The Melrose Public Library is proud to continue the popular “Author’s Corner “ program with award winning playwright Laura Harrington author of the best- selling novel “Alice Bliss”.

Laura Harrington is an award-winning playwright, lyricist and librettist. She teaches playwriting at MIT and lives in Gloucester, MA. “Alice Bliss”, her first novel, grew out of Harrington’s one-woman musical Alice Unwrapped, which ran off-Broadway in New York and in the Minneapolis Fringe Festival in 2009. “Alice Bliss”is a coming of age story that is both timeless and incredibly timely. Currently there are more than 300,000 teens in the US with family members who are deployed—“Alice Bliss”movingly illuminates the impact of war on those left at home: children, partners, family members, and the community.

When Alice learns her father is being deployed to Iraq, she’s heartbroken. Matt Bliss is leaving just as his daughter blossoms into a full-blown teenager. She will learn to drive, shop for a dress for her first dance, and fall in love all while trying to be strong for her mother and take care of her younger sister. She is a tremendous girl, one who sneaks her way into your heart with her strength, her vulnerability, and her struggles with the trappings of being an awkward teen, confronting life without her beloved father. His scent is fading from the shirt of his she wears every day, and his phone calls are never enough.

A profoundly moving, uplifting novel “Alice Bliss”is a story about those who are left at home during wartime and a teenage girl bravely facing the future. Books will be available for purchase that night, courtesy of Haley Booksellers.

Check back soon for details.

Edith Pearlman and Jessica Treadway, two local short story writers, discussed their work recently at Stellina in Watertown, MA.

Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, Pearlman’s book, received glowing praise in the New York Times Book Review, where reviewer Roxana Robinson said, “Edith Pearlman’s view of the world is large and compassionate, delivered in these stories through small, beautifully precise moments.” Ann Patchett, who included Pearlman’s Self-Reliance in the 2006 Best American Short Stories series, tells us to “put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That’s where they belong.”

Please Come Back to Me, Treadway’s collection, is a winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. She is a professor of literature and writing at Emerson College; her short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic and Ploughshares.

Each month, Stellina Restaurant & Haley Booksellers play host to an author or authors who will speak about their books and answer questions from the audience. Books will be available for purchase at events.

Author’s Nights is a monthly event that begins at 6:30. Stellina will provide light antipasti; drinks (cocktails, wine, etc.) are available for purchase. Please plan to stay for dinner!

Michele McPhee talks about the movie adaptation of her book, A Date With Death

Senator Scott Brown stopped by to watch the Lifetime movie, The Craigslist Killer

Charlie Baker with Michele and guests

Michele with Greater Boston's Emily Rooney

Michele with author William Martin and Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake

Brutus Beefcake about to bring the pain to Dick Haley

Join us on Jan 3 at Jerry Remy’s in Boston to watch & celebrate the premiere showing of “Craigslist Killer” on the Lifetime Network – based on Michele McPhee’s book, “A Date With Death.”

Free admission – HD TVs – cash bar & full menu available. Copies of all Michele’s books will be available for sale, which she will be signing throughout the night.