08.13.2025

Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures by Amanda & Wally Koval

Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures

Adventure awaits in this new visual odyssey from Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA), taking readers on stunning trips to every continent and sharing oddly moving human tales along the way. For lovers of travel, design, and exploration, AWA presents a brand-new collection of real-world places that seem plucked from the films of Wes Anderson, and the stories that bring each location to life. You’ll venture to Antarctica through the treacherous Drake Passage, make a stop in lesser-known Jincumbilly, Australia (where platypuses outnumber people), discover the bridge in Wisconsin that went to nowhere, and drop into the most peculiar umbrella shop in London. But adventure means nothing without someone to tell the tale. You’ll meet the father of American skydiving, who created the officially-sanctioned center of Earth — a California town with a population of two. You’ll visit the “post office at the end of the world” — and meet its mustachioed letter carrier, who runs an anarchist island nation in his free time. And you’ll travel to a town in the Arctic Circle where cats are prohibited, humans may not be buried, and doomsday vaults hold all we need to survive an apocalypse — including the secret recipe for the Oreo cookie.  Authorized by the legendary filmmaker himself, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures reminds us that the world is ours to explore.

About the Speakers

Wally and Amanda Koval are the unlikely duo that founded Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA) on Instagram in 2017, growing the community to nearly two million Adventurers worldwide. Their first book, Accidentally Wes Anderson, became a New York Times bestseller published in ten languages, followed by their critically acclaimed second title, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures. The AWA collection includes a jigsaw puzzle and a book of postcards, alongside their award-winning website and newsletter. Their work has been featured in museums and large-scale exhibitions around the globe. The couple lives with their dog, Dexter, in their hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, where they pinch themselves daily to ensure this extraordinary journey is real.

Matthew Dickey is an artist, urbanist and Streetscape Curator dedicated to connecting people to place. As the Deputy Director for the Boston Preservation Alliance, Matthew aims to elevate the stories of the people that make Boston, Boston, while celebrating the city’s unique architectural heritage. Matthew is an official Accidentally Wes Anderson Ambassador and serves on the Boards of the Shirley-Eustis House Museum and Dorchester Historical Society. His paintings and photographs have been displayed around the world, and he makes regular appearances on the TV Series, Meet Boston with Billy and Jenny.

08.06.2025

Empire of the Elite by Michael Grynbaum

Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America

For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over. Condé’s billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. They were the ultimate influencers — before social media changed everything. The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles. The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over. The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.

About the Speakers

Michael M. Grynbaum is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he covers media, politics, and culture. Since joining The New York Times as a staff writer at age twenty-two, he has reported on three presidential campaigns, two New York City mayors, and the 2008 financial crisis. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, and lives in Manhattan.

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book The Metaphysical Club was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, published in 2021, was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. He won the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism in 2025.

07.29.2025

A Living Archive with Lindsey Beal & May Babcock

Join us for an engaging conversation between artists Lindsey Beal and May Babcock, as they discuss their collaborative artistic practice. Moderated by photography curator Karen Haas, this event will explore the unique process of creating images using plant-based materials and sunlight, illuminating the intersection of nature, art, and sustainability. The talk will explore their use of natural materials — such as pokeberries — in their paper making and photographic processes and how their most recent project, A Living Archive, explores the larger histories of industry within New England.

About the Speakers

May Babcock is an ecocentric artist who transforms sediment, seaweed, and excess plants into handmade paper, revealing the complexities of various waterways. Rooted in hand papermaking and place, her interdisciplinary practice reconnects people to the voice of the land and waters. Babcock exhibits nationally and internationally, installs public art at universities, airports, and historic sites, and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She founded Paperslurry.com, a hand papermaking blog.

Lindsey Beal is a photo-based artist in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work examines historical American views on technology, parenting, and sexual and reproductive health, and how they reflect today’s political and social landscape. Committed to process, she connects her work to early photographic history and techniques, often incorporating sculptural photographs, hand paper making, or artist books into her work.

Karen Haas has been the Lane Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston since 2001, where she is responsible for a large collection of photographs by American modernists, Charles Sheeler, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Imogen Cunningham. The Lane Collection, which has recently been given to the Museum, numbers more than 6,000 prints and ranges across the entire history of western photography from William Henry Fox Talbot to the Starn twins. Before coming to the MFA, she received her MA from Boston University and held various curatorial positions in museums and private collections, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the BU Art Gallery, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover. Her recent activities include exhibitions, Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott; Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass; and Bruce Davidson: East 100th Street; and publications, An Enduring Vision: Photographs from the Lane Collection; MFA Highlights: Photography; Ansel Adams; and The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist.

07.23.2025

Conservation Conversations

In the summer of 1963, the Athenaeum launched the nation’s first conservation program housed within a library, setting a precedent for institutions across the country.  In this conversation, the conservation team, Graham Patten, Terra Huber, and India Patel joined Lauren Graves, associate curator, to discuss the meticulous work of caring for and exhibiting our collections.

07.16.2025

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach & Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club

Two sisters living on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II find hope in the power of storytelling when they start a wartime book club for women—a spectacular novel inspired by true events from the New York Times bestselling author of Lilac Girls.
2016: Thirty-four-year-old Mari Starwood is still grieving as she travels to the storied island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. She’s come all the way from California with nothing but a name on a piece of paper: Elizabeth Deveraux, the famous but reclusive Vineyard painter. When Mari makes it to Mrs. Devereaux’s stunning waterfront farm under the guise of taking a painting class with her, Mrs. Deveraux begins to tell her the story of the Smith sisters, who once lived there. As the tale unfolds, Mari is shocked to learn that her relationship to this island runs deeper than she ever thought possible.
1942: The Smith girls—nineteen-year-old, wannabe writer Cadence and sixteen-year-old, war-obsessed Briar—are faced with the impossible task of holding their failing family farm together during World War II as the U.S. Army arrives on Martha’s Vineyard. When Briar spots German U-boats lurking off the island’s shores, and Cadence falls into an unlikely romance with a sworn enemy, their quiet lives are officially upended. In an attempt at normalcy, Cadence and her best friend Bess start a book club, which grows in both number and influence as they connect with a fabulous New York publisher who could make all of Cadence’s dreams come true. But all that is put at risk by a mysterious man who washes ashore—and whispers of a spy in their midst. Who in their tight-knit island community can they trust? Could this little book club change the course of the war… before it’s too late?

About the Speaker

Martha Hall Kelly is the New York Times bestselling author of Lilac Girls, Lost Roses, Sunflower Sisters, and The Golden Doves. She was born and raised in Massachusetts, received Journalism degrees from both Syracuse and Northwestern Universities and worked as an advertising copywriter for many years before becoming a novelist. With more than two million copies of her books sold and translated in fifty countries, Martha lives in Litchfield, CT, Hobe Sound, FL, and New York City.

07.02.2025

A Beach Reading List

beach reading list summer vacation book recommendations set in new england

If you’re dreaming of salty air, screened porches, lobster rolls, and the hum of cicadas in the distance, this booklist is your passport to a perfect New England summer escape. Whether you’re stretched out on a beach towel or simply craving that sun-drenched, coastal charm from home, these novels and nonfiction gems are steeped in the kind of seasonal magic that smells like sunscreen and nostalgia. From the bittersweet intimacy of Happy Place and Summer Sisters to the elegant unraveling of family secrets in The Paper Palace and Eden, each title transports you to windswept shorelines, clapboard cottages, and the messy beauty of love, loss, and reinvention. Add in evocative nonfiction like The Outermost House or The Big House, and you’ll find yourself wandering Cape Cod dunes or peeking into the soul of a summer home that has seen generations come and go.

If you’re yearning for a literary vacation—or the next best thing—these books promise a sunlit escape that lingers long after the final page. Explore the full list, or stop by to see our curated book selection on the shelves of the first-floor Bow Room.

See a title you’d like to read? Select the link to visit our catalog where you’ll find the call number to locate the book yourself, or simply choose “Pick up at Circulation,” log in with your last name and six-digit member ID, and we’ll have it ready for you!

Every morning our librarians pull requests bright and early to keep your reading list moving. If you’re placing a hold later in the day and hoping to grab your book by lunch or after work, just give us a call at 617-720-7626. We’ll do everything we can to get it ready in time.

Set in New England

Non Fiction

  • The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt F72.C3 C57 2003
  • The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston Cutter IZ64C .B468 .ou

General Beach Reads

06.30.2025

Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of Presidents by Nigel Hamilton

Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of Presidents 

From New York Times bestselling presidential biographer Nigel Hamilton comes the greatest untold story of the Civil War: how two American presidents faced off as the fate of the nation hung in the balance—and how Abraham Lincoln came to embrace emancipation as the last, best chance to save the Union. Of all the books written on Abraham Lincoln, there has been one surprising gap: the drama of how the “railsplitter” from Illinois grew into his critical role as U.S. commander-in-chief, and managed to outwit his formidable opponent, Jefferson Davis, in what remains history’s only military faceoff between rival American presidents. Davis was a trained soldier and war hero; Lincoln a country lawyer who had only briefly served in the militia. Confronted with the most violent and challenging war ever seen on American soil, Lincoln seemed ill-suited to the task: inexperienced, indecisive, and a poor judge of people’s motives, he allowed his administration’s war policies to be sabotaged by fickle, faithless cabinet officials while entrusting command of his army to a preening young officer named George McClellan—whose defeat in battle left Washington, the nation’s capital, at the mercy of General Robert E. Lee, Davis’s star performer. The war almost ended there. But in a Shakespearean twist, Lincoln summoned the courage to make, at last, a climactic decision: issuing as a “military necessity” a proclamation freeing the 3.5 million enslaved Americans without whom the South could not feed or fund their armed insurrection. The new war policy doomed the rebellion—which was in dire need of support from Europe, none of whose governments now would dare to recognize rebel “independence” in a war openly fought over slavery. The fate of President Davis was sealed. With a cast of unforgettable characters, from first ladies to fugitive coachmen to treasonous cabinet officials, Lincoln vs. Davis is a spellbinding dual biography from renowned presidential chronicler Nigel Hamilton: a saga that will surprise, touch, and enthrall.

About the Speaker

Historian Nigel Hamilton is a New York Times best-selling biographer of General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, President John F. Kennedy, President Bill Clinton, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among other subjects. He has won multiple awards, including the Whitbread Prize and the Templer Medal for Military History. The first volume of his FDR War trilogy, The Mantle of Command, was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is a senior fellow at the McCormack Graduate School, University of Massachusetts Boston, and splits his time between Boston, Massachusetts, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

06.26.2025

Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done by Charlie Baker & Steve Kadish

Results: Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done

Former Governor Charlie Baker, ranked as one of the most popular governors in the United States, with a reputation for getting things done, wrote: “Wedge issues may be great for making headlines but they do not move us forward. Success is measured by what we accomplish together. Our obligation to the people we serve is too important to place politics and partisanship before progress and results.”

For Baker and his longtime associate Steve Kadish, these words are much more than political platitudes. They are at the heart of a method for delivering results—and getting past politics—the two developed while working together in top leadership positions in the public and private sectors. Distilled into a four-step framework, Results: Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done is the much-needed implementation guide for anyone—in public service or in organizations—hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics. With a broad range of examples, Baker, a Republican, and Kadish, a Democrat, show how to move from identifying problems to achieving results in a way that bridges divides instead of exacerbating them.

About the Speakers

The Honorable Charles D. Baker, former Governor of Massachusetts, is currently President of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). He has served as CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a top-performing health care insurance provider, and twice as Commonwealth of Massachusetts Cabinet Secretary, leading the Executive Office of Health & Human Services and the Executive Office of Administration & Finance.

Steve Kadish has served as CFO, COO, and in other senior leadership roles in health care and higher education in both the public and the private sectors. Kadish served as Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s first Chief of Staff, and then as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He is currently a Senior Advisor at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University.

Lee Pelton, who was recognized in 2024 by Non-Profit Times in its list of America’s 50 most powerful and influential non-profit leaders, is the CEO & President of The Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations with $2.0 billion in assets. He joined the Foundation in June 2021, after serving as President of Emerson College (2011-2021) and Willamette University (1998-2011).

06.23.2025

American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives by Robert Fieseler

American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives

In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. And the government of Florida would use any tactic at their disposal — legal or not — to get Copleston to admit it. Using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, journalist Robert W. Fieseler unravels the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary powers. The state of Florida would prefer that this history remain buried. But for nearly a decade, the Florida Legislature founded, funded, and supported the Johns Committee — an organization using the cover of communism to viciously attack members of the NAACP and queer professors and students. Spearheaded by Charley Johns, a multi-term politician in a gerrymandered legislature, the Committee was determined to eliminate any threats to the state’s white, conservative regime. Fieseler describes the heartbreaking ramifications for citizens of Florida whose lives were imperiled, profiling marginalized residents with compassion and a determination to bring their devastating experiences to light at last. A propulsive, human-centered drama, with fascinating insight into Florida politics, American Scare is a page-turning reckoning of our racist and homophobic past — and its chilling parallels to today.

About the Speakers
Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association ‘Journalist of the Year’ and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. Fieseler’s second queer history book American Scare, a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, publishes in June 2025. A former Athenaeum writer and proud Boston resident, he now lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Michael Bronski has been active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, publisher and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous award winning books including A Queer History of the United States, You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics, coauthored with Kay Whitlock. In 2017, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

06.17.2025

A Juneteenth Reading List

Juneteenth commemorates the ending of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865, and has been celebrated as a “second independence day” since its first anniversary. For generations, the legacy of Juneteenth has inspired authors across a variety of genres, so we invite you to find a new or known voice with this Juneteenth reading list. Celebrate by memorizing a poem, learning a new fact, crafting a new cocktail or recipe, or being inspired by art and life stories.

Fiction

Culture

History

Biography and Autobiography

Children’s Books