July 2019

Join us for all of our exciting upcoming events! As the temperature drops, stock up on cold weather reads at Next Chapter Booksellers! Next Chapter Booksellers has a ton of awesome events this fall. Join our new poetry or speculative fiction book club or meet new authors. It's all happening here.

Thursday, October 17, 2019, 7:00pm   Ben Westhoff reads from Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic A deeply human story,  Fentanyl, Inc.  is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. "A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape," writes Ben Westhoff. "These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs"--and all-too-often tragically lethal.

Friday, October 18, 2019, 7:00pm Leslie Jamison discusses Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which Leslie Jamison has been so widely acclaimed, the fourteen essays in  Make It Scream, Make It Burn  explore the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; the haunted landscape of the Sri Lankan Civil War; and an entire museum dedicated to the relics of broken relationships. Jamison follows these examinations to more personal reckonings -- with elusive men and ruptured romances, with marriage and maternity -- in essays about eloping in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother, and giving birth. Often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, and widely considered one of the defining voices of her generation, Jamison interrogates her own life with the same nuance and rigor she brings to her subjects. The result is a provocative reminder of the joy and sustenance that can be found in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

Saturday, October 19, 2019, 4:00pm How to Be an Anti-Racist Book Club A book club discussion of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi will take place on Saturday, October 19th at 4:00pm. Come join our host Susan Moore for this thought-provoking conversation! Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and re-energizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At it's core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In  How to Be An Antiracist , Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

Saturday, October 19, 2019, 7:00pm  Jim Cory discusses the late Karl Tierney's Have You Seen This Man?: The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including Berkeley Poetry Review , American Poetry Review , and Exquisite Corpse . He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995. He was 39 years old. "The publication of these poems almost a quarter century after Karl Tierney’s death is a rarity in the world of letters. That this poetry could not just quietly disappear speaks to the spirit and quality it contains.” - Jim Cory, from the Introduction 

Sunday, October 20, 2019, 3:00pm  NCB Toni Morrison Book Club discusses Sula In honor of the passing of beloved author Toni Morrison, Next Chapter Booksellers will be hosting a book club to read one of her timeless works once a month. Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic,  Sula  is a work that overflows with life. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels  The Bluest Eye ,  Song of Solomon , and  Beloved , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2001 she was named one of "The 30 Most Powerful Women in America" by Ladies' Home Journal. 

Tuesday, October 22, 2019. 7:00pm  Benjamin Percy talks about Suicide Woods with Peter Geye Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection,  Thrill Me , he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed  Refresh, Refresh , Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in  Suicide Woods , a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods.   Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels, two books of short stories, and the essay collection Thrill Me . His honors include a fellowship from the NEA, the Whiting Writers’ Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Plimpton Prize. He lives in Minnesota. Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast . Geye is the author of the award winning novels Safe from the Sea , The Lighthouse Road , and Wintering , winner of the Minnesota Book Award. He currently teaches the year-long Novel Writing Project at the Loft Literary Center. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his family. 

Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 7:00pm  Preeti Mathur presents From Seven Rivers to Ten Thousand Lakes: Minnesota's Indian American Community Through personal stories and vivid photographs,  From Seven Rivers to Ten Thousand Lakes  offers an overview of the Indian people and the conditions that have spurred immigration to Minnesota; the experiences of settling in the state and establishing a community here; the professional, political, and economic contributions of Indian Americans in Minnesota, including both permanent and visiting residents; and the pursuit and celebration of cultural and religious traditions in this, their adopted home. Profiles of prominent individuals, businesses, and organizations that form the cornerstones of the Indian American community in Minnesota round out the narrative. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, as well as on personal experience as an involved member, Preeti Mathur tells of this vibrant community's past and present, while Dr. S. K. Dash's foreword looks to its bright future. 

Thursday, October 24, 2019, 7:00pm  Peter Campion reads from Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by  we ? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality. 

Sunday, October 27, 2019, 4:00pm  The NCB Book Club discusses Tin Man "Michael loves Ellis, Ellis loves Annie, and Annie loves them both. Yet Sarah Winman’s blistering novel Tin Man is anything but the usual love triangle. Instead, Winman asks us to consider what remains of love after its object is gone. She crowds this spare little book, set in London, Oxford, and the south of France, with vivid portraits of loss and mourning. At once terse and expansive, Tin Man is a firework flashing in the night--gone too soon but burned forever into the reader’s memory." — David - NCB Store Manager This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between? With beautiful prose and characters that are so real they jump off the page,  Tin Man  is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living. 

Tuesday, October 29, 2019, 7:00pm  Outside the Margins SFF Book Club: Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss Join us at 7PM on the last Tuesday of the month and discuss weird, wild, fantastic literature! This month we're reading  Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss. Villagers were always warned that monsters live outside the gates, but when a young boy named Vren is cast out, he finds a home in the world beyond, in Whiting Award winner Molly Gloss’s classic fantasy novel.  Vren has always been told that the world beyond the gates of his village is one filled with monsters, giants, and other terrifying creatures. But when he confides with his family about his ability to talk to animals, he’s outcast to the very world he’s been taught to fear his whole life. He expects to die alone, lost and confused, but he finds something different altogether—refuge in a community of shadowed people with extraordinary powers. Thirty years later, Molly Gloss’s dystopian fantasy novel is just as timely, poignant, and stirring as ever, in a brand-new edition! 

Friday, November 1, 2019 - 7:00pm  Chris Fink: Add This to the List of Things That You Are A cat culler in an Arizona trailer park community mulls his daily routine. An old mercenary explains the history of edible eel in New Zealand. A divorcé plays homewrecker across Finland and Russia while his worldly possessions sit in a self-storage unit. The dark and stunning stories in  Add This to the List of Things That You Are   explore how we sustain relationships when everything goes sideways and how we find meaning when the old patterns and structures of life give way. Many of Chris Fink’s characters have outgrown their rural roots yet feel ill-equipped for the urbane scenarios in which they find themselves.

Saturday, November 2, 2019 - 2:00pm  Kiersten Hall presents Jellybeans Thirty-five jellybeans come together to share a sweet and thoughtful poem promoting kindness and inclusivity with children, 0 to 6 years. Join in their adventure as they discover their unique qualities while realizing they are all, ultimately, the same. The Jellybeans book is sure to be a favorite among children and their family members. 

Saturday, November 2, 2019 - 6:00pm Poetry Book Club: Bodega by Su Hwang Join NCB staff and Macalester professors Michael Prior and Ben Voigt for a discussion of Su Hwang's  Bodega ! This richly lyrical debut collection tells the coming-of-age story of a first-generation Korean American as she views the world from her parents’ bodega in Queensbridge, New York, looking at our nation of immigrants eye-to-eye with humanitarianism and heart. Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents’ bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work. 

Sunday, November 3, 2019 - 2:00pm Sheila O'Connor reads from Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions Join Sheila O’Connor, Joe Horton, Mona Susan Power and Sun Yung Shin for a reading at Next Chapter Booksellers to celebrate the release of Sheila O’Connor’s new hybrid book  Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions . In an ambitious blend of fact and fiction, novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. V endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 7:00pm The Lost Brothers: A Family’s Decades-Long Search by Jack El-Hai On a cold November afternoon in 1951, three young boys went out to play in Farview Park in north Minneapolis. The Klein brothers—Kenneth Jr., 8; David, 6; and Danny, 4—never came home. When two caps turned up on the ice of the Mississippi River, investigators concluded that the boys had drowned and closed the case. The boys’ parents were unconvinced, hoping against hope that their sons would still be found. Sixty long years would pass before two sheriff’s deputies, with new information in hand and the FBI on board, could convince the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to reopen the case. 

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - 7:00pm Ben Orlin presents Change Is the Only Constant The next book from Ben Orlin, the popular math blogger and author of the underground bestseller Math With Bad Drawings . Change Is The Only Constant is an engaging and eloquent exploration of the intersection between calculus and daily life, complete with Orlin’s sly humor and wonderfully bad drawings. Change is the Only Constant is an engaging and eloquent exploration of the intersection between calculus and daily life, complete with Orlin’s sly humor and memorably bad drawings. By spinning 28 engaging mathematical tales, Orlin shows us that calculus is simply another language to express the very things we humans grapple with every day — love, risk, time, and most importantly, change. Divided into two parts, “Moments” and “Eternities,” and drawing on everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Mark Twain to David Foster Wallace, Change is the Only Constant unearths connections between calculus, art, literature, and a beloved dog named Elvis. This is not just math for math’s sake; it’s math for the sake of becoming a wiser and more thoughtful human.   Ben Orlin is the author of the book  Math with Bad Drawings  and the blog of the same name. His writing on math and education has appeared in  The Atlantic ,  The Chicago Tribune , The Los Angeles Times , Slate , Vox , and  Popular Science . He has taught middle and high school mathematics in Oakland, California and in Birmingham, England, and has spoken about math at college and universities across the U.S. He currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  

Thursday, November 14, 2019, 6:30pm  Cracked Walnut Bridges Reading Bridges was formerly housed at Blue Harbor Center for the Arts, along with sister reading series, Literary Lights, hosted by Donna Isaac. Bridges is intended to bring together writers across genres and cultural backgrounds to express themselves, but also build links to each other. The title comes from a performance piece, Landbridge: The Beringia Project, that Stanley Kusunoki did with Jamison Mahto, an Anishinabe performance poet/trickster coyote. Starting with conflicting creation myths, we came to a point where the readers, understood and connected with the commonalities of their histories and cultures. It is the hope of the series that participants will do the same between themselves and audience members. 

Dear Booklovers at NCB, A note of gratitude and a goodbye I’m packing up my wall of books and about to make a return East, this time to Brooklyn, after a 2-year sojourn here in St. Paul. This corner, this bookstore and YOU-ALL have provided connection, healing and community for me as I’ve navigated thru some life changes. Thank you. What a corner it is! In the world! I hope you see it and celebrate it as I do- a place of ideas, community and a passion for books – and BEST OF ALL a commitment to how vital an independent bookstore is (esp. in these times) Many thanks and READ ON! Lorrie

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. We've got lots more great books in the store. We hope you'll come in soon for a recommendation. --all of us at Next Chapter Booksellers