March 7: Aparna Kaji Shah

March can be the best and worst month of the year. Depending on who comes roaring in, a lion or a lamb, we can get a month that goes from good to bad or bad to good. It’s not a great month! It is certainly no June or September! I know many of us get a feeling that this month offers promise. The promise of spring. The promise of an end to winter, but there is nothing about this March that feels at all promising.

Except, we have books to read and authors to chat with about those books!

You can rely on Junction Reads – more than the weather – for readings and author talks. Our fun Sunday afternoon chats are something many readers and writers have come to look forward to.

March 7: Aparna Kaji Shah joins us for another fantastic conversation about her beautiful collection of short stories, The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories from Inanna Publications. The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories about strong female characters dealing with difficult life-changing situations. The turmoil that they face is, often, the result of a social structure that discriminates against women. Through these powerful women characters, the stories reflect attitudes and ways of life in a village in India, and in modern day Mumbai; they highlight the values of an older generation, and the dreams of a new one. Beneath all their differences, The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories illuminate the quality of women’s lives, exposing the pain, the injustices, as well as the triumphs that make up their existence. More From Inanna Publications.

NEW DATE: APRIL 18 Sharon Kirsch will join us with readings from her latest A Smallest Objective from New Star Books. “Confronted with her mother’s memory loss, a daughter undertakes a search for buried treasure in her now-vacant family home, aided by a team of archeologists. This first-person narrative produces unsettling discoveries about several Montreal personalities as revealed by the objects that survive them—a microscope and lantern slides, a worn recipe book, the obituary of a renowned black sheep in the family. In the end, the excavation of the narrator’s childhood home yields both less and more than she ever imagined.” You can read an excerpt on her website.

Register for our events on Eventbrite. PWYC ($0+) Proceeds to the author. Captions available.