PortLit

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 of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, moral, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.”

In Mill Town, Arsenault undertakes an excavation of a collective past, sifting through historical archives and scientific reports, talking to family and neighbors, and examining her own childhood to present a portrait of a community that illuminates not only the ruin of her hometown and the collapse of the working-class of America, but also the hazards of both living in and leaving home, and the silences we are all afraid to violate. In exquisite prose, Arsenault explores the corruption of bodies: the human body, bodies of water, and governmental bodies, and what it’s like to come from a place you love but doesn’t always love you back.

A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

About the authors:

Kerri Arsenaultis the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine, and Contributing Editor at Lithub. Arsenault received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and studied in Malmö University’s Communication for Development master’s programme. Her writing has appeared in Freeman’s, Lithub, Oprah.com, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications. She lives in New England. Mill Town is her first book.

Kate Christensen is the author of six prior novels, most recently The Astral, and the memoir Blue Plate Special. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine. She lives with her husband in Portland, Maine.

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 to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of his life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Replete with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.

About the authors:

Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day. He is winner of the Prix Femina in France, the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain.  He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Canada.  His story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank with You, Rock Springs, and A Multitude of Sins.  He lives in Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford. Photo by Robert Mitchell.

Bill Roorbach’s newest book is The Girl of the Lake, a collection of stories from Algonquin, which was longlisted for the 2017 Story Prize and finalist for the Maine Literary Award in Fiction, 2017.  Also from Algonquin are the novels The Remedy for Love, a finalist for the 2015 Kirkus Prize,and the bestselling Life Among Giants, which won a Maine Literary Award in 2012, and his next novel, Lucky Turtle, delayed but now due in 2021.  His first book of stories, Big Bend, won the Flannery O’Connor Prize in 2000, and the title story an O. Henry Award. Nonfiction books include Temple Stream, Summers with Juliet, and Into Woods.  Bill was a 2018 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow at the Civitella castle in Umbria.  He lives in Scarborough.

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.

Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive—precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston—but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. They are grateful every day for the grace of their deep bonds to each other, to their family, and to their bountiful land. As they hold fast to this contentment, Doris is uneasy, and confesses, “We can’t ever know what will come.”

When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered. The family is consumed by a dark shadow of grief and guilt. Slowly, the surviving Senters must find their way to forgiveness—of themselves and of each other.

New York Times bestselling author Meredith Hall’s radiant debut novel is a study of love—both its gifts and its obligations—that will stay with readers long after the last page. With a rare tenderness and compassion, Beneficence illuminates the heart’s enduring covenants and compromises.

About the authors:

Simon Van Booy is the award-winning and best-selling author of fourteen books, including Love Begins in Winter (winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) and Everything Beautiful Began After, which Andre Dubus III called, “A powerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty of one’s own fate.” He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio, The Financial Times, and the BBC.  His next novel, Night Came With Many Stars, will be published in 2021.