her profiles, has a Wikipedia entry that's just one paragraph long, and part of that discusses how much she protects her privacy. By contrast, the Wikipedia entry on, say, Rex the Wonder Dog fills two computer screens. (And, no, don't even try to learn her age.)
About the only time Ross opened a window on her own life was in a narrowly focused memoir a decade ago called "Here But Not Here," which described her long-term affair with iconic New Yorker editor William Shawn (shown here on Ross's arm). Over the decades, Ross profiled Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Bennie Goodman, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, and Robin Williams, among many.
Her insightful 1950 portrait of Hemingway led to a popular reappraisal of the author, whom some readers found delightful but others simply boorish. Here's how she set the scene in that piece: "Ernest Hemingway, who may well be the greatest American novelist and short-story writer of our day, rarely comes to New York. For many years, he has spent most of his time on a farm, Finca Vigia, nine miles outside Havana, with his wife, a domestic staff of nine, fifty-two cats, sixteen dogs, a couple of hundred pigeons, and three cows. When he does come to New York, it is only because he has to pass through it on his way somewhere else." In three bell-clear sentences, she paints the backdrop to the narrative to come.
Ross is in Boston Tuesday, June 9, to discuss that seminal profile and her friendship with Hemingway, part of the celebration marking the 110th anniversary of his birth. Ross will share the stage with Susan Morrison, her New Yorker editor, and also will discuss the craft of interviewing and other writers she has known. The session begins at 5:30 p.m. at the John F. Kennedy Library on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. To assure seating, you can register at jfklibrary.org.