Reading Event at Boswell tonight

Douglas Armstrong, author of Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows

Monday, November 22 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

Emma Starkey is a spunky little girl trying hard to be charitable and virtuous. But her calculated attempts have a way of backfiring with tumultuous consequences in Douglas Armstrong’s poignant story of small-town life in 1920s Kansas. As Emma’s grandmother wryly observes, “Even sunflowers cast shadows.”  

 Weaving through four years of Emma’s engaging disasters is a chaotic friendship with a transplanted Yankee whiz kid, Margaret Drummond, whose family arrives one summer burdened with a heavy secret and a flair for the dramatic. As Emma’s and Margaret’s brothers and sisters become friends, too, their lively pursuits and youthful infatuations begin to spawn rivalries that threaten to split them apart. In the end, perilous, even tragic turns await.  This novel recaptures a faded moment in time when innocence could still be lost grudgingly.

 

 

Author bio: Douglas Armstrong was born in Kansas, but his memories of it are largely second hand, as his family left when he was five. The stories told to him by his mother of life in the small Kansas town where she grew up form the basis of his first novel, Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows. His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines from Ellery Queen to Alfred Hitchcock to Boys’ Life. After thirty years as a newspaper reporter, editorial writer, columnist and film critic at The Milwaukee Journal and later the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Armstrong has recently left journalism in order to turn to writing fiction full time. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Milwaukee Press Club, and lives in Whitefish Bay with his family.

Reading Events & Book Club Meeting!

Book discussion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Wednesday, November 17 @6:30pm, Bay View Library

Book club is open for all to join in the conversation!

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Will Fellows, author of Gay Bar: The Fabulous True Story of a Daring Woman and her Boys in the 1950s

Wednesday, November 17 @ 7pm, Boswell Book Company

Co-Sponsored by Bronze Optical

Vivacious, unconventional, candid, and straight, Helen Branson operated a gay bar in Los Angeles in the 1950s—America’s most anti-gay decade. After years of fending off drunken passes as an entertainer in cocktail bars, this divorced grandmother preferred the wit, variety, and fun she found among homosexual men. 

Enjoying their companionship and deploring their plight, she gave her gay friends a place to socialize. Though at the time California statutes prohibited homosexuals from gathering in bars, Helen’s place was relaxed, suave, and remarkably safe from police raids and other anti-homosexual hazards. In 1957, she published her extraordinary memoir Gay Bar, the first book by a heterosexual to depict the lives of homosexuals with admiration, respect, and love.

 

In this new edition of Gay Bar, Will Fellows interweaves Branson’s chapters with historical perspective provided through his own insightful commentary and excerpts gleaned from letters and essays appearing in gay publications of the period. Also included is the original introduction to the book by maverick 1950s psychiatrist Blanche Baker. The eclectic selection of voices gives the flavor of American life in that extraordinary age of anxiety, revealing how gay men saw themselves and their circumstances, and how others perceived them.

 

Author bio: Will Fellows is the author of Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, and A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Farm Boys was named a notable book of the year by Esquire and was adapted into an off-Broadway stage play.  He lives in Milwaukee.

 

Helen P. Branson (1896-1977) was born in Almena, Kansas and worked as a bank teller, cook, and palm-reading nightclub entertainer before taking over a Melrose Avenue tavern and opening Helen’s in 1952. Self-described as having the demeanor of “your sixth grade teacher or the librarian in the Maple Street branch library,” and at five-foot-four, Branson was a force to be reckoned with, taking on the Vice squads and unruly haters.  She once said that after attending parties held by some of her patrons, she quickly became “bored stiff” at parties “held by straight people.”

 

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Daniel Levin, author of The Last Ember

Wednesday, November 17 @7pm,  Jewish Community Center

The author of The Last Ember, Daniel Levin will talk about his compelling and thought-provoking page-turner set in the high-stakes modern worlds of archeology, religion and international terrorism, which is nothing short of a Jewish Davinci Code. Levin is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He clerked for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome in 2004.

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Reading Event & Book Club Meeting!

Book Club discusses "Wifey" by Kiki Swinson.

Tuesday, November 16 @7pm, East Library 

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Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Tuesday, November 16 @ 7pm, Boswell Book Company

Co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Public Library

 

Welcome to the very small town of Chabot, Mississippi, where history is long and secrets run deep.  Two men, boyhood friends torn apart by social circumstances of the ‘70s, are thrust together once more when the daughter of a prominent businessman goes missing and a body is found in the woods. Eerily similar to an unsolved mystery from their past, Silas Jones and Larry Ott are set out on a path to discover if they are connected.  Suspenseful and lyrical without sacrificing emotional depth, Franklin’s new novel may have a Southern voice, but its themes of friendship, class, and race—are universal.

 

10% of all designated sales the evening of the event will be donated to the Milwaukee Public Library, who will have volunteers on hand to assist customers in signing up for, or renewing, library cards, and to answer any questions.  In addition, this kicks off the launch of the Katie Gingrass Gallery’s annual Fill-the-Shelves event where the Milwaukee Public Library puts out a request list of books that can be purchased and then donated to the library system.  After tonight’s event, many of the books will be available for purchase at the Katie Gingrass Gallery.

 

Author bio: Tom Franklin, author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk, has won numerous awards, including a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. His novella, Poachers, was recently selected for inclusion in The Best American Noir of the Century.  Franklin teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and lives in Oxford, MS, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.

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Saturday, November 13 @ 8pm, Pabst Theater, $29.50

 

Mike Birbiglia, author of Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories. Fresh from his appearances on This American Life and Comedy Central, the comedian muses on childhood pipe dreams, life failures, and various disorders.

A variety of reading topics this evening!

Book Club for Adults discusses Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Wednesday, November 10 @6:30pm, Tippecanoe Library

Leif Enger's debut is an extraordinary novel—an epic of generosity and heart that reminds us of the restorative power of great literature. The story of a father raising his three children in 1960s Minnesota, Peace Like a River is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, a love story, and a haunting meditation on the possibility of magic in the everyday world.

Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy who knows firsthand that life is a gift, and also one who suspects that his father is touched by God and can overturn the laws of nature.

The quiet Midwestern life of the Lands is upended when Davy, the oldest son, kills two marauders who have come to harm the family; unlike his father, he is not content to leave all matters of justice in God's hands. The morning of his sentencing, Davy—a hero to some, a cold-blooded murderer to others—escapes from his cell, and the Lands set out in search of him. Their journey is touched by serendipity and the kindness of strangers—among them a free spirit named Roxanna, who offers them a place to stay during a blizzard and winds up providing them with something far more permanent. Meanwhile, a federal agent is trailing the Lands, convinced they know of Davy's whereabouts.

With Jeremiah at the helm, the family covers territory far more extraordinary than even the Badlands where they search for Davy from their Airstream trailer. Sprinkled with playful nods to biblical tales, beloved classics such as Huckleberry Finn, the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the westerns of Zane Grey, Peace Like a River unfolds like a revelation.

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Dennis Lehane, author of  Moonlight Mile

Wednesday, November 10 @7pm, Mystery One Bookstore

Dennis Lehane  more info to follow - but do you really need any more info? Dennis Lehane! isn't that enough? 

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.

Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman—a woman who hasn't been seen in weeks.

Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand-year-old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It's a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal.

In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it's possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don't always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.  

Dennis Lehane is the author of nine novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He and his wife, Angie, divide their time between Boston and the Gulf Coast of Florida. 

Before becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. His one regret is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar.

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Joel Hoffman, PhD, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning

Wednesday, November 10 @7pm, Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center 

From Publishers Weekly: Author Hoffman, a linguist and a translator, uses his knowledge and his skills to correct some of the common errors in translating the language of the Bible from Hebrew into English. His initial three chapters are devoted to explaining linguistics and translation theory, skillfully clarifying complex concepts. The remaining five chapters ably apply these ideas to biblical phrases that, according to Hoffman, require rewording. 

He begins with the important commandment, And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. He convincingly claims that the Hebrew words for heart and soul have been severely mistranslated and should be rendered as mind and body. Similarly, Hoffman effectively demonstrates errors in rendering shepherd, my sister, my bride, two of the Ten Commandments, and virgin. Attentive readers will find this book to be valuable for properly understanding the Bible. (Feb.)

Dr. Joel M. Hoffman, an expert in translation, Hebrew, and the Bible, is a much sought-after speaker who presents to dozens of popular and academic audiences each year. He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and has served on the faculties of Brandeis University and Hebrew Union College.

Dr. Hoffman is the chief translator for the popular 10-volume series, My People's Prayer Book (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and for My People's Passover Haggadah, both from Jewish Lights Publishing. He is the author of the critically acclaimed In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (NYU Press).

Ticket are $5 per person. They can be purchased at the JCC or by calling Sandee Kayser, 414-967-8228. For additional information contact Dorene Paley , 414-967-8217 or dpaley@jccmilwaukee.org. or visit our web-site: www.jccmilwaukee.org.

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Linda and Allen Anderson, authors of Dogs and the Women Who Love Them

Wednesday, November 10 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

Co-Sponsored by the Wisconsin Humane Society and Ecopet on Brady Street

 

Nobody who has lived with, loved, or been loved by a dog can deny the human-canine bond. Yet women, with their predisposition to being nurturers, seem to forge the deepest and most harmonious connections with their non-speaking furred companions.  

Dogs and the Women Who Love Them looks into the lives of some inspiring women whose relationships with their dogs have had long-lasting, positive effects on not only their own lives, but those of humans and canines alike.  Stories include an abused German Shepherd who saved the life of a nationally recognized, award-winning police dog trainer while serving as her partner; a rescued pit bull whose time in dog fighting pits inspired a New Orleans shelter for special needs dogs; a wheelchair-bound Dachshund who visits children in schools, teaching them how to appreciate people’s differences; and a rescued Lab who, with his human, “co-founded” a Texas non-profit that trains service dogs for disabled veterans.

 

10% of designated sales for this event will be donated to the Wisconsin Humane Society.  Volunteers from WHS will be on hand with an information table and will be selling Mini Cooper raffle tickets, with proceeds from ticket sales going to help the many pets that pass through their doors.

Author bio: Allen and Linda Anderson are speakers and authors of a series of twelve popular books about the spiritual relationships between people and animals. They co-founded the Angel Animals Network in 1996 to increase love and respect for all life through the power of story. Their award-winning work has been featured on local, national, and international media and news outlets. They donate a portion of revenue from their projects to animal shelters and animal welfare organizations. The Andersons’ website is www.angelanimals.net. 

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My Thoughts Be Bloody...

Nora Titone, author of My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy

Monday, November 8 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

This sweeping family saga will rewrite our understanding of one of the most seminal tragedies in American history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Every American knows the literal story of what happened in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865: Lincoln was shot by a second-rate actor, John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged at the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. But Nora Titone, a brilliant young historian, has uncovered a hidden history, buried until now in private letters, journals, and reminiscences of the Booth family, that will captivate all readers of American history and electrify the historical debate.

To recreate the lost world of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, Titone leads readers on a tour of the 19th century, bringing forgotten landscapes to life.  The action moves from the slums of 1840s Baltimore to the gold fields of California, and from the jungles of Panama to the mansions of Gilded Age New York.  By the end of the journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death less as the result of the war between the North and South, than the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers.

 

Author bio: Nora Titone studied history at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.  For the past decade she has worked as a historical researcher specializing in nineteenth-century America for a range of academics, authors, and artists.  She lives in Chicago.

A Music Class, Poetry, and a Film Chat

Jennifer Murphy Damm, free music class

Saturday, November 6 @11am, Boswell Book Company

Bring your little ones out to move and groove with Ms. Jen and Music for Aardvarks-Milwaukee!

Music for Aardvarks is an interactive music program for kids, ages 0-6, and their caregivers. Classes incorporate singing, dancing, live music, storytelling, and instrumental jam sessions. The Music for Aardvarks music program began in New York City 13 years ago and can be found in many cities across the country. Aardvarks songs are also featured on Nick Jr. and Jack’s Big Music Show.

Presenter bio: Jennifer Murphy Damm is a singer/songwriter, teacher, and piano instructor.  She graduated from Colorado State University with a Masters Degree in Instructional Leadership and was a middle school Science and Math teacher for seven years before having children of her own.  Damm discovered the Music for Aardvarks program and has now brought this fresh and exciting musical experience to Milwaukee.  Her website is www.milwaukeeaardvarks.com.

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Poet Annie Finch 
Saturday, November 6 @2pm, MPLs Centennial Hall

From haiku to ode, great poetry has always connected us with earth's cycles. This program will help you rediscover how poetry attunes us to the motions of our moving and vulnerable planet. Poet Annie Finch shares some of her favorite seasonal poems, along with tips for using poetic rhythm to align yourself with the changing year.

Annie Finch is author of the poetry collections Among the Goddesses, Calendars, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, and Eve, reissued in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporaries Poetry Series. Her other works include libretti; music, theater, and art collaborations; translation; and several anthologies and books on poetry. Winner of a Black Earth fellowship and the Robert Fitzgerald Award, she is Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine.

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Nathan Rabin, author of My Year of Flops: One Man's Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

Saturday, November 6 @2pm, Boswell Book Company

What if we went to a hundred movies and they all sucked?  But what if, afterwards, we had a beer or two, and after some discussion, several turned out to be works of genius, and others, well, still sucked?  And then one of us wrote a column about it?   

That's the gist of Nathan Rabin's new book, My Year of Flops, based on his twice-weekly column of the same name that began in 2007 and was so popular (his fans include the popular comic Patton Oswalt), he continued beyond the initial timeframe implied in the title. Rabin watches (in most case, re-watches) a commercial and generally critical failure, offers his critique, and puts it in cultural perspective and biographical (his) perspective.   

Think Exit to Eden, Ishtar, Mame, and Battlefield Earth.  It helps that Rabin has encyclopedic film knowledge and a razor sharp wit. My Year of Flops takes dozens of those columns and throws in fifteen brand-new entries as well as bonus interviews. The results are laugh-out-loud funny and, perhaps a little strangely, nostalgic.

 

Author bio: Nathan Rabin is the author of the acclaimed memoir, The Big Rewind, which chronicles Rabin’s tumultuous childhood and struggles with depression through a darkly comic lens of pop culture and entertainment.  He attended the University of Wisconsin where he began writing for The Onion, becoming the Head Writer of its entertainment section, The A.V. Club.  Rabin was, briefly, a regular critic on AMC’s short-lived “Movie Club with John Ridley.”  He lives in Chicago. 

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Because everybody loves a Threesome:

Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies with
Davis Schneiderman, author of Drain with
Zoe Zolbrod, author of Currency

Friday, November 5 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

Join three fearless authors as they explore the fictional crossroads of power and control, gender and sexuality, and the deeper essence of freedom and creativity.

 

Slut Lullabies is a daring collection of insightfully drawn, deeply felt characters moving delicately amid the despair and wreckage of ordinary life, but always towards hope.  A gay Latino man and his lover navigate their familial clashes as they plan their commitment ceremony; a young girl wanting to leave a violent home precariously balances ethical tightropes when she seduces a teacher for blackmail money; and a wealthy socialite must confront her demons when her comfortable life crumbles.  Through beauty, horror, humor and chaos, Frangello digs into her understanding of human experience to write in an uplifting voice, demanding the judgmental reader to consider the power of empathy.

 

Drain imagines a waterless Lake Michigan in the year 2039, with the planet’s protective atmospheric fields slowly disappearing and its subsequent effect on the occupants of a desert area east of Chicago where three communities are clashing: punk pirates, ultra-wealthy closed communities, and end-times cultists.  Shocking, but unwavering in its critique of modern culture, Drain walks a post-apocalyptic path in the footsteps of William S. Burroughs and Chuck Pahlaniuk.

 

In Currency, Robin, an American backpacker low on money but infatuated with travel and beauty, and Piv, her charismatic Thai lover who dreams of a better life, become embroiled in the dangerous world of international animal trafficking in this exotic literary thriller.

 

Author bios:

Gina Frangello is the author of the critically acclaimed novel My Sister’s Continent. She is the executive editor and co-founder of Other Voices Books and the editor of The Nervous Breakdown’s fiction section. She lives in Chicago with her husband, twin daughters and son, and teaches at Columbia College and Northwestern University.

 

Davis Schneiderman chairs the English and American studies departments at Lake Forest College in Illinois.  He is the director of Lake Forest College Press/&Now Books; he also directs the Virtual Burnham Initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.  Schneiderman is the author of the novel DIS and the co-author of the novel Abecedarium.  His creative work has appeared in numerous publications, including Fiction International, the Chicago Tribune, Tri-Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and the Iowa Review.

 

Zoe Zolbrod studied at both Oberlin and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has been a Senior Editor at Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. She also was co-publisher of Maxine - a literate companion for churlish girls and rakish women.  Currency is her first novel.

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a Mystery and some Non-Fiction for ya!

Michael Ayoob, author of In Search of Mercy

Thursday, November 4 @7pm, Mystery One Bookstore

Winner of the PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Competition!

Dexter Bolzjak is an ex–hockey goalie who was abducted and tortured by perverted sports fans eight years ago. Now he's muddling along in a Pittsburgh warehouse when he meets an old, terminally ill drunk named Lou Kashon. Lou wants to see his lost love, the actress Mercy Carnahan, and offers Dexter a fortune to find her. 

Dexter embarks on the search, retracing Mercy's past online and on foot. Soon, Mercy begins to haunt Dexter, appearing in his dreams while flashbacks to his own traumatic experience plague his waking hours. 

Dexter persists and follows Mercy's trail to New York, where he finds a voyeuristic film of the actress recorded shortly before her disappearance. Once Dexter connects that film to its source, he finds himself trapped in the ultimate nightmare.

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Steve Paulson, author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science

Thursday, November 4 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

In Atoms and Eden, the Peabody Award-winning journalist Steve Paulson explores this complex subject with a host of intellectual luminaries, including Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, E.O. Wilson, Sam Harris, Elaine Pagels, Francis Collins, Daniel Dennett, Jane Goodall, Paul Davies, and Steven Weinberg. The interviewees include Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims, as well as agnostics, atheists, and other scholars who hold perspectives that are hard to categorize. 

Paulson's interviews sweep across a broad range of scientific disciplines--evolutionary biology, quantum physics, cosmology, and neuroscience--and also explore key issues in theology, religious history, and what William James called ''the varieties of religious experience.'' Collectively, these engaging dialogues cover the major issues that have often pitted science against religion--from the origins of the universe to debates about God, Darwin, the nature of reality, and the limits of human reason. These are complex, intellectually rich discussions, presented in an accessible and engaging manner.  

Most of these interviews were originally published as individual cover stories for Salon.com, where they generated a huge reader response. Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge will present a major companion series on related topics this fall.

A feast of ideas and competing perspectives, this volume will appeal to scientists, spiritual seekers, and the intellectually curious.

 

Author bio: Steve Paulson is Executive Producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge. He received the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion.  His work has been featured in Salon and Slate as well as on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

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Reading events in every part of town tonight!

Wednesday, November 3 @ 4pm, Weasler Auditorium 

(1422 West Wisconsin Avenue)

Boswell Book Company will be on-hand to sell books.

Robert D. Putnam, author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us and Bowling Alone.  This year's Marburg Lecture at Marquette University features the great Harvard Professor whose seminal work has been one of the most cited of the last decade.  This event is free.

Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.

America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion.

The result has been a growing polarization—the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars.

American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate how the trends described by Putnam and Campbell affect the lives of real Americans.

 

David E. Campbell is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame as well as a research fellow with the Institute for Educational Initiatives. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of several books, and his work has also appeared in the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.  He lives near South Bend, Indiana.

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Myla Goldberg, author of A False Friend
Wednesday, November 3 @7pm, Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center (6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Whitefish Bay)

As part of the Jewish Book and Culture Fair 2010

From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two  eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out . . .

Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.

The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.

Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past.

Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.

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Wednesday, November 3 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

Co-sponsored with Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast

Celebrate National Butchers week with Bolzano Artisan Meats and Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast by meeting Milwaukee’s own Scott Buer, featured as one of the top 50 butchers in the country in a new book by Marissa Guggiana, Primal Cuts, replete with profiles, recipes, practical advice with pictorial assistance and tons of insider information into the new, “slow,” meat industry.  One of the farmers who provides Bolzano with hogs will also be on hand.
 

Scott Buer is the owner of Bolzano Artisan Meats, a Riverwest charcuterie specializing in the art of dry curing, and one of the only ones nationwide that makes its product using locally raised heirloom hogs. Bolzano meats are available around the state at various specialty food stores and online, though Buer also brings his product to area farmers markets throughout the year.

 

Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast is a local branch of the non-profit organization Slow Food USA/International.  They offer events and programs to assist in advocating the support of family farms and cooperatives, promotion of locally grown food, support for school gardens, conservation of regional culinary traditions and the maintenance of biodiversity.

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Beth Hoffman, author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
Wednesday, November 3 @7pm, Next Chapter Bookshop

Beth Hoffman's bestseller Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is out in paperback now, and that's great news for book clubs!

At the heart of Hoffman's novel is twelve-year-old CeeCee who has been shouldering the burden of caring for her psychologically troubled mother, Camille, for much of her young life. It's 1967 and they live in Ohio, but Camille is certain that it's 1951 and she's just been crowned the Vidalia Onion Queen of Georgia.

The day CeeCee discovers her mother in the front yard wearing a tattered prom dress, she knows her mother has completely flipped. When Camille meets a tragic end, it brings CeeCee's Great Aunt Tootie into her life. CeeCee is whisked away to Savannah Georgia, a world of perfumed prosperty and Southern eccentricity. She's fascinated by the denizens of her new world and thrives on her new friendships, particularly with her aunt's cook, Oletta. Before CeeCee can bloom into a Georgia peach, she must face the fact that her mother's legacy isn't easy to escape.

Stitch 'n' Bitch TONIGHT!

Debbie Stoller, author of Stitch ‘n’ Bitch Superstar Knitting: Go Beyond the Basics

Tuesday, November 2 @7pm at Boswell Book Company, Co-Sponsored with Loop Yarn Shop

 

The expert knitter and gifted, edgy author who introduced knitting to a new generation will host a free in-store lace workshop to launch the newest addition to the New York Times-bestselling Stitch ‘n Bitch series. 

Featuring 41 cool, funky, and fabulous patterns including sexy stockings, stylish handbags, blankets, scarves, and more, all photographed in full-color, Stitch 'n’ Bitch Superstar Knitting is the only knitter's handbook to teach the full array of advanced knitting techniques and skills, such as double-knitting, knitting lace, complicated color work, beading, and more. 

Writing with the clarity that makes her such an effective teacher, and the attitude that got her dubbed "knitting superstar" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Stoller explains how to "knit by the numbers;" get creative with stripes; embellish with crochet, beading, and I-cords; how to make cable patterns; and how to use color forms. There's also a whole section on DIY, which gives a tutorial on creating your own knitting patterns.

 

Author bio: Debbie Stoller is the bestselling author of the Stitch 'n’ Bitch series of knitting books and calendars. She comes from a long line of Dutch knitters, has a Ph.D. from Yale in the psychology of women, and is the editor-in-chief of "Bust" magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Phil Cosineau reading TONIGHT!

Phil Cousineau, author of Wordcatcher

Friday, October 29 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

Who knew that the great country of Canada is named for a mistake? How about “bedswerver,” the best Elizabethan insult to hurl at a cheating boyfriend? By exploring the delightful back stories of the 250 words in Wordcatcher, readers are lured by language and entangled in etymologies. 

Author Phil Cousineau takes us on a tour into the obscure territory of word origins with great erudition and endearing curiosity. The English poet W. H. Auden was once asked to teach a poetry class, and when 200 students applied to study with him, he only had room for 20 of them. When asked how he chose his students, he said he picked the ones who actually loved words. So too, with this book—it takes a special wordcatcher to create a treasure chest of remarkable words and their origins, and any word lover will relish the stories that Cousineau has discovered.

 

Author bio: Phil Cousineau is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, lecturer and travel leader, storyteller and TV host. His fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him from Michigan to Marrakesh, Iceland to the Amazon, in a worldwide search for what the ancients called the “soul of the word.” 

With more than 25 books and 15 scriptwriting credits to his name, the “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. His books include Stoking the Creative Fires, Once and Future Myths, The Art of Pilgrimage, The Olympic Odyssey, The Hero’s Journey, and Wordcatcher.

*LOCAL AUTHOR* Reading Event, TONIGHT!

Dennis McCann, author of Badger Boneyards...now at Boswell!

Thursday, October 28 @7pm, Boswell Book Company

The bodies are buried, but the stories are not. From the ornate tombs of Milwaukee’s beer barons to displaced Chippewa graves and miniscule family plots, “Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story” unearths the stories of Wisconsin. Football great John Heisman is buried here, as is the state’s smallest man, a woman whose tombstone names her murderer, and the boy who would not tell a lie and paid the price. 

 

Even in a graveyard, peace proves hard to come by: Wisconsin’s Native American tribes have fought for undisturbed grounds and proper burial. A patch of Belgian graves now resides beneath a parking lot while the headstones cluster nearby, and the inhabitants of a Bayfield cemetery were unearthed by a raging flood. Sometimes the dead are recalled with only a first name, and sometimes no name at all. Following the clues in tips from readers, unusual epitaphs, and well-worn stones, Dennis McCann finds the melancholy, the humorous, the tragic, and the universal in Wisconsin’s cities of the dead.

 

Author bio: Dennis McCann is a Wisconsin native and longtime explorer of the state’s nooks, crannies, and, yes, its burial grounds. A University of Wisconsin–Madison journalism graduate, he joined the Milwaukee Journal (later the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) in 1983 as a farm writer and state rover. His previous books include The Wisconsin Story: 150 Stories/150 Years, Dennis McCann Takes You for a Ride, and Rough Stuff, a collection of his columns from Wisconsin Golfer magazine. Now a freelance writer, he spends most of his time with his wife, Barb, a retired teacher, at their home on Lake Superior in Bayfield.