Books, Bites, and a Kids' Carnival: The Hotchkiss Library's Summer Book Signing Weekend

The Hotchkiss Library of Sharon has been putting up a white tent on its lawn every summer for 28 years, filling it with authors and hors d'oeuvres and drinks, and drawing readers from across the region to spend evenings with the people who wrote the books on their nightstands and in their kitchens. When the event began, it featured five or six local authors. This year's roster includes 28, and the weekend has expanded into three days of programming.

The Book Signing itself kicks off the festivities Friday, July 31 from 4:45 to 7:30pm on the library grounds adjacent to the Sharon Green. Jenny Jackson, whose debut, Pineapple Street, made waves while she worked her day job as vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, arrives with The Shampoo Effect, a summer-set comedy about a young woman escaping her publishing career and her famous mother for a writer's residency in a fictional Massachusetts beach town. Elin Hilderbrand called it a "must, must, must for your summer reading list."

Jonathan Mahler brings The Gods of New York to the tent, a sweeping account of four years (1986 to 1990) when the crack epidemic, the AIDS crisis, Black Monday, Howard Beach, the Central Park Five, and the rise of both Giuliani and Trump converged in a city that was simultaneously falling apart and reinventing itself. The New York Times Book Review named it an Editors' Choice; the Washington Post called it "walloping." Mahler, a longtime Times Magazine staff writer whose Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning became an ESPN miniseries, writes the kind of history that makes the past feel like the present, which in this case requires almost no effort at all.

Simon Winchester, who lives in western Massachusetts and has made a long career out of taking improbable subjects—the Oxford English Dictionary, the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, the Atlantic Ocean—and revealing them as lenses onto everything, brings The Breath of the Gods, a history of wind: its science, its cultural reach, and its gathering power as the climate changes. James Traub, a journalist who spent nearly five decades at The New Yorker and the Times Magazine and now teaches foreign policy at NYU, rounds out the headliners alongside a roster that includes poet and memoirist Sharon Charde, local historian Anne Mackay-Smith, botanical illustrator Wendy Hollender, and a strong slate of children's and YA authors.

Seven author dinners follow at 7:30pm in private Sharon homes—smaller, more conversational, and by ticket only—with Jackson, Mahler, Traub, Winchester, Dr. Maria Sophocles, Jim Windolf, and Alex Wright at the tables.

Saturday, August 1 is Page to Plate, now in its second year: a full day of cooking demonstrations and conversations with food writers and cookbook authors, running 10am to 4:30pm with signed books available throughout. Melissa Clark, who has been writing the "A Good Appetite" column for the New York Times since 2007 and has authored more than 45 cookbooks, is the anchor of the event. She has twice won the James Beard Award and writes roughly 65 recipes a year for the paper; if you cook from the internet, you have almost certainly made one of her dishes. Joining her are Elisa Spungen Bildner and Robert Bildner, authors of The Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook; Paris Review contributor Valerie Stivers, who writes about cooking the food that appears in great literature; and Anna Stockwell, Sabrina Rudin, and Kate Truini.

Sunday closes the weekend with the free Kids' Summer Reading Carnival, 11am to 2pm under the tent—games, face painting, balloon animals, magic, an ice cream truck, and no ticket required. A lunch honoring Melissa Clark, hosted by Paul Sekhri and Mark Gude, happens at noon.

Proceeds from the weekend support the library's operating budget.

28th Annual Sharon Summer Book Signing, Friday, July 31–Sunday, August 2. Hotchkiss Library of Sharon, 10 Upper Main St., Sharon, CT. Tickets and full schedule at hotchkisslibraryofsharon.org/library-book-signing-2026.