Event Spotlight: Douglas Stewart In Conversation with MPR Correspondent Euan Kerr

On Friday, April 29th, starting at 6:00pm, we'll be hosting Douglas Stewart, author of Shuggie Bain, in conversation with MPR arts correspondent Euan Kerr. Your ticket includes a copy of Stewart's new novel Young Mungo. Tickets can be purchased in store or through the website here.

Douglas Stuart's first novel, Shuggie Bain, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far, winning the 2020 Booker Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and two British Book Awards. His new novel Young Mungo is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the first love of two young men. Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic. When they fall in love, however, Mungo must hide his true self from his big brother, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. Young Mungo explores the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

This is what 100 copies of Young Mungo looks like. It was a workout receiving these!

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Time Is A Mother – Ocean Vuong

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.

The Trouble With Happiness: And Other Stories – Tove Ditlevson

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife’s beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy—without ever truly understanding what that might mean. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

The Candy House – Jennifer Egan

An electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private, The Candy House is a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. Egan introduces characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets. The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. Egan takes to stunning new heights her “deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture” (Vogue) -- delivering an extraordinary combination of fierce, exhilarating intelligence and heart.

The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning – Resmaa Menakem

Through the coordinated repetition of lies, anti-democratic elements in American society are working to incite mass radicalization, provoking a collective trauma response in tens of millions of American bodies. Most of us are utterly unprepared for this potential mayhem. This book focuses not on strategy or politics, but on practices that build presence and discernment; settle our bodies during the heat of conflict; maintain our safety, sanity, and stability in dangerous situations; and heal our personal and collective racialized trauma. The Quaking of America is a unique and perfectly timed guide to help us navigate our widespread upheaval and build an antiracist culture.

Slouching Toward Radiance: A Day in the Life of You, Me and God –Heidi Barr

Slouching Toward Radiance is a collection of nature poetry, meditations, gentle advice, and nudges toward reflection. Heidi Barr's words are worthy companions on the way toward living a life steeped in integrity and compassion for one's fellow beings--from the human down the street to a deer in the forest. It's a walk through a metaphorical day, from dawn to dusk, noticing the holy ordinary even through storms, by way of solitude and community. It's an invitation to start where you are, to find beauty and healing in the everyday stuff of life, and to make the choices that lead to fully living in the ways that work best.

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole – Susan Cain

Em­ploying a mix of research, storytelling, and memoir, Cain explores why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, con­nection, and transcendence. She shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others via abuse or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another. At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.

A Brief History of Equality – Thomas Picketty

Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games — And Why They Matter – Ben Orlin

Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota –Chad Montrie

Minnesota is a paradox. Widely seen as the progressive stronghold of the Midwest, the state also has some of the greatest racial disparities in the nation. Whiteness in Plain View examines the ways White residents across Minnesota acted to intimidate, control, and remove African Americans over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What they did was not an anomaly or aberration, but common and continuous. The book shows that Minnesota's overwhelming Whiteness is neither accidental nor incidental, and that racial exclusion's legacy is woven into the state's contemporary politics, economy, and culture.

Tickets here, or call

For signings, we've got Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper and Spirit Car, and Marcie Rendon, author of the Cash Blackbear mysteries (most recently Girl Gone Missing). Come get our stamp on your bookstore passport!

One Summer Up North – John Owens

Uncommon Charm – Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver

Most of you know our bookseller / book-buyer / book genius Emily. You may not know that she is also a book writer -- she and her wife Kat are the authors of Uncommon Charm, soon to be published by Neon Hemlock as part of their 2022 series of queer fantasy/sci-fi novellas. 

This event is free and non-ticketed, but we will be collecting donations for Letjaha, an aid network assisting Ukrainian refugees in Poland. If you'd like to preorder Uncommon Charm, you can do so here.

Passing – Nella Larsen

-Milan

Charles Bonnet syndrome is a form of detailed hallucination that accompanies loss of vision, arising from the brain's desire to perceive even when it cannot. The most common hallucination is that of miniature people, dubbed Lilliputians, "accompanied by small animals or small objects... with the result that the individual must see a world such as created by Swift in Gulliver."

The Man Who Tasted Words: A Neurologist Explores the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses, by Dr. Guy Leschziner

"Beneath the Virgin's feet were a lion and a dragon who curled around each other in a most puzzling matter and bit each other's necks. These creatures had been carved by someone who had never seen a dragon but had seen a great many dogs and sheep and something of the character of a dog and a sheep had got into his carving. Whenever some poor fellow was brought before the Virgin and Child to be examined the lion and the dragon would cease biting each other and look up like the Virgin's strange watchdogs and the lion would bark and the dragon would bleat angrily."

-Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell