Thursday, May 24 – 7:00 pm

The Monthly Eminent Authors’
Birthdays Open Reading

a long-standing Bird & Beckett tradition,
recurring on the fourth Thursday of each month

Have a favorite writer born in May?  Come down to Bird & Beckett this Thursday evening to share aloud a bit of his or her work with fellow devotees of the book.  We have long lists of fine writers and their birth months, if you’d care to come down and take a look to see who might be a likely candidate for your attention.

And please, we hope you’ll endeavor to read to us from a real book if humanly possible.  Bird & Beckett is, after all, a book store and we particularly treasure that lovely form in which writing has been shared since the good blacksmith Gutenberg invented movable type.

Consider too, that if you buy a book to take home, it need not cost you much — but it will benefit the bookstore greatly, and you may even find that you have a little treasure in your hands that can sit comely upon the shelf in your abode, beckoning you from time to time to take it down, let it fall open and entice you anew with the words that lay there awaiting your engagement.

May birthdays include:  Honore de Balzac, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Browning, Mikhail Bulgakov, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Jayne Cortez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lorraine Hansberry, Joseph Heller, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Randall Jarrell, Thomas Kinsella, Edward Lear, Bobbie Ann Mason, Walker Percy, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Mari Sandoz, May Sarton, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Terry Southern, Rabindranath Tagore, Studs Terkel, Sigrid Undset,Walt Whitman, Al Young.

And also Dante Alighieri, Alan Bennett, J. M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Sterling A. Brown, Raymond Carver, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Creeley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ariel Dorfman, Archibald MacLeish, Peter Matthiassen, Farley Mowat, Theodore Roethke, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Trevor, Mona Van Duyn.

See what a wonderful world of authors we inhabit — whose thoughts and words inhabit us?  Really, after you’ve read to us and listened to us read to you, buy a book!  Take it home!  Live with it and allow it to seduce you privately, quietly — just you and the pages and the binding around them and the writer behind them…

Sunday, May 27th – 2:30 pm

Political Theorist
Hannah Arendt

Walker Talks!

a monthly series of excursions across the intellectual landscape of Walker Brents III

Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt’s close associations with philosophers Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Walter Benjamin, together with the course of world events through the 1930s and 1940s, influenced the formation of her ideas, which came into broad public recognition through her teaching at a number of universities and through published works that include The Origin of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).