Symposium Books

Ink & Echo: The Creative Current and America Unfinished
Thursday, July 2nd 5-8pm

Symposium Books is partnering with Ink & Echo and the WaterFire Arts Center to bring you a day of poetry, music, and artistry!!!

Join us on July 2nd at 5pm atop the WaterFire Arts Center’s rooftop!!

This is a donation based event. Donations start at $10. Every $5 donated automatically enters you into our local community raffle! All proceeds directly fund and support our performing artists.

About the event:
Artists will be performing a night of spoken word and music, with opportunities for artist-audience engagement. Artists set the tone for deeper connections. Below, you will find our lineup follow by artist bios!
Monica D. Vance (Poetry/Spoken Word)
Justice Ameer (Poetry/Performance)
Christopher Cardoso (Poetry/Spoken Word)
Jessi Bankston (Soul/Singer-Songwriter)
Chris Collado (“Kleen”) (Lyricist/MC)
Rebecca N. Mancini (Singer/Performer)
Kou Tukala Nyan (Poetry/ Producer/Performer)

Ink & Echo:The Creative Current uplifts souls, words, and connections. Through an intentional pause from the digital noise, to the joy of gathering, to the music and spoken word, this residency draws Providence together with authenticity.

More info in comments + on Symposium Books events page where you can also RSVP

Author Event! Tim W**d’s “The Gatepost”

Join us on Monday, June 29th as we host Tim W**d in conversation Jenna Blum to discuss his new novel, The Gatepost.

About the book:
“A compellingly trippy journey.” ―Kirkus Reviews
From the author of The Afterlife Project: One woman’s quest to find her father pushes her beyond the boundaries of space, time, and the human mind.
Esme Weatherhead was twelve years old when her father, an amateur scientist and the author of a bestselling book on Mesoamerican shamanism, walked into the forest on their rural Vermont property and never came back. Twenty years later, she quit her job in San Francisco, got divorced, and moved back home with the goal of writing a book about her father’s life and sudden vanishing.
In the course of her research, Esme uncovers an old field journal that describes a cave on the property she hadn’t known about, experiments involving high doses of psilocybin mushrooms, and a series of strangely vivid hallucinations. After searching unsuccessfully for the cave, she hires Lucas St. Pierre, a local geologist, to help her find it.
Now, as they work to unravel the mystery of her father’s disappearance, Esme and Lucas must confront hidden forces that will test their sanity and put their safety at risk, ultimately leading to new insights about love, death, and the enduring resilience of life on Earth.
Perfect for fans of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, and Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, Tim W**d’s The Gatepost blends modern science and ancient cosmology to take readers on a journey offering hallucinatory glimpses into worlds beyond our own.

More info in comments + on events page.

Silent Sapphic Literary Society - Wednesday, June 24th 6-8pm

Super excited to be bringing you another x Silent Sapphic Book Club meet up!!

Are you a sapphic looking to talk about books with other sapphics, but don’t want assigned readings? Then this is for you!!

Bring your own book and mingle with other sapphics. Sapphic books are encouraged but not required. Below you will see how we will be spending the evening.

6-6:30
“Book Report” (Discuss what you’re reading)
6:30-7:30 - Quiet reading hour
7:30-8:00 - Optional socializing or just keep reading

See you soon!!

Happy Friday! Here is a selection of the latest new releases in this week 📚



All out now on the new arrivals tables.



We are open today until 8pm.



Some excellent paperback releases!



Terrific non fiction.



Children’s & Chapter Books



Enjoy reading outside on Westminster Street outside

Poetry Book Club Announcement!!
x
Friday, June 26th @ 7pm
Moderator and organizer

This month - we are reading - The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry)

Poetry Book Club is free and open to all. No RSVP needed.

If needed, copies available - in store or online.

Jericho Brown’s daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

Author Event! Linford Fisher’s “Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History”

Join us on Saturday, June 20th @ 4pm as we host Linford Fisher in conversation with Judith Sanford-Harris to discuss his latest book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History. In conversation with Judith Sanford-Harris

“An indispensable book, as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally wrenching.”―Greg Grandin, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth

“An important addition to the body of scholarship on Native peoples and enslavement.”
― Booklist

About the author:
Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
About the moderator:
Judith Sanford-Harris, PhD, is of African American and Indigenous descent. She is a native of Roxbury, Massachusetts and is an enrolled citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Her research into her 5x great-grandfather, Private Attaquin’s service led to a successful application to, and membership in, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) for herself and her daughters. She is a recipient of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, along with her co-authors, for her work in Forgotten Patriots: The American Revolution Northern Theater and contributed “Forgotten Indigenous Patriots: The Legacy of Solomon Attaquin, Son of Mashpee” to the Journal of the Society of the First African Families of English America, Special Edition III & IV, December 2025. She is a member of American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) and the New England Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), is a registered Citizen Archivist of the National Archives Catalog, and a Heritage Member of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.

More info in comments + on events .com

Copies available at the store or reserve online.

FINE & Raw back in stock!!

FINE & RAW Chocolate is an artisanal, organic, non-gmo small-batch chocolate company that specializes in sustainable, plant-based confections, operating from a factory and café space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC

New releases in this week Symposium Books

Author Event! Elizabeth Preston’s “The Creatures’ Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care“ Join us on Thursday , June 11th at 6pm as we host Elizabeth Preston @by.elizabeth.preston in conversation with Phoebe Hall @phoebefhall to discuss her new book, The Creatures’ Guide to Caring About the book: A lively and revelatory journey through the evolution of caretaking on Earth, from animal parents to modern-day humans, making the case that caring for children and one another made us who we are Poison frog fathers carry tadpoles on their backs. Killer whale grandmothers hunt to feed their adult sons. Tropical birds incubate their friends’ eggs. Spider moms let their hatchlings eat them alive. Around the world, animals from the exotic to the familiar go to astonishing lengths to keep their young alive. Their biology, brains and behaviors show us what we have in common with other creatures, as well as what’s unique about Homo sapiens. With warmth, humor, and occasional run-ins with bodily fluids, science journalist Elizabeth Preston leads a highly accessible tour of cutting-edge research into how and why we and other animals care for young. She discovers that humans evolved to raise our kids in cooperative groups, and that the tools we’ve inherited for caretaking aren’t only for moms or parents in general—they’re the basis for our human society. About the author: Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist who contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for Science, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Orion, Slate, Audubon, Discover, National Geographic and others. She is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award. Preston is also a humor writer whose work has appeared in outlets such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Parents, and Real Simple and was the editor of Muse, a magazine about science and ideas for kids. She lives in Massachusetts. More info @symposiumbooks .com events + in comments below! See you soon! #animalbehavior #biology #parenting #communityevent #thingstodoinprovidence