Monday, July 22, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Catherine Chung presents The Tenth Muse, in conversation with Steph Opitz

In The Tenth Muse, Chung – who has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and spent time at Einstein’s famed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – brings to life the language and passion of mathematics and shines a light on the too-often suppressed historical contributions of women throughout time.

Growing up with a Chinese mother and an American father who served in World War II, Katherine senses painful secrets behind her parents’ troubled relationship, but her mother abandons the family when Katherine is only a child, and her father refuses to discuss the past. Heartbroken and confused, Katherine finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos, but as she matures into an exceptional mathematician, she continues to struggle with the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? These questions grow ever more entangled as Katherine strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and becomes involved with a brilliant and charismatic professor.

When she embarks on a quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis—the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time—she turns to a theorem with a puzzling history that may hold both the lock and key to her identity, and to mysteries long buried during World War II. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her, and discovers how seemingly distant and unrelated stories, lives, and ideas are inextricably linked to her own.

Aflame with the language of mathematics and told with unflinching grace and compassion, The Tenth Muse is a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

Catherine Chung was a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from The University of Chicago and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

Steph Opitz is the founding director of Wordplay at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She serves on committees for the National Book Foundation, PEN America, Rain Taxi, Mojave School, and Portland Book Festival. She has curated literary events and festivals around the country--as the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, the fiction co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival, on the programs team for the PEN World Voices Festival among others. Steph was the books reviewer for Marie Claire magazine for six years, her book reviews can also be found in Garden & Gun, Departures, Kirkus, and elsewhere.

Tuesday, July 23, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Under Purple Skies: A Reading with Contributors to The Minneapolis Anthology

In recent years, Minneapolis has become a literary powerhouse. Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, collects some of the most exciting work being done in, or about, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area, with narrative threads that stretch back not just to Scandinavia, but across the world. The writers here have won, or been shortlisted for, the Newbery Award, the Man Booker prize, the Pulitzer, the Caldecott Award, the National Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award and many others. They included Kelly Barnhill, Marlon James, Kao Kalia Yang, Michael Perry, Bao Phi, Danez Smith, Shannon Gibney, and many more, alongside new and first-time writers.

Join us for a reading featuring anthology editor Frank Bures and contributors Kelly Barnhill, Jason Good, Lindsay Nielsen, and Francine Tolf.

Kelly Barnhill lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three children. She is the author of four novels, most recently The Girl Who Drank the Moon, winner of the Newbery Medal. The Witch’s Boy received four starred
reviews and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards.

Jason Good is the author of three books: This is Ridiculous. This is Amazing, Must Push Buttons, and most recently a memoir, Rock, Meet Window. Despite his traffic concerns, Jason really does enjoy living in Minneapolis. A version of “No, You Turn” appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune under the title, “Too fast, too slow, too angry: A New Yorker’s treatise on Minnesota drivers.”

Lindsay Nielsen is a Minneapolis-based clinical social worker/psychotherapist, writer, and Paralympian. Lindsay competed in the 2000 Sydney Paralympic games, and at fifty years of age, became the first amputee woman in the world to complete a full Ironman Triathlon. Lindsay co-wrote a biography of Coach Roy Griak, Ten Yards Beyond the Finish Line, has completed a memoir, and is currently working on a book of essays.

Francine Marie Tolf’s award-winning essays and poems have been published widely in journals such as Rattle, Spoon River, Water~Stone Review, and Contrary Magazine. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently How Still the Riddle (Pinyon Press, 2017). She has also published a memoir, an essay collection, and a number of chapbooks, including two published by Red Bird Chapbooks of Minnesota. She shares an apartment in North East Minneapolis with her golden cat, Lilly.

Wednesday, July 24, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Mary Christine Kane presents Between the Stars Where You Are Lost, with Erica Skog

In this collection, Mary Christine Kane honors the complicated experience of childhood with a range of voices including a motherless child, a girl who collects toy rings and the adult looking back in longing. The poems remind us what comfort and yearning feel like by opening the interior life of children—both moments like rolling down a grassy hill but also those of trying to reconcile life’s hardest topics.

"In Mary Christine Kane’s first collection, Between the stars where you are lost, we are given such a vivid portrait of a girlhood, considered and wondered over; we are in a trance of her memories, given indelible details, held by the power in this poet’s tone of voice...This is a beautiful book, written by a poet who understands what to say, and what to protect.  Read this work." –Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems

Mary Christine Kane grew up in Western New York and has lived in the Twin Cities most of her adult life. She works in marketing and is a volunteer for the arts and animal rescue. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in journals and anthologies including Bluestem; The Buffalo Anthology, Right Here, Right Now; Ponder Review; Plainsongs and others. This is her first collection.

Erica Skog lives in Little Canada, MN with her husband Iver and their one-year old son, Bobby.  She is a graduate of Luther College and has a master's degree in creative writing from Hamline University. She has been published in Whistling Shade, The Edge Magazine, and in Red Bird Chapbook's newsletter. Erica is currently working on a full length manuscript entitled A Psalm for the Faithless.

Monday, August 5, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Kimi Eisele presents The Lightest Object in the Universe

Amid the chaos of a world without phones or reliable plumbing, Carson, a high school teacher who devotes himself to recording the history that is unfolding all around him, heads west on foot. His journey, he hopes, will bring him back into the arms of Beatrix, a woman he met and fell in love with during a chance visit to his school. Along the way, he encounters a wide variety of lost souls, clever opportunists, and fervent believers of the evangelical preacher Jonathan Blue, whose nationwide radio broadcasts promise an end to suffering in his utopia, The Center. 3,000 miles away, Beatrix uses her activist roots to create a different sort of safe harbor for all those who need it, countering Jonathan Blue’s message with a cooperative radio program of her own, refusing to lose faith in the promise of a new beginning. Whether Carson and Beatrix find each other, though, relies on fifteen-year-old Rosie Santos, who travels reluctantly with her grandmother to Jonathan Blue, finding her voice and making choices that could ultimately decide the fate of the cross‑country lovers.

Kimi Eisele is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her writing has appeared in Orion, High Country News, Terrain.org, and Fourth Genre, and has covered art, the environment, health, culture, youth, and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. A dancer/choreographer, Eisele’s performance work explores human‑nature relationships and often involves storytelling and public participation in site‑specific venues. She holds a master’s degree in geography from the University of Arizona, and has taught creative writing and dance in schools, communities, and institutions for two decades. The recipient of numerous awards and residencies, she currently lives in Tucson and works for the Southwest Folklife Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating traditional knowledge and cultural expression.

Tuesday, August 6, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Meredith Jordan presents Below the Line

A nonfiction narrative about how major motion pictures are made today using one movie as a vehicle. As the book follows the people making Last Vegas, it stops along the way to explain process and different aspects of the business, from creating sets to costuming. The movie stars are well known -- Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and Mary Steenburgen - but in this book they play supporting roles. Instead, the leads are the people behind the camera, the director (Jon The Meg Turteltaub) and a huge cast of artists and artisans, designers and creators, overseers, office and logistical support, editors and musicians. Below the Line proves movies are a collaborative art form.

Meredith Jordan is an award-winning journalist who spent 25 years working for news organizations ranging from small local papers to Dow Jones & Co., Cox Communications and National Geographic. Then she saw a story about movie production that had never been told and moved West.

Wednesday, August 14, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Louie Kemp presents Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures

“It was at summer camp in northern Wisconsin in 1953 that I first met Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing. He was twelve years old and he had a guitar. He would go around telling everybody that he was going to be a rock-and-roll star. I was eleven and I believed him.”

So begins this honest, funny, and deeply affectionate memoir of a friendship that has spanned five decades of wild adventures, soul searching conversation, musical milestones, and enduring comradery. Louie and Bob after the Rolling Thunder Night of the Hurricane Benefit Concert at Madison Square Garden, December 8th, 1975.

As Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan and Louie Kemp built a successful international business, their lives diverged but their friendship held fast. No matter how much time passed between one adventure and the next, the two “boys from the North Country” picked up where they left off and shared experiences that will surprise and delight Dylan fans and anybody who loves a rollicking-good rock-and-roll memoir.

Louie Kemp was born in Duluth, Minnesota.. Shortly before graduating college, he left school to take over his father’s Lake Superior fish business, expanding it into Alaska and making it one of the most successful seafood operations in the country.

Louie produced Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tours and traveled with him all over the world as a trusted ally and friend. As a respected and devout member of the Jewish community, Louie is the “father” of Aish Ha Torah’s Discovery Program, attended by more than 500,000 people worldwide, and the founder of Chabad of Pacific Palisades, California.

Most meaningful to him of all, he is the proud father of six great children and five grandchildren…and counting. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Sunday, August 18, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Billy Jensen presents Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

Have you ever wanted to solve a murder? Gather the clues the police overlooked? Put together the pieces? Identify the suspect?

Journalist Billy Jensen spent fifteen years investigating unsolved murders, fighting for the families of victims. Every story he wrote had one thing in common—they didn’t have an ending. The killer was still out there.

But after the sudden death of a friend, Billy became fed up. Following a dark night, he came up with a plan. A plan to investigate past the point when the cops had given up. A plan to solve the murders himself.

You’ll ride shotgun as Billy identifies the Halloween Mask Murderer, finds a missing girl in the California Redwoods, and investigates the only other murder in New York City on 9/11. You’ll hear intimate details of the hunts for two of the most terrifying serial killers in history: his friend Michelle McNamara’s pursuit of the Golden State Killer and his own quest to find the murderer of the Allenstown Four. And Billy gives you the tools—and the rules—to help solve murders yourself.

Gripping, complex, unforgettable, Chase Darkness with Me is an examination of the evil forces that walk among us, illustrating a novel way to catch those killers, and a true-crime narrative unlike any you’ve read before.

Billy Jensen is an investigative journalist focused squarely on unsolved murders and missing persons. He helped finish Michelle McNamara’s New York Times bestseller I’ll Be Gone in the Dark after her untimely death.

Tuesday, August 20, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Steve Rushin launches Nights in White Castle

Picking up where he left off in his acclaimed 2017 memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, Steve Rushin brilliantly captures a bygone era―and the thrills of new adulthood in the early 80s―in his new memoir.

It begins in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a 13-year-old kid staging his own author photo that he hopes will someday grace the cover of a book jacket. And it ends at a desk in the legendary Time & Life building, with that same boy-now in his early 20s and writing professionally-reflecting on how the hell he got there from what seems like a distant universe. In between, Steve Rushin whisks us along the extraordinary experience of coming of age. Funny, gripping, and altogether unforgettable, Rushin is a master at capturing the fleeting, halcyon days of young adulthood―high school, college, and leaving home forever ―when life’s possibilities seem positively endless.

From a menial summer job at suburban Bennigan's, to first-time college experiences in Milwaukee, to surviving early adulthood in seedy New York City, this deeply touching odyssey will remind any reader of those special moments when they too went from innocence to experience. Nostalgic and rife with pop culture touchstones, NIGHTS IN WHITE CASTLE offers a tender, evocative account of growing up in suburban America in the 1980s.

Steve Rushin is the author of Road Swing, which was named one of the "Top 100 Sports Books of All Time". He previously worked for Sports Illustrated and has filed stories for the magazine from all seven continents, including Antarctica. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing collections, with essays appearing in Time magazine and The New York Times. He lives in Minnesota.

Sunday, August 25, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Poetry Reading with Lisa Higgs, John McCarthy, and Tracy Zeman

Join us for an evening of poetry with three writers!

Lisa Higgs' third chapbook, Earthen Bound, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2019. She is poetry editor for Quiddity International Literary Journal and her book reviews and interviews can be found at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review Online and the Adroit Journal.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses, which won the Jake Adam York prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2019. He is also the author of Ghost County, which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by the Chicago Review of Books. His work has appeared in the American Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, TriQuarterly, and Zone 3. John's work has been featured in anthologies such as Best New Poets 2015 and New Poetry From the Midwest 2017. He edits RHINO Magazine and Quiddity. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Tracy Zeman’s first book, Empire, recently won the 2018 New Measure Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, jubilat, TYPO and other journals. She has received a number of residencies, most notably six weeks at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the central Oregon coast. Currently, Zeman is a freelance writer and editor for a number of conservation organizations in the Midwest. She lives outside Detroit, Michigan with her husband and daughter.

Friday, September 6, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Sarah Elaine Smith presents Marilou is Everywhere

Marilou is Everywhere takes the “missing girl in a small town” premise and turns it on its head, bringing depth and social nuance to the familiar trope. A fourteen-year-old girl lives with her two older brothers and absent mother in impoverished rural Pennsylvania. When a popular teenage girl from a more affluent home nearby goes missing, the young narrator escapes her family and slips into the missing teen’s life, hoarding the love of a confused and sick mother and seduced by the idea of living the life of someone else. Grappling with a complicated relationship to maternal love and an untenable web of lies, the vulnerable but fierce girl must confront her own self-hatred and its connection to greater pain within her family and community. Set in a class-divided Appalachia, Smith explores both the charming idiosyncrasies and the injustices of suffering small town America.

Packed with poignant, breath-taking sentences, Marilou is Everywhere is a tantalizing mystery that is compulsively readable. It harkens the peculiar quirk of Twin Peaks and the hypnotic prose of Emma Cline’s The Girls that brilliantly captures the ineffable strangeness of being a teenage girl in an often dangerous world. And yet, Sarah Elaine Smith occupies a space as a writer and storyteller that is all her own—weird and wonderful, darkly comic yet tender and soulful.


Sarah Elaine Smith holds MFAs in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Wallace fellowship.

Tuesday, December 31, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

POSTPONED: Shalini Shankar presents Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z's New Path to Success

This event has been postponed due to travel changes. Dec. 31 is a placeholder time/date - it is NOT the official rescheduled time. We are hoping to reschedule in Fall 2019. Thank you for your interest!

Anthropologist Shalini Shankar argues that, far from being simply overstressed and overscheduled, Gen Z spelling bee competitors are learning crucial twenty-first-century skills.

At first glance, Generation Z (youth born after 1997) seems to be made up of anxious overachievers, hounded by Tiger Moms and constantly tracked on social media. One would think that competitors in the National Spelling Bee—the most popular brain sport in America—would be the worst off. Counterintuitively, anthropologist Shalini Shankar argues that, far from being simply overstressed and overscheduled, Gen Z spelling bee competitors are learning crucial twenty-first-century skills from their high-powered lives, displaying a sophisticated understanding of self-promotion, self-direction, and social mobility. Drawing on original ethnographic research, including interviews with participants, judges, and parents, Shankar examines the outsize impact of immigrant parents and explains why Gen Z kids are on a path to success.

Shalini Shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers (Duke Press 2015) and Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class and Success in Silicon Valley (Duke Press 2008). She is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose ethnographic research focuses on youth, media, language use, race & ethnicity, and Asian diasporas. A Guggenheim fellow and National Science Foundation grant recipient, she is the mother of two Gen Z children.