Tuesday, June 18, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Lucy Ives presents Loudermilk

A tale of two idiots—the handsome, charismatic Troy Augustus Loudermilk and his unassuming, socially anxious friend Harry Rego—who, in the early days of the new millennium, scam their way into a fellowship at the most prestigious creative writing program in the country

It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.

Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.

Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.

Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, the Baffler, frieze, Granta, Lapham’s Quarterly, Vogue, and at newyorker.com.. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. She currently teaches in the Image Text interdisciplinary MFA program at Ithaca College, as well as at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities. She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Wednesday, June 19, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Sweet Nature: A Cook's Guide to Using Honey and Maple Syrup with Beth Dooley & Mette Nielsen

Beth Dooley and Mette Nielsen present their new cookbook, Sweet Nature, a beautiful, delicious celebration of two natural sweeteners in irresistible recipes. Book signing to follow.

Sweet Nature invites us to fully enjoy two iconic ingredients from nature’s pantry: honey and maple syrup. James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Beth Dooley and photographer Mette Nielsen make the most of these flavors in foods both savory and sweet, from rosemary honey butter to savory maple black pepper biscotti to curry marinated herring.

Beth Dooley is a James Beard Award–winning author and coauthor of several cookbooks, including Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, The Northern Heartland Kitchen, Minnesota’s Bounty, The Birchwood Cafe Cookbook, Savory Sweet, and The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (Best American Cookbook, James Beard Award, 2018), all from Minnesota. In Winter’s KitchenThe Birchwood Cafe Cookbook and Minnesota’s Bounty, and coauthored Savory Sweet.

Mette Nielsen’s photographs have illustrated numerous books, newspapers, and magazines. A talented master gardener, she created the edible garden for the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis, collaborated on The Birchwood Cafe Cookbook and Minnesota’s Bounty, and coauthored Savory Sweet.

Thursday, June 20, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Bill Meissner presents The Mapmaker's Dream, in conversation with Margaret Hasse

Join us for an evening with two acclaimed Midwest poets!  Bill Meissner will read from his latest poetry book, The Mapmaker’s Dream and Margaret Hasse will read from a new 2018 edition of her first book, Stars Above, Stars Below. Margaret and Bill, long-time friends, will also discuss their writing and publishing experience and read a favorite poem of one another’s.

Bill Meissner grew up in Wisconsin and attended Baraboo High School and UW-Stevens Point. Now an author and teacher, Bill has published four previous collections of poetry:  American Compass (U. of Notre Dame Press), Learning to Breathe Underwater and The Sleepwalker’s Son (Ohio U. Press) and Twin Sons of Different Mirrors (Milkweed Editions), and a chapbook—The Glass Carnival (Paper Soul Press). His first novel, Spirits in the Grass (U. of Notre Dame Press), won the Midwest Book Award. He lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota with his wife.

Margaret Hasse is the author of five collections of poetry, including two finalists for the Minnesota Book Award, and two winners of the poetry prize from the Minnesota Independent Publishing Association. She’s a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Minnesota State Arts Board, among others. Her poems are often read on “The Writers Almanac” and have appeared in journals and unusual places, such as stamped into the sidewalks of Saint Paul and on bicycle spoke cards.

Tuesday, June 25, 5:30pm Fig + Farro (3001 Hennepin Ave S. Minneapolis, MN 55408)

Magers + Fig Book Club: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Join us bi-monthly for engaging conversation on climate change and the role food plays in our environment. Plant-based eating not only reduces your individual "carbon foodprint" by a staggering 70%, it also reduces water use, livestock pollution, and deforestation.

Books are available for purchase at Magers & Quinn before meetings and at Fig + Farro during meetings. 

Book club meetings are free to attend and are held at  Fig + Farro. Let us know you can make it!

2nd & 4th Tuesdays
5:30-7:30pm at Fig & Farro

6/11: Diet for a Small Planet

6/25: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Wednesday, June 26, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Daniel Thomas and Thomas R. Smith

Poets Daniel Thomas and Thomas R. Smith present their recent works, Deep Pockets and Windy Day at Kabekona.

Daniel Thomas’s collection of poetry, Deep Pockets, was published by Saint Julian Press in Houston. He has an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University, as well as an MA in film and a BA in literature.  His long career in nonprofit management includes work as an executive director and a chief development officer.

Thomas R. Smith's most recent book is Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems,  1978-2018 (White Pine Press).  He has also edited several books, including AIR MAIL: THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BLY AND TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER (Graywolf Press).  He teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center.

Thursday, June 27, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Colin T. Nelson presents Ivory Lust

Pete Chandler, an investigator for the U.S. Export/Import Bank, travels to South Africa with his daughter, hoping to heal their relationship.  He’s also on assignment to solve a murder case for the bank.  Arriving in Cape Town, his daughter is almost killed during a second murder.  That throws Pete into a dangerous quest to find the killers.
It leads them across South Africa to a wild game reserve.  Clues point to an international ivory trafficking network centered at the reserve.  Pete’s investigation traps him between powerful forces that don’t want him to succeed.  When he refuses to give-up, Pete and Karen become targets of the criminals---who try to eliminate them both.

Colin T. Nelson worked as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer for many years in Minneapolis.  He’s written six previous novels and a collection of short stories.  Other short stories have been featured in crime anthologies.  He also plays the saxophone in a jazz group and a rock band.

Monday, July 8, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Amber Royer presents Pure Chocolate

Pure Chocolate is the second in the telenovela-inspired foodie-centric Chocoverse comic space opera series. The first book, Free Chocolate, stars Bo Benitez, ex-paparazzi princess and current culinary arts student, who gets drawn into an impending galactic war over the only thing Earth has that the galaxy wants: chocolate.

To save everyone she loves, Bo Bonitez is now touring Zant, home of the murderous, shark-toothed aliens who so recently tried to eat her. In the midst of her stint as Galactic paparazzi princess, she discovers that Earth has been exporting tainted chocolate to the galaxy, and getting aliens hooked on cocoa. Bo must choose whether to go public, or just smile for the cameras and make it home alive. She’s already struggling with her withdrawal from the Invincible Heart, and her love life has a life of its own, but when insidious mind worms intervene, things start to get complicated!

Amber Royer is the author of the high-energy comedic space opera Chocoverse series. She teaches enrichment and continuing education creative writing classes for teens and adults through both the University of Texas at Arlington and Writing Workshops Dallas. She is also the discussion leader for the Saturday Night Write writing craft group.  She spent five years as a youth librarian, where she organized teen writers’ groups and teen writing contests. In addition to two cookbooks co-authored with her husband, Amber has published a number of articles on gardening, crafting and cooking for print and on-line publications.

Wednesday, July 10, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Linda Holmes presents Evvie Drake Starts Over

From the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast comes a heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.

“A quirky, sweet, and splendid story of a woman coming into her own.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out.

A joyful, hilarious, and hope-filled debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over will have you cheering for the two most unlikely comebacks of the year—and will leave you wanting more from Linda Holmes.

Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for National Public Radio and the host of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which has held sold-out live shows in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and elsewhere. She appears regularly on NPR’s radio shows, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. Before NPR, she wrote for New York magazine online and for TV Guide, as well as for the influential website Television Without Pity. In her free time, she watches far too many romantic comedies, bakes bread, watches her nephews get taller, and recently knitted her first hat. Evvie Drake Starts Over is her first novel.

Thursday, July 11, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Kelly Barnhill presents The Girl Who Drank the Moon, now in paperback!

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest. They hope this sacrifice will keep her from terrorizing their town. But the witch in the Forest, Xan, is kind. She shares her home with a wise Swamp Monster and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Xan rescues the children and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest, nourishing the babies with starlight on the journey.

One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, whom she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna’s thirteenth birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge—with dangerous consequences. Meanwhile, a young man from the Protectorate is determined to free his people by killing the witch. Deadly birds with uncertain intentions flock nearby. A volcano, quiet for centuries, rumbles just beneath the earth’s surface. And the woman with the Tiger’s heart is on the prowl . . .


Winner of the 2017 Newbery Award
The New York Times Bestseller

An Entertainment Weekly Best Middle Grade Book of 2016
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2016
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2016
An Amazon Top 20 Best Book of 2016
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016
A School Library Journal Best Book of 2016
Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2016
2017 Booklist Youth Editors’ Choice

Kelly Barnhill lives in Minnesota with her husband and three children. She is the author of four novels, most recently The Girl Who Drank the Moon, winner of the 2017 John Newbery Medal. She is also the winner of the World Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, a Nebula Award, and the PEN/USA literary prize.

Monday, July 15, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Brittany Chaffee presents BORDERLINE

Join us for an evening of mingling and poetry celebrating Brittany's seasonal essay collection. Purchase a book and Brittany will write a custom poem to take with you!

In the four volumes of BORDERLINE, Chaffee offers perspective on the physical and emotional progression of time. The book is her collection of prose essays on the four vulnerabilities of movement: memory, time, change, and wonder. BORDERLINE is a book for people who want to discuss childhood, the future, the past - all of the things we don't normally talk about in line at Starbucks. Chaffee reminds us of the tiny details in life we may not notice right away, but drive us straight to the heart of the matter.

Brittany Chaffee is an author living happily in St. Paul. As an avid storyteller and professional empath, she likes to spend her time with great lighting, warm bread, and good company. Her second book, “Borderline” (released May 2019), is available for purchase now. Find more of her work on her website.

Thursday, July 18, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Kate McQuade and Lila Savage in Conversation

Authors Kate McQuade and Lila Savage will discuss their work, including McQuade's short story collection Tell Me Who We Were and Savage's novel Say Say Say.

About Tell Me Who We Were: Infused with the keen insight of Joyce Carol Oates and haunting power of Kelly Link, a radiant collection of linked stories that explore the vulnerability, resilience, and hidden desires of women, following six girls over the course of sixty years, from their first semester at boarding school to the twilight of their lives.

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love, and their first true loss.

In this extraordinary collection, Kate McQuade explores the ripple effect of one transformative moment on six lives, witnessed at a different point in each girl’s future. Throughout these stories, these bright, imaginative, and ambitious girls mature into women, lose touch and call in favors, achieve success and endure betrayal, marry and divorce, have children and struggle with infertility, abandon husbands and remain loyal to the end.
Lyrical, intimate, and incisive, Tell Me Who We Were explores the inner worlds of girls and women, the relationships we cherish and betray, and the transformations we undergo in the simple act of living.

About Say Say Say: A beautiful, bracingly honest debut novel about the triangle formed between a young woman and the couple whose life she enters one transformative year: a story about love and compassion, the fluidity of desire, and the myriad ways of devotion.

Ella is nearing thirty, and not yet living the life she imagined. Her artistic ambitions as a student in Minnesota have given way to an unintended career in caregiving. One spring, Bryn--a retired carpenter--hires her to help him care for Jill, his wife of many years. A car accident caused a brain injury that has left Jill verbally diminished; she moves about the house like a ghost of her former self, often able to utter, like an incantation, only the words that comprise this novel's title.

As Ella is drawn ever deeper into the couple's household, her presence unwanted but wholly necessary, she is profoundly moved by the tenderness Bryn shows toward the wife he still fiercely loves. Ella is startled by the yearning this awakens in her, one that complicates her feelings for her girlfriend, Alix, and causes her to look at relationships of all kinds--between partners, between employer and employee, and above all between men and women--in new ways.

Tightly woven, humane and insightful, tracing unflinchingly the most intimate reaches of a young woman's heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.


Kate McQuade lives in Andover, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, Baltimore Review, and Verse Daily, among other journals. She has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ucross Foundation, and Yaddo, and teaches at Phillips Academy, Andover.

Lila Savage is originally from Minneapolis. Prior to writing fiction, she spent nearly a decade working as a caregiver. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2018. She lives in San Francisco.

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.

Thursday, August 1, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

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

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.

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.