James Parker with Carlo Rotella: Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes

From the vertiginously talented James Parker, a collection of uproarious odes that show how to find gratitude in unexpected places.

Our politics are broken; our world is melting; the next catastrophe looms. Enter James Parker, who for years now has been writing odes of appreciation on subjects from the seemingly minor (“Ode to Naps”) to the unexpected (“Ode to Giving People Money”) to the seemingly minor, unexpected, and hyperspecific (“Ode to Running in Movies”). Finally collecting Parker’s beloved and much-lauded odes in one place, this volume demonstrates the profound power of the form. Each ode is an exercise in gratitude. Each celebrates the permanent susceptibility of everyday humdrum life to dazzling saturations of divine light: the squirrel in the street, the crying baby, the misplaced cup of tea. Parker’s odes are songs of praise, but with a decent amount of complaining in there, too: a human ratio of moans. Varied in length but unified in tone, mostly in prose, sometimes toppling into verse, the odes range across music, movies, literature, psychology, and beyond, all through the lens of Parker’s personal history. Gathered together, they form an accidental how-to guide to honoring your own experience—and to finding your own odes.

James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins and the co-editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Carlo Rotella's most recent book is The World Is Always Coming to An End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. A professor of English, American Studies, and Journalism at Boston College, he writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Best American Essays. Among the subjects that recur in his writing are cities, boxing, school, blues, country music, crime, fantasy, movies, basketball, landscape, the Rust Belt, children and parents, neighborhood, apocalyptic doomsayers, Chicago, Boston, and how people get good at things.

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EVENT ACCESSIBILITY

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline, United States