Limited supplies. Call to register: 203-488-8702
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Free & open to all | Registration encouraged
Note: this is an outside event and will be postponed in the case of inclement weather
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
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CALL 203-488-8702
PETER BEINART: Online conversation at the Willoughby Wallace Library, April 2025.
Gish Jen's work has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has received NEA, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award. Her short work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and many anthologies; she has taught at Harvard University, NYU Shanghai, and other universities.
Bad Bad Girl is her sixth novel; her other books include two collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction, including publication of her Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far closer to her than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But proud as he is, he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and in 1947 announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—“Bad bad girl!”—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.
Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as incisive as it is compassionate.
Source: Penguin Random House & Gishjen.com
Attend a summer reading program and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading program & enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event & enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Come in your pajamas for a night of crafts, snacks and a movie!
Bring a stuffed animal to stay the night at the library and pick them up the next morning with a polaroid photo of what the animals got up to in the library after hours :)
Attend a summer reading event & enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event & enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Attend a summer reading event and enter a raffle to win an “Unearth a Story” prize pack!
Limited spots! Call to register: 203-488-8702
Explore your very own bucket of sand to find treasures you get to take home
Limited spots! Call to register: 203-488-8702
Attend a summer reading event & enter a raffle to win an “unearth a story” prize pack!
a genre-bending novel full of secrets and surprises, and an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known
“It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” —New York Times
“What We Can Know feels like a direct descendant of Atonement, McEwan’s most beloved work, where an illicit relationship generates unexpected tremors, and fantasy and memory rush into the gaps between facts.” —New Yorker
“This is all brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted. . . . [T]here is a daring realignment that boldly shifts the perspective and demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart.” —Washington Post
“McEwan is a novelist of consummate skill, and his latest book is a deeply intelligent addition to—perhaps even a crowning of—his oeuvre.” —Wall Street Journal
“[A] carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterisation and the propulsive drive of a thriller. . . . McEwan’s most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years.” —Financial Times
“McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.” —L.A. Times
“McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. . . . The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. . . . McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. . . . If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.” —The New Republic
“McEwan fans, rejoice: the novel ranks high among his oeuvre… close to Atonement and Amsterdam.” —The Boston Globe
“What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences.” —Sunday Times
“A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser… What We Can Know delivers one of McEwan’s finest comic set pieces… [and] can be read as an optimist’s manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline… [and] a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia.” ―Times Literary Supplement
“[A] dazzling novel… [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by ‘slow roasting.’” ―Independent
IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Connecticut State Parks Educational Team from D.E.E.P. leads an interactive workshop on fossils
Registration encouraged: 203-488-8702
The Reader, 2025
Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 30”
Canoeing, 2026
Acrylic on Wood, 11"x14"
FREE & ALL WELCOME | NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
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