Meredith Maran in conversation
with Gina Frangello
The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention 

Like a lot of women her age, Meredith Maran has a hard time believing she's a woman of her age. For readers of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman, comes a lusty, kickass, post-divorce memoir, one woman's story of starting over at 60 in Hollywood. After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life's savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran leaves her San Francisco freelance writer's life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles. Determined to rebuild not only her savings but herself, The New Old Me follows Maran as she learns to celebrate becoming an elder along with the difficulties of loss and change.

Meredith Maran is the author of fourteen nonfiction books and the acclaimed 2012 novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes. Meredith is a book critic, essayist, and feature writer for People, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Meredith lives in Silverlake, Los Angeles, and on Twitter at @meredithmaran.

Gina Frangello is a cofounder of Other Voices Books and the editor of the fiction section at The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of one previous novel and a collection of short stories. She lives in Chicago.

Feminist Craft Circle: 
Yarn Bombing, part 1

Tuesday, April 4 at 7 p.m. 

This event is BYOB & BYO Crafting Materials 

- All levels of crafters welcome!

Join the Feminist Craft Circle as we use our hooks and needles to create a colorful installation for this summer's Midsommarfest-- Andersonville's annual street festival! Learn the how's and why's of yarnbombing--street art made with knitting and crochet--and help us make a yarnbomb creation to be installed in and around the bookstore in June. Simple patterns will be provided, or you can let your creativity run wild! Please bring your own knitting needles or crochet hooks. Some yarn will be provided but any yarn contributions (especially acrylic yarns) are welcome.

Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights

 

Brian F. Harrison (PhD, Northwestern University) is a political scientist, writer, and award-winning teacher. He has taught at Northwestern University, Wesleyan University, Loyola University Chicago, and DePaul University. Brian is a specialist in political communication, political behavior and attitude change, and public opinion. He has been published in many academic journals, such as Political Behavior, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly , among others. 

 

Melissa R. Michelson  (PhD, Yale University) is professor of political science at Menlo College. She is co-author of Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns and Living the Dream: New Immigration Policies and the Lives of Undocumented Latino Youth . She has published dozens of articles, and her current research projects explore voter registration and mobilization in minority communities and persuasive communication on LGBT rights.

 

Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas

In the first-ever Seven Seas history of the world's female buccaneers, Laura Sook Duncombe  tells the story of women, both real and legendary, who sailed alongside--and sometimes in command of--their male counterparts. History has largely ignored these female swashbucklers, until now. Here are their stories, from ancient Norse princess Alfhild to Cheng I Sao, who commanded a fleet of four hundred ships off China in the early nineteenth century.  Author Laura Sook Duncombe also looks beyond the stories to the storytellers and investigates why and how these stories are told and passed down, and how history changes depending on who is recording it. 

 

Laura Sook Duncombe is an author and feminist who loves all things science fiction, Broadway, and Sherlock Holmes. She lives with her husband and son in Virginia.

Hallelujah Anyway

 

   

For our April installment, Tasasha Henderson will present Love & Protect and Hannah Baptiste will talk about Assata's Daughters.

Love & Protect supports those who identify as women and gender non-conforming persons of color who are criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence. For this event, Love & Protect will discuss the history of Love & Protect, events they have held, facts about criminalization of domestic survivors, and why defense committees are important.

Assata's Daughters is a grassroots intergenerational collective of radical Black women located in the city of Chicago. They identify their work as part of the larger Black Lives Matter movement. Their programs aim to escalate, deepen, and sustain this movement for collective liberation. 

Join us for wine and cheese from Andersonville's Pastoral and a book talk featuring Greer Macallister and Renee Rosen! The authors will be discussing their new works of female-driven historical fiction--both set in Chicago. Macallister's Girl in Disguise is inspired by the true story of Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton detective. Renee Rosen's Windy City Blues unfolds a rich love story born out of the Chicago's blues scene during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister ( The Magician's Lie) is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist whose work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, the Missouri Review, and the Messenger . Her plays have been performed at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. She lives with her family on the East Coast.

Renée Rosen is the bestselling author of White Collar Girl, What the Lady Wants, Dollface , and the young adult novel, Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago. Visit her online at ReneeRosen.com, Facebook.com/ReneeRosenAuthor, and @ReneeRosen1.

 

Fallout
B ook Launch Party

Renee Engeln

Beauty Sick

Nadine Kenney Johnstone

Of This Much I'm Sure: A Memoir

When the Chant Comes

Sunday, April 23 at 4 p.m.

 

Wednesday, April 26 at 7 p.m.   

Reading, Q&A, and Signing

 

From the #1 New York Times -bestselling author of You Are a Badass ,  Jen Sincero recounts her own transformation--over just a few years--from a musician living in a converted garage with tum bleweeds blowing through her bank account to a business-savvy jetsetter.   

Jen channels the inimitable sass and practicality of You Are a Badass with these hilarious personal essays that offer accessible concepts to help readers learn to relate to money in a new (and lucrative) way.

Jen Sincero is a world-renowned author, success coach, and motivational speaker who's spent more than a decade helping people transform their lives and their bank accounts. Sincero lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

   

Stephanie Danler 's work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Vogue, Travel and Leisure, and Bon Appetit, among others. She is at work on a book of nonfiction and is based in Los Angeles.

Greta Johnsen co-hosts WBEZ's Nerdette Podcast. Prior to joining WBEZ in 2014. Greta hosted Morning Edition at WCQS in Asheville, North Carolina, and at KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska. Greta has a BA in English from Saint Olaf College and a MS in journalism from Northwestern University.

Indie Bookstore Day:

Books, Bread & Roses in collaboration with The Conversation  

 

dependent bookstores, we'll be focusing on books and literature as tools of resistance. Our theme this year is "books, bread & roses" inspired by feminist labor organizer Rose Schneiderman's famous speech--"The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too"--a rallying cry for the dignity of workers drawn from the title of a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim. This theme will also be on display during the Andersonville Flower Show, which starts on April 22.  

 

Refreshments will include fresh baked bread (and, of course, butter!) along with coffee from The Coffee Studio in the morning and wine from Pastoral in the evening. We will also have exclusive Indie Bookstore Day merch for sale while supplies last.

Read any history of New York City and you will read about men--men who were political leaders and men who were activists and cultural tastemakers. The Women Who Made New York reveals the untold stories of the phenomenal women who made New York City. Many were revolutionaries and activists, like Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde. Others were icons and iconoclasts, like Fran Lebowitz and Grace Jones. There were also women who led quieter private lives but were just as influential, such as Emily Warren Roebling, who completed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her engineer husband became too ill to work. Paired with striking, contemporary illustrations by artist Hallie Heald, The Women Who Made New York confronts the sexism inherent in how history is made and recorded.

Julie Scelfo is a frequent contributor to the New York Times . Prior to joining the Times in 2007, Scelfo was a correspondent at Newsweek , where she covered breaking news and wrote about society and human behavior. Scelfo lives with her family in Brooklyn, where she rides a push-scooter to ease travel back and forth between neighborhoods. She is a member of PEN America, a supporter of Narrative 4, and believes radical empathy is where it's at. More information about her work can be found at juliescelfo.com.

We're thrilled to welcome Susan Faludi, acclaimed feminist writer, back to Women & Children First. When Susan Faludi learned that her 76-year-old father - long estranged and living in Hungary - now identified as a woman, she struggled to connect this woman with the the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known throughout her life. Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father's many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. Faludi's memoir about her father's metamorphosis takes her to Hungary and across borders - historical, political, religious, sexual - to bring her face to face with questions of identity and family allegiances.

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, and the Baffler, among other publications.