July News
Greetings!
We are so excited that we’re going to be seeing [the upper half of] your faces again in the store for the first time since March! As of Monday, July 13, we’ll be opening again for walk-in business seven days a week, from noon – 5 pm. We’ll be taking all necessary precautions to protect you and our staff, including requiring face masks, offering hand sanitizer or gloves at the door, and limiting the number of people inside the store at any given time. Additionally, we are not accepting cash payments! We want to say a big loud THANK YOU again to everyone who has faithfully kept ordering from us online or generously donated to our GoFundMe campaign, because those are the reasons we’ve been able to stay afloat and return to [sort of] normal operations. Remember, you can still order your books online and just duck into the store to pick them up, or have them sent to you at home.

And yes, Waldo’s back for the sixth annual Find Waldo in Downtown Evanston scavenger hunt! This year Waldo is, of course, wearing a responsible face covering, and he is hiding in a socially-distanced-accessible way in the windows of the participating businesses , so you and the kids can find him without actually having to come inside the stores. Find Waldo starts July 15 and runs through August 15 , and there will be, as usual, prizes available for kids who complete their passports. For more details, see the event listing below.

Finally, we’re resuming Literary Lunchbreaks on July 16 with a launch event for the new book by Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. Then on July 23, as part of our Midwest Address collaboration with Evanston Public Library, we welcome Sahar Mustafah to talk about her debut novel The Beauty of Your Face.

For details and other news, read on in the newsletter.

And, as always, read on!

Yours,
Nina
News and Events
To celebrate the launch of  The King of Confidence , author Miles Harvey and Ben George, his editor at Little, Brown & Company, will have a virtual conversation about the making of a book that  Vanity Fair  calls a "rollicking story, ripe for a Hollywood treatment,"  Library Journa l describes as "a tour de force of popular history," and  Kirkus  calls "perfect for fans of  Devil in the White City ." Harvey and George, who collaborated closely on this work from conception to completion, will discuss the story behind the story--the author-editor relationship in the creative process.

About the book: In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king.

From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country.
The King of Confidence  tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man.
Miles Harvey is the author of the national and international bestseller  The Island of Lost Maps  and the recipient of a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship. His book  Painter in a Savage Land  was named a  Chicago Tribune  Best Book of the Year. He teaches at DePaul University.
Ben George is a Senior Editor at Little, Brown and Company, where he edits Rick Bass, David Bezmozgis, Tony Earley, Adam Haslett, Leslie Jamison, Rick Moody, Edith Pearlman, and Lauren Slater, among other writers. Prior to joining Little, Brown, he was an editor at Viking Penguin and before that the co-founder and editorial director of Lookout Books. He was also the editor of the literary journal  Ecotone , where he worked with Annie Proulx, Jonathan Lethem, Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie, Charles Baxter, Terry Tempest Williams, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, among many others.
Thu, Jul 16, 2020 12:00 PM CST
Literary Lunchbreak: Miles Harvey: The King of Confidence Book Launch
A MIDWEST ADDRESS EVENT, CO-SPONSORED BY EVANSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Thursday, July 23rd, noon - 1 pm
Join us for a virtual lunchtime discussion between Sahar Mustafah and Christine Maul Rice about Sahar's new novel  The Beauty of Your Face , a profound and poignant exploration of one woman's life in a nation at odds with its ideals. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter--radicalized by the online alt-right--attacks the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories: the bigotry she faced as a child, her mother's dreams of returning to Palestine, and the devastating disappearance of her older sister that tore her family apart. Still, there is the sweetness of the music from her father's oud, and the hope and community Afaf finds in Islam.

The Beauty of Your Face  is a profound and poignant exploration of one woman’s life in a nation at odds with its ideals, an emotionally rich novel that encourages us to reflect on our shared humanity. If others take the time to really see us, to look into our face, they will find something indelibly familiar, something achingly beautiful gazing back.
Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. The Beauty of Your Face, her first novel, was named a  New York Times Book Review  Editor’s Choice, a  Los Angeles Times  United We Read selection representing Illinois, and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. Her short story collection  Code of the West   was the winner of the 2016 Willow Books Fiction Award. Her stories have earned a Distinguished Story citation from  Best American Short Stories 2016 , First Place in Fiction from the Guild Literary Complex of Chicago, and three Pushcart Prize nominations, among other honors. Mustafah earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago where she was the recipient of the David Friedman Award for Best Fiction. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.
Christine Maul Rice’s novel  Swarm Theory  was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award and a National Indie Excellence Award, as well as earning an Honorable Mention in the Chicago Writers Association for Book of the Year awards. Christine's short stories have been published in MAKE Literary Magazine, BELT’s  Rust Belt Anthology  and  The Literary Review , among others. Her essays, interviews, and long-form journalism have appeared in  The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Big Smoke, The Millions, Chicago Tribune, Detroit’s Metro Times , among other publications. Christine has served as faculty at conferences including Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference, Interlochen's Writers Retreat, and Shake Rag Alley Writers’ Retreat. Christine taught in Columbia College Chicago's Fiction Writing Department for over 20 years, is the founder and editor of  Hypertext Magazine , and director of the social justice storytelling nonprofit organization Hypertext Magazine & Studio (HMS).
Thu, Jul 23, 2020 12:00 PM CST
Sahar Mustafah & Christine Maul Rice: The Beauty of Your Face
July 15 - August 15
Waldo returns to Evanston again this summer, this time hiding in the windows of businesses downtown. To participate, you can pick up a Find Waldo passport here at Bookends & Beginnings.

  1. When you spot Waldo at any one of the businesses listed on the reverse side, write in the number found on his mask in the space provided for that business.
  2. When you’ve found at least 10 different Waldos, snap a picture of your passport and email it to lbrown@downtownevanston.org or bring the paper passport to Bookends & Beginnings, where you can either bring it inside or leave it in the plastic envelope outside. Deadline to submit is August 15 at noon! 
  3. If you turn in the passport, you’ll be entered a raffle to win a variety of prizes from local businesses. The raffle drawing will take place on Saturday, August 15 at 4pm and you will be contacted via email.
If you order five or more titles from the District 65 Summer Reading list from us (all at once), we will deliver them to your doorstep FOR FREE!

We’ve got all of the District 65 Summer Reading List books conveniently listed on pages you can browse on our website and then pop right into the shopping cart.
Books You Could be Reading
(and ordering from us!)
Pre-order these books and get them when they're released!
Bookends & Beginnings  is a community-centered and community-sustained, full-service, general-interest independent bookstore, now in our sixth calendar year. We are a member of the Chicago Independent Bookstore Alliance ( ChIBA ), the Great Lakes Independent Bookstore Association ( GLIBA ), and the American Booksellers Association ( ABA ). Show your support by shopping in our store (and  other Chicago-area independent bookstores ), by trading in or donating books of quality and in good condition, by bringing your local and out-of-town friends and family to shop with us, by attending our events, and by "liking" us on  Facebook  and posting reviews on other social media. Remember that you can always see event photos and news updates on  our Facebook page , which is updated almost daily. There you can also subscribe to our events feed with a single click.
 
Above all, keep reading good books! 
Bookends & Beginnings
1712 Sherman Ave Alley #1
Evanston, IL 60202 
224-999-7722

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