Join us when editors Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood and Asheville contributors Jan Jacobson and Stacey Millett present Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60.

UPDATE: Due to illness, we will not gather in the store for this event. The event will proceed virtually. 

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to view the live stream on YouTube will be emailed to registrants on the day of the event.

Books with signed bookplates will be available after the event. 

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop's. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Gray Love narrates stories about the most common themes – searching for and (perhaps) finding love. Forty-five men and women between ages 60 and 94 from diverse backgrounds talk about dating, starting or ending a relationship, embracing life alone or enjoying a partnered one. The longing for connection as old age encroaches is palpable here, with more and more senior singles searching online. Those who find new partners explore issues that most relationships encounter at any age, as well as some that are unique to elder relationships. These include having had previous partners and a complicated and deep personal history; family and friends’ reactions to an older person’s dating; alternative models to marriage (such as sharing space or living apart); having more than one partner at the same time; one’s aging body, appearance, and sexuality; and the pressure of time and the specter of illness and death.

Nan Bauer-Maglin  is Professor Emerita at the City University of New York. She has published eight collections (six with coeditors) on topics such as step-families, retirement, feminism, death, dying and choice, and older parenting. Her latest book is Widows’ Words: Women Write on the Experience of Grief, The First Year, The Long Haul, and Everything In Between.

Daniel E. Hood is a retired professor of sociology. He taught at several New York Metro area schools for four decades. His latest book is Redemption and Recovery: Parallels of Religion and Science in Addiction Treatment.  His memoir essay, “Better Late Than Never,” was recently published in Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40.

Jan Jacobson, Ph.D. is a writer and psychologist living in Asheville, North Carolina.  In college she rode a boxcar for several days in the heart of winter from California to Missouri, and her adventurous spirit thrives to this day.

Stacey Parkins Millett retired from a full-time career in philanthropy, health equity, and community development. Now she writes creative fiction and non-fiction in multiple genres. She and her husband spend time living between New York City and Western North Carolina. Millett is an accomplished runner who has completed 60 marathons.

Courtney Szto on Harnarayan Singh - Announcer with Hockey Night in Canada

Wednesday, March 15 at 6:30 Eastern/7:30 Atlantic 

On Zoom. Register for the Zoom link here.Share the Facebook event notice.


"Mahriaa shot, Keeta goal! Harnarayan Singh and the Future of Hockey"
He started commentating games from his living room on a Fisher Price microphone set. Today, he's a play-by-play announcer for Sportsnet and Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi. Does Harnarayan Singh's presence in hockey and style of commentary signal a more diverse future for sports broadcasting in Canada?

Dr. Courtney Szto (@courtneyszto) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University. She has published widely on racism in hockey, including her award-winning book "Changing on the Fly: Hockey through the voices of South Asian Canadians," and the publicly available "Policy Paper for Anti-Racism in Canadian Hockey." Dr. Szto runs anti-racism education for the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) and consults with the Hockey Diversity Alliance and Black Girl Hockey Club.

Book Talk: Speaking Yiddish to Chickens

Hosted By: Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)

Meet Seth Stern, author of the new book, “Speaking Yiddish to Chickens,” and learn the fascinating story of the Holocaust survivors who found refuge on New Jersey poultry farms. “Speaking Yiddish to Chickens” is the first book to tell the story of these refugees — including the author’s grandparents — and how they rebuilt their lives and their lost Jewish and Yiddish cultures in these unexpected places.

Free: Register Here for Zoom link.

Ajay Sinha in Person (livestreamed on Facebook)

Join us in person on Tuesday, March 21 at 7 PM as Ajay Sinha presents his new book, Photo-Attractions. He will be joined in conversation by Christopher Benfey.

About the Book

In Spring 1938, an Indian dancer named Ram Gopal and an American writer-photographer named Carl Van Vechten came together for a photoshoot in New York City. Ram Gopal was a pioneer of classical Indian dance and Van Vechten was reputed as a prominent white patron of the African-American movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Photo-Attractions describes the interpersonal desires and expectations of the two men that took shape when the dancer took pose in exotic costumes in front of Van Vechten’s Leica camera. The spectacular images provide a rare and compelling record of an underrepresented history of transcultural exchanges during the interwar years of early-20th century, made briefly visible through photography.
 
Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and transcultural desires. Challenging the assumption that Gopal was merely objectified by Van Vechten’s Orientalist gaze, he explores the ways in which the Indian dancer co-authored the photos. In Sinha’s reading, Van Vechten’s New York studio becomes a promiscuous contact zone between world cultures, where a “photo-erotic” triangle is formed between the American photographer, Indian dancer, and German camera.
 
A groundbreaking study of global modernity, Photo-Attractions brings scholarship on American photography, literature, race and sexual economies into conversation with work on South Asian visual culture, dance, and gender. In these remarkable historical documents, it locates the pleasure taken in cultural difference that still resonates today.

About the Author

Sinha is the Julia ’73 and Helene ’49 Herzig Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College, U.S.A. He writes and teaches about the histories of global modernity in the visual arts and media of South Asia and served on the editorial board of the online journal, Trans Asia Photography Review. His books include Imagining Architects: Creativity in Religious Monuments of India, and a co-edited collection Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens.

About Christopher Benfey

Christopher Benfey is Professor Emeritus and the Acting Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership at Mount Holyoke College. A well-regarded scholar of 19th and 20th century American literature, he has authored 5 books including If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years (2019); A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2009); The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003), Degas in New Orleans (1997); and The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992). A family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay; Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival was published in 2012, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Benfey frequently contributes as a literary and art critic to publications such as The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. 

Register

To register, please click here

Event date: 

Tuesday, March 21, 2023 - 7:00pm

Event address: 

9 College St
South Hadley, MA 01075