Howdy, readers! I apologize for the length of this newsletter. If I'd had more time it would have been shorter.

This week we have all manner of beautiful new paper goods, a new Jacqueline Winspear heroine, Sea of Tranquility in paperback, an upcoming book release event for a local fantasy author, and four synopses of Law and Order: SVU episodes, sort of...

Pictured above, letterpress postcards from Kyupodo! These "postcards from another world" are styled after vintage Japanese advertisements for, e.g., an energy drink for cats, or a travel agency for ghosts (the Japanese text reads, partially: "cross-cultural exchange with humans -- work at a haunted house!"). These are guaranteed to amaze and confound, and would also fit well in a small picture frame.

LIFE notebooks: high-quality, fountain-pen friendly paper; sewn, lay-flat binding! The larger size (the "Noble Note" line) have gold-embellished covers, and are available in grid, lined, or blank, but we also have smaller ones that are more affordable: the Kyupodo "Todai Note," a lined notebook made with the same paper and decorated with a little flipbook animation -- adorable!! LIFE has been making these notebooks in Tokyo since 1949!

MT Masking (Washi) Tape: colorful paper-based tapes that easily adhere to AND remove from almost any surface. These are perfect for gift-wrapping, scrapbooking, interior decorating, and more. If you aren't already a Washi tape enthusiast, try one and see! We'll be getting patterned tapes in a future order.

We've got cards and postcards from this world too! Check out our new zodiac cards from Pier Six Press! These beautiful, letterpress cards feature a unique design for each star-sign. Find them by our rotating zodiac-themed display next to the register. We now have a number of gorgeous cards with floral designs as well, befitting the start of spring, and Minnesota license plate cards with all of our favorite folksy regionalisms.

Lastly, we are proud to introduce stickers! We've curated a wonderful little collection -- my favorite being the Cat Meme Arcana by Ping Hatta. All it takes is one of these to make your water bottle, laptop, or notebook cover sing.

We have some nice preorder bonuses available for TJ Klune's upcoming In the Lives of Puppets, which comes out on April 25th -- a postcard with "The Rules" and a pin reading "Be Brave!" These are free with your preorder, which you can place here.

Rachael Hanel's reading from her book Not the Camilla We Knew featured a surprise attendee: a high-school friend of Camilla's who was able to share her memories of the book's subject. We have signed copies of Rachael's book available here.

The White Lady — Jacqueline Winspear

The private, quiet ex-spy Elinor White lives in rural Kent, where her fellow villagers have no way of knowing how dangerous her war work was, or how it haunts her still. It will take Susie, the child of a young farmworker, Jim Mackie, and his wife Rose to break through Miss White's icy demeanor—but Jim, too, is desperate to escape his past. When the powerful Mackie crime family demands his return for an important job, Elinor assumes the task of protecting her neighbors. Yet in her quest to uncover the truth behind the family’s pursuit of Jim, Elinor unwittingly sets out on a treacherous path, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.

The Great Reclamation — Rachel Heng

Ah Boon is born into a fishing village in Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, and the future of the village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends must decide who they want to be. An aching love story and powerful coming-of-age that reckons with the legacy of British colonialism, Japanese occupation, and the pursuit of modernity, The Great Reclamation confronts the wounds of progress and the sacrifices of love.

Sweet Enough — Alison Roman

In Sweet Enough, Alison has written the book for people who think they don’t have the time or skill to pull off dessert. She shows you how to make simple yet sublime sweets with her trademark casualness, like how to make jam in the oven, then swirl it into ice cream or fold it into cake batter. There are effortless cakes that take just minutes to get into a pan. And there are new, instant classics with a signature Alison twist, like Salted Lemon Pie, Raspberries and Sour Cream, or Caramelized Maple Tart. Requiring little more than a few mixing bowls, these recipes are geared towards those without fancy equipment or specialty ingredients. Whether you’re a dedicated baker or, better yet, someone who doesn’t think they are a baker, Sweet Enough lets you finish any dinner with a little something wonderful and sweet.

Romantic Comedy — Curtis Sittenfeld

Sally is a sketch writer for a late-night live comedy show. She’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up. Enter Noah, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks flying. With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.

Chain-Gang All-Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain-Gang All-Stars principally follows one team in the titular blood-sport-reality-television hybrid, exploring the fuzzy ground between humanizing and dehumanizing where entertainment media and depictions of the imprisoned both frequently arrive. As with the best dystopias, it doesn't warn us away from a terrible future so much as hold a mirror to a terrible present. But despite its long trek through darkness this is a book dedicated to love, pure love, in a way that repeatedly brought me to tears. -Graham [read my full review here]

As always, our newsletter can't fit everything, so check out the other new arrivals and recent bestsellers on our website!

Wednesday, March 29 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

Heidi Barr is a writer and wellness coach with over fifteen years of experience in health promotion. Her work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She is also editor of "The Mindful Kitchen," a wellness column in The Wayfarer Magazine. She lives with her family in Minnesota. Collisions of Earth and Sky is an invitation to live in a way that is attuned to nature. It is a journey of self-inquiry for digging into our origins and roots, figuring out what it means to be a good community member--both to other humans and to nonhumans--and integrating those truths so we can add to the healing of the world.

Ellie Roscher is hosts the Unlikely Conversations podcast and teaches writing and yoga at The Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Writing Project, and Up Yoga. She lives in Minneapolis with her spouse and sons. The Embodied Path tells more than twenty body stories to do the essential work of resistance and repair at the individual and communal level, including the story of a woman who sees her hijab as an extension of her body, a quadriplegic woman who became a lawyer to advocate for herself, and a transgender man who underwent a transition after birthing two children. It also includes profoundly simple, beautiful stories of broken bones, motherhood, sickness, and healing toward wholeness.

Sci-Fi Fantasy Club: Amatka

Friday, March 31 at 5:00pm (RSVP)

There's no final frontier for the Sci-Fi Fantasy Club! Join us the last Friday of every month as we uncover and rediscover forgotten classics, titles that blur genres, small press stunners, and all the books you missed because they don't have Brandon Sanderson's marketing budget. Our second meeting has been pushed back to March 31st due to the snowstorm last month. We'll be discussing Amatka, a surreal debut novel set in a world shaped by language. In it, Vanja is sent to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka to collect intelligence for her employer. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. But everyone in Amatka keeps secrets, and Vanja and Nina's world -- a world holding back chaos through labels and names -- is about to collide with the ineffable.

“This month is National Poetry Month,” says Stan Kusunoki, co-host/curator of the Literary Bridges Reading Series. “And no better way to celebrate than with a roster of fabulous writers—this will be a classic Literary Bridges reading!” The roster includes Diane Jarvenpa (Shy Lands), Dralandra Larkins, Lora Robinson (An Essential Melancholy), John Medeiros (Self, Divided), and Michael Moos (The Idea of the Garden).

Tuesday, April 4 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

Janna Knittel hails from the Pacific Northwest and has lived in Minnesota since 2004. Janna has taught literature and writing classes at colleges and universities in Oregon, Kansas, and Minnesota. The poems in her new collection Real Work describe family life on the farm, celebrate natural environments, process childhood emotions with the help of decades of living, and quietly assuage the wounds suffered due to personal crisis and loss. A wooden box on a desk, a father's hands, the lives of rabbits and bees, a rare visit to church--these are a few of the subjects illuminated in these finely crafted pieces .A lyric gravity infuses these stark yet lovely poems. The real work required on the farm has been transformed repeatedly into acts of literary precision and emotional honesty.

James Cihlar's previous books include Rancho Nostalgia and Undoing. He earned his BA in English at the University of Iowa, where he studied in the Writer’s Workshop, and his MA and PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He lives in St. Paul with his husband and cats, and is the publisher of Howling Bird Press in Minneapolis. In The Shadowgraph, James Cihlar explores the ways images, performances, and memories shape and inform LGBTQ+ identity. Golden-age Hollywood cinema provides the screen on which Cihlar projects characters and stories bravely, even defiantly, performed. Cihlar's commentary on individual films--as well as on human experience and desire--is intense, smart, and right on target.

Joe Milan Jr. (The All-American)

Saturday, April 8 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

Seventeen-year-old Bucky Yi knows nothing about his birth country of South Korea or his bio-dad’s disappearance; he can’t even pronounce his Korean name correctly. His sights are set on one goal: to become a college football player. So when the U.S. government deports him to South Korea, he’s forced to navigate an entirely foreign version of his life. At an expat bar in Seoul, in the bleak barracks of his Korean military, on a remote island where an erratic sergeant fights a shadow-war, and in the remote town where he seeks out his drunken, indebted biological father, Bucky must determine who he is to himself, who he is to others, and what kind of man he wants to become. Joe Milan Jr. was the 2019-20 David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia and a Black Mountain Institute Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Peter Bognanni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His debut novel, The House of Tomorrow, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the ALA Alex Award and has been adapted into a feature film. He teaches creative writing at Macalester College.

Manga Club: Solanin

Saturday, April 8 at 5:00pm (RSVP)

Come to NCB at 5pm on the second Saturday of every month to talk manga with other weebs! Hosted by our resident manga experts Emily and Graham (yours truly), the Manga Club provides free Japanese snacks, a 10% discount on ALL manga in the store, and most importantly, a forum to discuss a new title every month. For our April meeting, we'll be discussing one of my favorite manga: Sazan & Comet Girl by Yuriko Akase. This one has something for everyone: whimsy, action, romance, and likable characters in a fun setting -- plus, rendered in glorious full watercolor. It feels like the 80s anime film you never saw.

Solastalgia with Paul Bogard, Roopali Phadke, Angela Pelster, and Kathryn Nuernberger

Monday, April 17 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

The concept of solastalgia comes from the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who describes it as "the homesickness we feel while still at home." It’s the pain and longing we feel as we realize the world immediately around us is changing, with our love for that world serving as a catalyst for action on its behalf. This powerful anthology brings together thirty-four writers to share their emotions in the face of environmental crisis.

To discuss this release, we'll be hosting its editor, Paul Bogard, Associate Professor of English at Hamline University and the author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. We'll also have three of the contributors:

Monday, April 24 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

Claire Wahmanholm received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her debut collection, Wilder, was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. She lives in the Twin Cities. Meltwater is a haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body. Part requiem, part bedtime story, it narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.

Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, where she received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.”

In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, she exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that polluted her family, the nation, and the world. Traveling to Nevada, Hiroshima, and finally back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, she grapples with the ramifications of her grandfather's work building nuclear weapons, revealing the intersection between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy of the nuclear industry, which persists to this day.

A Sleight of Shadows Book Release with author Kat Howard

Tuesday, April 25 at 6:00pm (RSVP)

We are THRILLED to host local fantasy author Kat Howard for the release of her new book A Sleight of Shadows, sequel to 2017's Alex Award–winning An Unkindness of Magicians. After taking down the source of the corruption of the Unseen World, Sydney has been left with almost no magical ability. Feeling estranged from herself, she is determined to find a way back to her status as one of the world’s most dangerous magicians. Unfortunately, she needs to do this quickly: the House of Shadows, the hell on earth that shaped her into who she was, the place she sacrificed everything to destroy, is rebuilding itself. Kat Howard’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in best-of collections, and performed on NPR. She is the author of Roses and Rot and the collection A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. She lives in St. Paul.

Fire and Hemlock – Diana Wynne Jones

DWJ is one of the those writers so burdened by their own success that they are both legendary and extremely underrated. (I beg you: read Howl's Moving Castle, but also read something that isn't Howl's Moving Castle). Here is the fabulous Fire and Hemlock, her sort-of-unplaceable Tam Lin retelling about love, friendship, and memory. It is and isn't a romance; it is not inappropriate for children but may not be for children; it is thoroughly uncanny.

In 1725, Etienne de Bourgmont was granted the title "commandant of the Missouri Valley" by the French crown for his help expanding French trade routes there. It was a meaningless title, for the Missouri Valley was controlled by the Osages. Bourgmont took it upon himself to bring a delegation of Osages and other Native Americans to France, where they toured Versailles and met the boy-king Louis XV. The delegates were unimpressed; one remarked that French men were feminine and "smelled like alligators."

Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen

“Tangled”: Stabler finds Benson sleeping in the back room at the precinct on a sagging cot. She wakes up when the door opens. She looks like she has “run the gauntlet,” which is something Stabler’s mother used to say before she died. Come to think of it, it’s the last phrase Stabler can remember her speaking.

“Redemption”: Benson accidentally catches a rapist when she Google-stalks her newest OKCupid date. She can’t decide whether or not to mark this in the “success” (“caught rapist”) or “failure” (“date didn’t work out”) column. She marks both.

“Sacrifice”: Benson leaves her handsome date at the table, in the restaurant, waiting for the drinks. She walks down an empty side street. She takes off her shoes and walks down the center of the road. It is too hot for April. She can feel her feet darkening from the blacktop. She should be afraid of broken glass but she is not. In front of a vacant lot, she stops. She reaches down and touches the pavement. It is breathing. Its two-toned heartbeat makes her clavicle vibrate. She can feel it. She is suddenly, irrevocably certain that the earth is breathing. She knows that New York is riding the back of a giant monster. She knows this more clearly than she has ever known anything before.

“Inheritance”: The phrase “run the gauntlet” is stuck in Stabler’s head, like water dipping and sluicing around his inner ear. He presses the muscles at the hinge of his jaw and cracks it. The crack takes the place of the single syllable of “run.” He does it again. Crack the gauntlet. Run the cracklet. Run.

-from Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU, by Carmen Maria Machado (The American Reader vol. 1 no. 5/6; collected in Her Body and Other Parties)

This more or less confirms what our sales show. And this is good to know, because I think we'll have to cut down on the variety of chocolates in the long run. They're taking up about half the counter by the register right now, and we need that space for books about cats! So we'll likely end up just carrying the best-selling products. I'm all for the Salty Dog. Eating one makes you feel bougie, and saying its name makes you feel like a weathered old sailor.

Now for this week's poll! This is a multiple-choice question, so click the 'Select' button to choose an answer. I'll include the results in the next newsletter. And our question is:

2. Order online or over the phone (at 651-225-8989) for in-store pickup. We'll let you know when your books are ready, then you can swing by and pick them up at your leisure.