Act One

There's a new player on the Twin Cities bookstore scene. Play by Play Books has opened at 1771 Selby Ave in St Paul. They have an bright and cheery store filled with books, scripts, memorabilia, and theater-related gifts. There will soon be wi-fi and coffee for sale, as well as a meeting space and even a patio in the back. Stop in today and buy a book.

Visit playbyplaybooks.com for details.--David E

Fashion on the Radio

Scott Schuman, who curates the Sartorialist and who put together a book gathering together the best of the blog's fashionable pictures, was recently on The Sound of Young America podcast. His talk on style is worth hearing, even without the pretty pictures. Here it here:



You can also download the podcast here.--David E

No Bird Brain He

Join members of the Big Bang Book Club for a discussion of Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process Tuesday, November, 24, 7:00pm, at Grumpy's, 1111 Washington Ave S, Minneapolis.

Alex's brain was the size of a shelled walnut--he was a parrot, after all--and when Irene and Alex first met, birds were not believed to possess any potential for language, consciousness, or anything remotely comparable to human intelligence. Yet, over the years, Alex proved many things. He could add. He could sound out words. He understood concepts like bigger, smaller, more, fewer, and none. He was capable of thought and intention. Together, Alex and Irene uncovered a startling reality: We live in a world populated by thinking, conscious creatures.

The Big Bang Book Club is a monthly book club for non-scientists that relishes in folding arts and science into a heady brew. This event is sponsored by Magers & Quinn Booksellers; the Center for Science, Technology, and Public Policy; Secrets of the City; and Grumpy's. Follow us on Facebook for details on all our events, plus extra materials about all the books.

Read Double Bound by Elizabeth Dingmann

Elizabeth Dingmann's poem Double Bound is this week's winner in our What Light Poetry Project. What Light is a part of mnLIT, which is presented by Magers and Quinn Booksellers and mnartists.org.

All the winning poems, as well as the short stories from our flash fiction competition miniStories will be published on magersandquinn.com and mnartists.org in the months to come. So come back soon!

Click here to read Elizabeth's poem and to learn more about the mnLIT contest.--Jay P

Damn Good Giveaway

One of the big food books for the holiday season will be Mitch Omer's Damn Good Food. Omer is the chef and owner of Hell's Kitchen. The book has 157 recipes from the restaurant, as well as stories of Omer's struggles with drugs and how he used cooking to get clean.

Mitch Omer will be in the store from 1:00pm to 3:00pm on Saturday, December 19. He'll be signing copies of the book and giving away samples from it.

And...

Anyone who buys a copy of Damn Good Food can enter to win a free brunch for four at Hell's Kitchen. There are entry forms and a cigar box to keep them in by the front register.--David E

Citizen Review: The Lacuna

We continue our occasional series of customer reviews with the latest from novelist Barbara Kingsolver.

The Lacuna

The United States has some 'splainin' to do. Kingsolver's newest novel, The Lacuna, shines light on some of the darkest episodes in American and Mexican history, including the brutal suppression of the 1932 bonus army protests, Leon Trotsky's murder in 1940, and the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. The novel begins with Harrison Shepherd's tumultuous childhood, spent shuffling between his Mexican mother and American father. A gift of a diving mask allows him to exchange the ugliness of life on land for the beauty and mystery of life underwater, where he discovers his first "lacuna" or "gap" in the form of a cave accessible only when the tide is just right. A chance encounter with Frida Kahlo shapes the rest of his life, spent mostly as a writer in North Carolina. We get a glimpse of the difficulties he faces as a young gay man pre-Stonewall. The cruelties of the McCarthy era are portrayed without ambiguity. Kingsolver's deft, compelling prose backs us into a corner with Shepherd until we can see no way out. And then the lacuna beckons.

Nancy Seger is a social worker who lives in south Minneapolis. She bagged twenty-two (22!) bags of leaves this fall. She has also recently re-discovered a deep love of falafel.

PS: Barbara Kingsolver was on Minnesota Public Radio recently. You can hear the hour-long interview here.

That Study Carrel Will Look Great in My Media Room

The Elkhart (Indiana) Public Library is auctioning off its vintage furnishings. When the library opened on March 31, 1963, it was full of desks, tables and chairs by Herman Miller, fiberglass chairs from Charles and Ray Eames, and desks and credenzas by Jens Risom. According to the library's sale website, "Some have been in use to the present day, while others have spent years in storage." Design fiends are salivating at the prospect of an unused Eames chair for their apartments.

An online auction begins on Sunday and continues until the end of business on Friday, November 20. Send your bid emails to bids@myepl.org.

Thanks to Book Patrol for the catch.--David E

Starting Strong

St Paul's Replacement Press has announced its very first title. If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home is a collection of short stories by John Jodzio of Minneapolis. You might already know Jodzio's work from McSweeney's or from miniSstories. Jodzio won the miniStories competition in the summer of 2008 for "Shoo Shoo". You can also read the longer story which mnartists.org commissioned from Jodzio, entitled "Monarchs".

If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home will be published in March. Details are here.--David E

Get On the Bus

This coming Saturday, November 14, at 7:00pm, Peter Conners discusses his memoir Growing Up Dead at Magers & Quinn.

Peter discovered the Grateful Dead in 1985, at the age of 15, through friends who exchanged bootleg tapes of live Grateful Dead concerts. A teenager living in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, he became exposed to an entirely new way of life, and friends who were enjoying more freedom and less parental guidance. At the age of 16, he attended his first Grateful Dead concert on June 30, 1987-he was hooked. Between 1987 and 1995, Conners would attend Dead shows all over the United States.

Growing Up Dead provides riveting insight into the obsessive fandom that made the Grateful Dead the most successful touring band of all time. “We were just on the road, doing the best we could to get from show-to-show. So that was the story I wanted to tell: the story of a street-level Deadhead.”

Details on the event are here.--David E

Big Bang in a Book

Here's a suggestion for the science nerd on your Christmas shopping list. Voyage To The Heart Of Matter is a collaboration between CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and "paper engineer" Anton Radevsky. Or as Gizmodo described it, it's "the most accurate paper Large Hadron Collider ever." That's right, all the inner workings of the world's largest partical physics laboratory are explained to you in these 3D pages.

It's not clear how widely the book will be distributed in the US, but you can always buy it directly from the publisher. Details are here.--David E

Read "Sights" by Jessica Roeder, this week's winning flash fiction piece.

Jessica Roeder's short story "Sights" is this week's winner in our flash fiction competition miniStories. miniStories is a part of mnLIT, which is presented by Magers and Quinn Booksellers and mnartists.org.

All the winning stories, as well as the poems from our What Light contest will be published on magersandquinn.com and mnartists.org in the months to come. So come back soon!

Click here to read Jessica's story and to learn more about the mnLIT contest.--Jay P

Are You Experienced?

Graywolf Press is looking for interns. Graywolf is one of the nation's leading nonprofit literary publishers; their authors include Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Linda Gregg, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, William Kittredge, David Treuer, and Brenda Ueland. And they're right here in Minneapolis.

Applications for winter/spring internships are due November 15. Details are here.--David E

"You don't get to pick your obsessions": John Irving Wows Minneapolis

"I would never have guessed that the hottest ticket of 2009 would be a 67-year-old author of 700-page books," begins Jay Gabler's write-up of last night's reading by John Irving, posted today on tcdailyplanet.net. Ah, but it was, as a capacity crowd packed ComedySportz' theater to hear the author of The World According to Garp discuss wrestling, the writing life, and almost incidentally his latest novel Last Night in Twisted River.

Among the evening's revelations was this gem: "Turning to questions submitted in writing by the audience, Irving mentioned that at a recent literary conference he'd perplexingly received four questions directed at Margaret Atwood. "Though we're about the same age," he observed, "we really don't look all that similar." That led to a story about how Irving and John Updike, in the last decade of Updike's life, would trade packages of letters written by fans who mistook one author for the other."

Be sure to sign up for the M&Q newsletter or visit our events page to keep up with all the great authors you can meet in the months ahead.--David E

Fortitude Roars

The New York Public Library recently unveiled its new, web-friendlier logo. This being the digital age, they also released a video discussing the design process.



There's even more information at Flavorwire.--David E

Hear Here

John Irving will be in Minneapolis on Monday, to read from his new novel Last Night at Twisted River. Tickets for the live show are sold out, but Magers & Quinn will broadcast live audio of the reading in our store. Come in, sit down, and hear the whole reading for free.

Monday promises to be a very interesting evening. Irving recently spoke to the New Statesman, and he had some very interesting things to say, including his writing process.

How do you start a novel?
"With the last sentence. Every novel of mine began with a last sentence, and not even the punctuation in those 12 last sentences changed. The first couple of times that happened to me, I thought it was an oddity. I didn't recognise it as a habit, nor would I have labelled it a "process".. But then I came to recognise that this is the way my mind works."

The whole interview is here.--David E

Making Good

Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side follows a young man from his impoverished childhood with a crack-addicted mother, through his discovery of the sport of football, to his rise to become one of the most successful, highly paid players in the NFL.

Now the book is a movie, opening November 20. The trailer is below. Magers & Quinn has coupons good for two preview tickets to an advance screening November 17. Stop by the store and get yours while supplies last.--David E

After Percy

Rick Riordan, author of the recently completed Olympians series of young adult novels has announced his plans for his next books. The "Kane Chronicles" will tell the story of two siblings who accidentally release ancient Egyptian gods into the modern world. But fear not, they can fix this problem... if we're lucky.

The first book in the new series--The Red Pyramid--will be released on May 4, 2010. Details are in Publishers Weekly and on Rick Riodan's own blog.--David E

Just Across the Street

To everyone who bought tickets to John Irving's reading next Monday, a quick note... The location of the reading has changed to Comedy Sportz, on the second floor of Calhoun Square (3001 Hennepin Ave S, Minneapolis). The new venue is just across the street from our store, so you won't have any trouble finding it. Parking is available in Calhoun Square's ramp, which you can enter from either Lake St or 31st St. Parking is also available at meters in the neighborhood.

The doors will open at 6:30pm. Please be sure to bring your ticket. If you have any questions, give us a call at 612/822-4611.

For those of you who were not able to purchase tickets to the event, we have a bit of good news. We will be broadcasting the audio from John Irving's reading in our store, live on Monday night. Come in, browse around, and hear the whole event for free.--David E

A Book and a Beer Chaser

The next meeting of the Twin Cities' most unusual and interesting book club is Tuesday, November 10. Books & Bars meets at Bryant-Lake Bowl, 810 W Lake Street, in Minneapolis. Doors open at 6:00pm; the discussion begins at 7:00pm.

November's book is Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell. It's the story of a New York doctor whose life is turned upside down when a mobster recognizes him from his previous job--as a hitman for the Mafia. Read the book before Leonardo diCaprio makes the movie. Seriously.

Books & Bars is not your typical book club. We provide a unique atmosphere for a lively discussion of interesting authors, fun people, good food and drinks. You're welcome even if you haven't read the book.

Not Helping

There's a new holiday on the calendar, and it's not one I'm looking forward to.

November 18th is International Science Fiction Reshelving Day, and on that day--as isfrd.com explains--defenders of science fiction "will go to bookstores around the world and move science fiction and fantasy books from wherever they might be to their proper place in the “Science Fiction” section. We hope that this quiet act of protest will raise awareness of this problem and inspire new readers to explore our thought-provoking genre."

Actually, people, what your "quiet act of protest"--and you're hardly Gandhi here--will do is to make the books you love harder to find. The next time a customer comes in and asks for Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon, he or she will be directed to an empty spot on the bookshelf because you moved the book. No sale for the book store, no sale for the author, no book for an interested potential reader. Nice job.

Thanks to The Stranger for the tip.--David E