From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

Frog Hollow artist Carol MacDonald leads a linoleum block printing workshop. Linoleum Block is a basic relief printing process. Participants design, cut and print a one color linoleum print. Discussion and demonstration of materials, methods and process included. Space limited. Please call the library to register.

During the Trump administration, the usual ways of conducting diplomacy have been upended. Many positions in the State Department have never been filled, and meetings with foreign leaders such as Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin have been undertaken with little advance planning. What effect are these changes having now, and how will they affect ongoing relationships between the United States and its allies and adversaries?

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness.

Join us for a screening of this picture into Vermont, past & present. In 2006, during a summer between semesters at college, director Mike Leonard took on the challenge of visiting every town in the state by joining the 251 Club - a unique organization dedicated to exploring The Green Mountain State. After living outside Vermont for over a decade, Mike moved back home and has chosen to revisit the 251 Club – returning to some of the same places and re-interviewing some of the same people he met 12 years ago – to learn about how Vermont has changed, how it has stayed the same, and how a humble wayfarer’s club has shaped his identity forever. Co-sponsored with the Charlotte Grange, this program takes place at the Charlotte Grange, 2858 Spear Street, Charlotte.

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