Porter Square Books in Cambridge & Boston

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Also want to share my gratitude to @portersqbooks.bsky.social for working with us to offer book sales during this event!

The official day of advocacy may be wrapping up, but that doesn't mean it's too late to send an email to your state rep, especially when we've made it so easy!

All the workshops are listed on our events calendar & our bi-weekly events newsletter

Do you have a skill you can share with your community? Active bystander training? Ways to stretch a food budget? Understanding and influencing zoning regulations? Making zines & other public art? You can share your skills AND support a local organization through a Be the Change Workshop

Instagram Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

Massachusetts! Today @massaabb.bsky.social members are at the State House for a day of advocacy. Contact your reps and watch the 1230 press conference here www.instagram.com/nosycrow?igs...

This is incredible book with so much to teach us about the moment we're in. My biggest critique is that it wasn't out last year! (You can also preorder it from us if you want)

Oh & don't forget! You don't need to wait until we get a spare moment to ask for book recommendations. We actually have this whole thing set up for everyone

Just need to note/gloat that two people who just happened to see the recommendations from this came into the store to buy books they saw!

Thank you to everyone who's voted over the last few weeks and good luck to all of the finalists!

The Village Beyond the Mists From the bestselling, Batchelder Award-winning author and translator of Temple Alley Summer and The House of the Lost on the Cape comes the fantastic adventure that first inspired Hayao Miyazaki's beloved film, Spirited Away.

The Village Beyond the Mist is the type of whimsical story that you read as a child and, remember as an adult and find yourself frantically searching for again. Perfect for fans of Dianna Wynn Jones, Eva Ibbotson, and Patricia C Wrede.

Richard Scarry's Biggest Word Book Ever "Two feet high, this board book is as tall as a toddler. Scarry packs countless pictures of his characters on the wide pages, each perky creature identified by a short word or phrase. Strongly constructed, it's a can't-fail item for small boys and girls." —Publishers Weekly

Absolutely, delightfully, over-the-top. Several staff members snapped this one up! The novelty of the size amuses kids and adults alike, and Richard Scarry fans will enjoy another of his books coming back into print.

North Woods A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

I started out wondering what this was, and then it just totally drew me in. Such beautiful prose and haunting depictions of both people and place.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands Kate Beaton’s Ducks stunned the world with its unflinching honesty and candid vulnerability, cementing its place in the graphic novel canon alongside Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, young Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—in the tradition of East Coasters seeking gainful employment when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so dear.

This graphic novel made me sob. Three times. I fell asleep with it clutched to my chest. I hope it wrecks you the way it did me.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

If the world could be saved by a journalist's razor sharp precision & a novelist's sense of style & narrative alone, El Akkad would not have had to write this book. But he did. And we need to read it.

Readers of #BookSky and their friends/partners who just asked "What are you looking at?" It is time to announce the finalists for the 2026 Porter Square Books Staff Picks of the Year! The winners will be chosen by PSB libromancers and will be announced next week. Here are the finalists...

place no one else can own, so no matter what you get out of it, or even if you get out anything out of it, even if you don't like it, not time spent reading a book is wasted.

Uh, happy Saturday!

great way to get back to that space because it all happens in your own head and (at least for the time being) no one else has any access to your own mind that you don't explicitly give them, which kinda makes those semi-annual "nobody reads anymore" article feel like an opp, to move you way from a

full life was when you could just mess around and neither succeed nor fail because what you were doing was outside (or maybe beyond) assessment & accomplishment, and sure there isn't as much space for that in adulthood and there's joy in assessment & accomplishment too, of course, but reading is one

hours to an attempt that doesn't work out, I mean, you don't always need to be productive, remember just messing around when you were a kid, making up games you sorta played once and then moving on to something else, all the terrible pictures you drew that your parents still put on the fridge, how

Remember to do one thing* every day that scares you.

*read from a book you think is too difficult for you because it's probably not and even if it's hard or you don't get it at first, if you stick with it you'll develop the resources to read it, & even if you don't what's the harm, losing a couple

I didn't even know it was coming!

That was my exact thought! Like, "Hey friends, let's not add a ton of pictures of CHILDREN to the internet of 2026."

Whyteface: A Novel A pointed satire about a Nigerian on vacation in Europe, into the heart of whitenessFour years ago, a young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass. Now well established with a good job, going by Frank Whyte and living in a nicely appointed house in the capital city of Abuja, he is ready to set off on a real vacation—his first trip outside Nigeria.As Frank travels to Amsterdam, Oslo, and Milan, he finds himself, for the first time in years . . . blending in. His skin is not in the least remarkable. In Amsterdam he befriends his well-meaning but occasionally misguided Airbnb host. There he also meets a Nigerian expat living in America whom he is both delighted to see but who vexes him for reasons he can’t initially identify. In Oslo, he intervenes when a charismatic Kenyan writer is the victim of a racist taxi driver. In Milan he comes upon a woman who might be a distant relative who has survived a treacherous journey of migration. He quickly realizes that he feels most Nigerian when he is outside of Nigeria, and he begins to wonder what it might take to be treated, simply, as human.Hilarious, sharp-witted, and moving, each in turn and often all at once, A. Igoni Barrett’s Whyteface confronts the absurdities of Europe and the West’s ideas about the global south—both its xenophobic fear as well as its supposedly beneficent charity. It is a heady and absorbing new novel by the writer Teju Cole called “a major talent.”

OK, I recognize the following sentence is going look odd, but I cannot get over the year we're having for books and it's Friday night and we've got to live our truth so...

Holy crap there's a sequel to Blackass coming out called Whyteface!

Happy Friday! Here's an upcoming book event for all you weirdos. (Josh is legit freakin' excited for this) portersquarebooks.com/event/2026-0...

We Ride Upon Sticks: A Novel (Alex Award Winner) (Vintage Contemporaries) In the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. Against a background of irresistible 1980s iconography, Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry’s glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves.

One person on the internet made the excellent decision to buy themselves a copy of We Ride Upon Sticks & I think more of you should consider such good judgement for yourselves

"Red Hat, Blue Hat: The Oops! Movie" staring Jason Statham

How Friday is it?

I'm thinking about a classic noir, super old school Brooklyn version of Murderbot. It's still called "Murderbot" it's just pronounced "Moiduhbot." Anywho

Sandra Boynton Cinematic Universe send skeet

Cover of Wings of Fire The Hybrid Prince by Tui Sutherland. Book is upright on a wooden table.

I'm counting down the hours until my 10yo is home! He's been away on an overnight class trip all week and sad because he'd miss the launch for the new Wings of Fire book, his FAVE series.

He and I pre-ordered it months ago from @portersqbooks.bsky.social. I have it here now, ready for his return!!!

Want a bookstore to yourself for an hour? Tonight's Your Own Private Bookstore is still available!