The Bookshop: An Evening with Evan Friss and Joe Fassler

Name: The Bookshop: An Evening with Evan Friss and Joe Fassler
Start: 2024-10-10T18:00:00-04:00
Location: Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Schedule

Thu Oct 10 2024 at 06:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Midtown Scholar Bookstore | Harrisburg, PA

The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host award-winning author Evan Friss for a conversation and signing on his new book, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. Friss will be in conversation with author Joe Fassler. This event is free and open to the public.
About the Event:
Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.
In The Bookshop, Evan Friss draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. A love letter to bookstores, the result is a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.
Featured Book: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
— This event is free and open to the public and will will take place on the Midtown Scholar Bookstore’s main stage. Registration is not required.
— Seating is general admission; first come, first served.
— A public book signing will immediately follow the discussion.
— Purchasing an author’s new or previously published book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line. (Additional copies of a book may also be signed if time permits).
About the Speakers:
Evan Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University and the author of two other books: The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. He lives with his wife (a bookseller) and two children (occasional booksellers) in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Joe Fassler is the author of The Sky Was Ours, a novel, and Light the Dark, a collection based on his “By Heart” series of over 175 author interviews for The Atlantic. His nonfiction appears in outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, Fast Company, and Wired. A fiction MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Denver.