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Laurel Book Store
1423 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612
Mon-Th 10-6 Fri-Sat 10-7 Sun 10-4
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Dear Reader,
It's Memorial Day Weekend so I hope you're relaxing somewhere. We'll be open Saturday until 6 and then closed Sunday and Monday, so if you need a new book or gift, come on by! It's a gorgeous day and the parking is free in the Clay Street garage all day to day.
Wednesday we will be hosting Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter and the new book Girls & Sex about the lives of middle and high school girls. See below for more information.
We're making plans for some summer reading recommendations and fun for kids and adults so stay tuned!
Happy Reading and enjoy your Memorial Day,
Luan
5-28-16
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New and Notable
The Fireman by Joe Hill $28.99
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies-before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
The View From the Cheap Seats, Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman $26.99
An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his bestselling fiction. Now,The View from the Cheap Seats brings together for the first time ever more than sixty pieces of his outstanding nonfiction. Analytical yet playful, erudite yet accessible, this cornucopia explores a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts the author's experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards in Hollywood.
Insightful, incisive, witty, and wise, The View from the Cheap Seats explores the issues and subjects that matter most to Neil Gaiman-offering a glimpse into the head and heart of one of the most acclaimed, beloved, and influential artists of our time.
Voyager, Travel Writings by Russell Banks $25.99 Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. "Since childhood, I've longed for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue," he writes in this compelling anthology. The longing for escape has taken him from the "bright green islands and turquoise seas" of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson $17.99
Five thousand years after a catastrophic event sends a small surviving remnant of humanity into outer space, the progeny of those survivors--seven distinct races now three billion strong--embark on a journey into the unknown to return to Earth.
Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry $15.99
A sideshow performer, a pair of asylum escapees, and an orphaned boxer converge in Parrys intricately braided novel of secretsand hidden identity.
New York, 1895. A newborn baby is found abandoned in the muck of the privies behind a row of tenement houses. Her fate becomes the responsibility of four strangers, whose own lives become increasingly connected as their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum,Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New Yorka city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry$14.99
The New York Times bestselling humorist Michael Perry makes his fiction debut with this hilarious and bighearted tale-a comic yet sincere exploration of faith in the face of the modern world.
Life is suddenly full of drama for low-key Harley Jackson: a woman in a big red pickup has stolen his bachelor's heart; a Hummer-driving developer hooked on self-improvement audiobooks is threatening to pave the last vestiges of his family farm; and inside his barn lies a calf bearing the image of Jesus Christ. Harley's best friend, Billy, urges him to sidestep the woman, fight the developer, and get rich off the calf. But Harley takes the opposite tack, hoping to avoid what his devout, dearly departed mother would have called "a scene."
The Fifth Avenue Artists Society by Joy Callaway $15.99
The Bronx, 1891. Virginia Loftin, the boldest of four artistic sisters in a family living in genteel poverty, knows what she wants most: to become a celebrated novelist despite her gender, and to marry Charlie, the boy next door and her first love.
When Charlie proposes instead to a woman from a wealthy family, Ginny is devastated; shutting out her family, she holes up and turns their story into fiction, obsessively rewriting a better ending. Though she works with newfound intensity, literary success eludes her-until she attends a salon hosted in her brother's writer friend John Hopper's Fifth Avenue mansion. Among painters, musicians, actors, and writers, Ginny returns to herself, even blooming under the handsome, enigmatic John's increasingly romantic attentions.
Color Paris $14.99
Add your own special artistry to romantic Paris with this gorgeous coloring book that features twenty stunning landscapes, from the awe-inspiring view of the city from the Rue Piat terrace in Belleville to the lavish and elaborate exterior of the Palais Garnier, Paris' famed Opera House.
Color New York $14.99
From the Brooklyn Bridge to Times Square, The Guggenheim Museum to Washington Square, twenty dazzling New York City views to color, including architectural icons, lively street views, and gorgeously detailed interiors.
How about some poetry? This is by a poet who was featured here at the store during the Oakland Book Festival.
Hurrah's Nest by Arisa White $15
A vivid and varied collection that addresses family loyalties, dysfunction, violence, and differences, Hurrah's Nest is White's imaginative and emotionally honest exploration of growing up the second oldest, first daughter of seven siblings. Childhood experiences are looked at with rawness, sensitivity, and crafted with precision: be it the cutting of her dreadlocks, mother's abortion, drug trafficking, or her sister's developmental disability, the language is tender and startling. Hurrah's Nest-from the confusion of our lives-asks us to make meaning and good from what we've bargained and haven't bargained for.
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Younger Readers
Cockatoo, Too by Bethanie Deeney Murguia $17.99 Very few words and great illustrations make a wonderful book for reading aloud to small or medium sized people. It's got delightful turns of phrase and punctuation- which will be perfect for an animated storyteller!
Good Night, Baddies by Deborah Underwood with illustrations by Juli Kangas $17.99
What do the baddies in fairy tales do after their word day is done? Admit it, you never really thought about it. Here's the scoop told in rhyming text and beautiful illustrations. It's a story you haven't heard before and will elicit squeals of "there's the Big Bad Wolf" and "so that's what Trolls look like in pajamas." Not to be missed for the 4 and up set.
**We have signed copies on hand.**
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Book Club
To join, read the book and show up. We would love to have you with us.
Next meeting is Thursday, June 16, 6:15. Katherine Dunn's novel, Geek Love.
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out-with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes-to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious-and dangerous-asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry,Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Katherine Dunn passed away on May 11 of this year. Geek Love has enjoyed great popularity since it was published in 1989.
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Events
Join us to meet authors in person.
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June's Featured Artist
will be
First Friday reception on June 3 from 6-9pm
Hand Made Books Workshop June 11 at
LYNNE PRATHER
ARTIST STATEMENT
My first creative area was ceramics, followed by calligraphy and bookmaking and painting. These last three endeavors have kept circling around in various
combinations since 1977. Last year I studied Printmaking at Laney College which presented me with yet another way to combine words and images.
When I began studying calligraphy, I often warmed up by making gestural marks across a page. This pleasure in movement continues in much of what I do today.
The movement of the pen or brush across the paper of the paper when it is
folded of the pages of a book when they are turned of a mobile in the air.
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