Virtual Event: Nina MacLaughlin

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes NINA MACLAUGHLIN—author of the acclaimed collection Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, and the memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter—for a discussion of her latest book, Summer Solstice: An Essay. She will be joined in conversation by award-winning author and artist BEN SHATTUCK.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Summer Solstice from harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Summer Solstice

What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. Ponds, lakes, and oceans. The first swim. A sunburn. A crown you’ve made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing, spooning, and sleeping with the windows open. Two bodies, naked and entwined. Throbbing light from fireflies. Nina MacLaughlin's essay brims with a searching honesty and insight about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead. Release yourself into the sky and feel, for a moment: there's time.

Praise for Summer Solstice

"Maybe what I’m craving isn’t so much a change of season, but merely change itself. Even so, the quiet, accepted with varying degrees of resignation or resolve, can bring a peculiar kind of grace — something I’ve occasionally felt these past few evenings as I read Summer Solstice, Nina MacLaughlin’s contemplation of summer’s mysteries and joys that’s out this month in a slender chapbook. “What’s the start of summer for you,” she asks readers, “the signal that it’s here?" . . . No one knows what kind of summer awaits us. But in another restless week in an anxious spring, I figure it’s OK to dream." —Danny Heitman, The Advocate