Wednesday, August 12, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

William McKeever presents Emperors of the Deep: Sharks—The Ocean's Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood, and Most Important Guardians

Celebrate Shark Week with author William McKeever, who will present his book Emperors of the Deep live on Facebook on Wednesday, August 12 at 7:00pm Central time.

Tune in HERE!

From the Jaws blockbusters to Shark Week, we are conditioned to see sharks as terrifying cold-blooded underwater predators. But as Ocean Guardian founder William McKeever reveals, sharks are evolutionary marvels essential to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. We can learn much from sharks, he argues, and our knowledge about them continues to grow.

McKeever goes back through time to probe the shark’s pre-historic secrets and how it has become the world’s most feared and most misunderstood predator, and takes us on a pulse-pounding tour around the world and deep under the water’s surface, from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to the coral reefs of the tropical Central Pacific, to see sharks up close in their natural habitat. He also interviews ecologists, conservationists, and world-renowned shark experts, including the founders of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, the head of the Massachusetts Shark Research Program, and the self-professed “last great shark hunter.”

At once a deep-dive into the misunderstood world of sharks and an urgent call to protect them, Emperors of the Deep celebrates this wild species that hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the ocean—if we can prevent their extinction from climate change and human hunters.

Buy the book at a SPECIAL SHARK WEEK DISCOUNT here!

William McKeever is an author and documentary filmmaker. He also is the producer/writer/director of a shark documentary film of the same name.  The film exposes the threats that sharks face around the world and explains why society needs to change how it views these animals. Through interviews with scientists around the world and exciting shark video footage, the viewer sees sharks in a new light. 

Thursday, August 13, 6:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Casper ter Kuile presents The Power of Ritual, in conversation with Rev. Tyler Sit

Casper ter Kuile, a Harvard Divinity School fellow and cohost of the popular Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, explores how we can nourish our souls by transforming common, everyday practices—yoga, reading, walking the dog—into sacred rituals that can heal our crisis of social isolation and struggle to find purpose.

Tune in HERE on Thursday, August 13 at 6pm Central time.

What do Soul Cycle, gratitude journals, and tech breaks have in common? For ter Kuile, they offer rituals that create the foundation for our modern spiritual lives.

We are in crisis today. Our modern technological society has left too many of us—no matter our ages—feeling isolated and bereft of purpose. Previous frameworks for building community and finding meaning no longer support us. Yet ter Kuile reveals a hopeful new message: we might not be religious, but that doesn’t mean we are any less spiritual.

In The Power of Ritual, ter Kuile invites us to deepen these ordinary practices as intentional rituals that nurture connection and wellbeing. With wisdom and endearing wit, ter Kuile’s call for ritual is ultimately a call to heal our loss of connection to ourselves, to others, and to our spiritual identities.

The Power of Ritual reminds us that what we already do every day matters—and has the potential to become a powerful experience of reflection, sanctuary, and meaning.

Buy the book HERE

Casper ter Kuile is the cohost of the award-winning #1 podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, cofounder of the think tank How We Gather, and the former Executive Director of the On Being Impact Lab. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Vice, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and on PBS and many other outlets, He has presented his research to religious leaders and Silicon Valley CEOs alike at Aspen Ideas Festival, Institute for the Future, AAR/SBL, and more. He lives in New York City.

Rev. Tyler Sit is the pastor and church planter of New City Church, a multiethnic community in South Minneapolis. He is the author of the upcoming book tentatively titled, Staying Awake: the Gospel for Changemakers (set to publish early next year). He is the son of an immigrant from Hong Kong and a German-descended White woman from Minnesota. New City has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Minnesota Public Radio, and more.

Monday, August 17, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Lyz Lenz presents Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women, in conversation with Laura Lippman

Lyz Lenz will discuss her new book on the Magers & Quinn Facebook page, in conversation with Laura Lippman, on Monday, August 17 at 7pm Central time.

In a world in which our representatives enact laws criminalizing abortion and miscarriage, doctors prioritize the heath of the fetus over the life of the pregnant patient in front of them, and baristas refuse to serve visibly pregnant women caffeine—Lenz tackles the problems America has in answering the question of who gets to be a mother, and further, who is considered a good mother in this society in which cultural biases and systemic inequalities largely make those decisions.

Lenz also reflects on her own experience of carrying her two children, sharing how the sacrifices demanded during pregnancy—and often only being seen as a vessel or goddess—seemingly carries over into the cult of motherhood, where women are expected to play to the narrowly defined role of “mother” rather than be themselves.
The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, a rate that is increasing even as infant mortality rates decrease. Meanwhile, the right-wing assault on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy has also escalated. Belabored is an urgent call for us to trust women to choose what happens to their bodies, an impassioned and irreverent argument for dismantling our cultural narratives around pregnancy, and a plea for us to look at the stories we have been told and to create new and better ones.

Buy the book HERE

Lyz Lenz is the author of God Land and a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette and contributing writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Pacific Standard, among other publications. She lives in Iowa. 

Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at the Baltimore Sun. Her novels have won almost every prize given for crime fiction in the United States, including the Edgar, Anthony, Nero Wolfe and Agatha awards. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, the writer David Simon. Her essay collection My Life as a Villainess published in August 2020.

Wednesday, August 19, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Anna Bruno presents Ordinary Hazards, in conversation with Christine Utz

Tune into the Magers & Quinn Facebook page for a conversation with novelist Anna Bruno and Magers & Quinn Bookseller Christine Utz, Wednesday, August 19, at 7:00pm Central Time.

For fans of Claire Messud, Mary Beth Keane, and Alice McDermott comes an impeccably paced and transfixing debut novel about finding hope in the dark.

It’s 5pm on a Wednesday when Emma settles into her hometown bar with a motley crew of locals, all unaware that a series of decisions over the course of a single night is about to change their lives forever. As the evening unfolds, key details about Emma’s history emerge, and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train.

Why has Emma, a powerhouse in the business world, ended up here? What is she running away from?
And what is she willing to give up to reclaim the life she once cherished?

An exploration of contemporary love, guilt, and the place we call home, and in the tradition of Ask Again, Yes and Little Fires Everywhere, ORDINARY HAZARDS follows one woman’s epic journey back to a life worth living. This is storytelling at its finest, showing us the good, bad and ugly behind the big and little choices we all often make.

Learn more about the book HERE!

Anna Bruno is a writer and teacher at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. Previously, Anna managed public relations and marketing for technology and financial services companies in Silicon Valley. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MBA from Cornell University, and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, son, and blue heeler. ORDINARY HAZARDS is her first novel.

Thursday, August 20, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Kathleen Rooney presents Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

Tune in to the Magers & Quinn Facebook page for a discussion with novelists Kathleen Rooney and J. Ryan Stradal on Thursday, August 20 at 7:00pm Central time.

In CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY, Rooney transports readers to the battlefields of World War I, where two unlikely and reluctant heroes find their fates intertwined. Answering the call to serve in the war to end all wars, neither Cher Ami, the messenger bird, nor Charles Whittlesey, the Army officer in command of the unit she serves, can anticipate how their lives will briefly intersect in a chaotic battle in the forests of France, where their wills will be tested and their fates will be shaped. The real Cher Ami was taxidermied after her death in honor of her high level of service, and her body is currently on exhibit in the Smithsonian.
   
A saga of hope and duty, love and endurance, as well as the claustrophobia of fame, CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY is a tragic yet galvanizing war story that the world has never heard. Through Rooney’s heartrending and life-affirming prose, she resurrects two long-forgotten yet unforgettable figures, recounting their tale in a pair of voices that will change the way that readers look at animals, freedom, and even history itself.

Buy the book HERE

Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin's Press, 2017) and the co-editor of René Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). She is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her previous work includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Salon, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation and elsewhere. She teaches English and creative writing at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. His debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association award for fiction, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Monday, August 24, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Deborah Appleman presents Words No Bars Can Hold, with Kao Kalia Yang

Ever wondered about the ability of literature “to empower inmates who are too often dismissively diminished by society”? Join Deborah Appleman as she discusses her book, in which she shares her experiences teaching creative writing to high-security prisoners. She will be joined by Kao Kalia Yang, who will also discuss her new book The Shared Room!

Tune in on the Magers & Quinn Facebook page on Monday, August 24 at 7:00pm Central Time.

Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college-level classes at a high-security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman’s classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories.

Buy Words No Bars Can Hold HERE

Buy The Shared Room HERE

Deborah Appleman lives in Minnesota and is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies and director of the summer writing program at Carleton College. Since 2007, she has taught language, literature, and creative writing courses at a high-security prison for men in the upper Midwest.

Kao Kalia Yang is a mother of three and a writer of both adult and children's literature. She is author of A Map into the World, the award-winning memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and The Song Poet, and is coeditor with Shannon Gibney of What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color (Minnesota, 2019). Her dream is to create books that a child can grow up with and an adult can grow old with. She lives in Minnesota where the winters are cold and dry and the summers are hot and humid, but there are days in between that are so very precious and perfect they are a state secret.

Tuesday, August 25, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Eric Holthaus presents The Future Earth

Join us for a virtual event with Eric Holthaus, on the Magers & Quinn Facebook page, on Tuesday, 8/25, at 7:00pm Central Time.

The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.

The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus ("the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology"--Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

Buy the book HERE

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Thursday, August 27, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers Facebook Page

Martin Shaw presents Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems

Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw will discuss his collaboration with the late poet Tony Hoagland and their work on Cinderbiter, Thursday, August 27 at 7:00pm Central time. Tune in to the Magers & Quinn Facebook page.

Dramatic new retellings of Celtic poetry's great lyrics and legends

Cinderbiter collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling. In the spirit of recasting these legends and voices for new audiences, celebrated mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw and award-winning poet Tony Hoagland have created extraordinary new versions of these bardic lyrics, folkloric sagas, and heroes' journeys, as they have never been rendered before.

In long, shaggy tales of the unlikely ascensions of previously unknown heroes such as Cinderbiter, in the shrouded origin stories of figures such as Arthur and Merlin, and in anonymous flickering lyrics of elegy, praise, and heartbreak, these poems retain at once the rapturous, supernatural imagination of the deep past layered with an austere, devout allegiance to the Christian faith. Shaw and Hoagland's collaboration summons the power within this storehouse of the Celtic mind to arrive at this rare book--distinctive, audacious, and tuned to our time and condition with a convincing resonance.

Buy the book HERE

Monday, September 14, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

JP Gritton presents Wyoming

It's the tail end of the '80s and Shelley Cooper is in trouble. He's broke, he's been fired from his construction job, and his ex-wife has left him for their next door neighbor and a new life in Kansas City. The only opportunity on his horizon is fifty pounds of his brother's high-grade marijuana, which needs to be driven from Colorado to Houston and exchanged for a lockbox full of cash. The delivery goes off without a hitch, but getting home with the money proves to be a different challenge altogether. Fueled by a grab bag of resentments and self-punishment, Shelley watches things go from bad to worse to (maybe) good enough.

JP Gritton's awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, a DisQuiet fellowship and the Inprint Donald Barthelme prize in fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Tin House and elsewhere. His translations of the fiction of Brazilian writer Cidinha da Silva are forthcoming in InTranslation. Wyoming is his first novel.

Thursday, September 17, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Midway Journal Reading

Midway Journal is excited to highlight several of the talented Minnesota writers whose work has been featured in the journal in the first annual Twin Cities Midway Journal reading. The event will feature both poets and prose writers, with time to mingle and enjoy refreshments.

Thursday, December 31, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Postponed Indefinitely: Poetry Reading with Joyce Sutphen and Connie Wanek

This event has been postponed. We hope to reschedule for as soon as it is possible to safely gather again.

Joyce Sutphen's evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the later 1960s, and traveling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota and beyond will recognize themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbors in these poems, which move us from delight in keen description to something like wisdom or solace in the things of this world.

In addition to poems selected from the last 25 years, Carrying Water to the Field includes more than forty new poems on the themes of luck, hard work, and he ravages of time--erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language and lyrical precision.

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minneasota. She is a professor emeritus of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and is Minnesota's poet laureate. She is the author of seven poetry collections.

Connie Wanek was born in Wisconsin, raised in New Mexico, and lived for over a quarter century in Duluth, MN. Wanek’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Great River Review, Poetry East, Water-Stone, and many other publications over the years. In 2006, US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser named her a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. She served as a co-editor with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro on the comprehensive anthology, To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present, which appeared in 2007 from New Rivers Press. Author of four books of poetry, Wanek also published a book of prose, ten stories, called Summer Cars with Will o' the Wisp Press in 2014. Forthcoming from Candlewick Press is a children’s book of poetry co-written by Wanek and Ted Kooser.

Connie Wanek was deeply honored to receive the George Morrison Artist of the Year Award, which recognizes an individual artist whose body of work has made a significant contribution to the arts in Northeastern Minnesota. And in 2017, a wildflower trail in Duluth’s Hartley Nature Center was named in her honor.

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

POSTPONED INDEFINITELY: Ander Monson presents Gnome Stories and I Will Take the Answer, in conversation with Patrick Nathan

This event has been postponed indefinitely. We are working to reschedule in late summer or fall of 2020 if possible. Thank you for your interest in this event, and we apologize for any inconvenience!

In The Gnome Stories, Ander Monson presents eleven unforgettable stories about oddly American situations. His characters are loners in the truest sense; in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotions trauma; finding solace--or at least a sense of purpose--in peculiar jobs and pursuits. A man whose wife left him is robbed, so he decides to start doing his own breaking and entering into his neighbors' homes. When another man's girlfriend is cryogenically frozen by her family after a car accident, he becomes a maintenance worker at the cryogenic facility, eavesdropping on visitors as they whisper secrets to their frozen loved ones. A woman serves as an assistant to the Starvationist, whose methods to help clients lose large amounts of weight are unorthodox, sadistic--and utterly failproof. Another woman and her robot assistant have become hired to tinker with the troubling memories inside a celebrity's brain. The stories are as surreal as an urban legend and at the same time perfectly mundane.

In I Will Take the Answer, a book of essays, Monson grapples deeply with the idea of connection. In the opening essay, which extends across the book in brief subsequent pieces, a trip through a storm sewer in Tuscon inspires Monson to trace the city's relationship to Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, along with how violence is produced and how we grieve the dead. With the formally inventive "I in River," he ruminates on water in a waterless city and the structures we use to attempt to contain and control it. Monson also visits the exuberantly nerdy kingdom of a Renaissance Faire, and elaborates on the enduring appeal of sad songs through the lens of March Sadness, an online competition that he cofounded, an engaging riff on the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in which sad songs replace teams.

Ander Monson is the author of Letter to a Future Lover and Vanishing Point, and is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Tuscon, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.

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

POSTPONED INDEFINITELY: Sarah Kendzior presents Hiding in Plain Sight

Unfortunately, this event has been postponed indefinitely. We are working to set up a new date later in 2020. We apologize for any inconvenience.

President Donald Trump is often portrayed as a doddering narcissist who lucked his way into office and has wreaked havoc like a bull in a China shop ever since. St. Louis-based journalist and expert on authoritarian states Sarah Kendzior is here to dismiss that dangerous misconception and set the record straight: Donald Trump’s presidential run was nothing short of a calculated effort in the works for decades, and, once in office, Trump set in motion a plan to drive the United States into the ground for personal profit.

In her unflinching hardcover debut HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, New York Times bestselling author Kendzior unveils a startling portrait of the way foreign powers and organized crime have infiltrated our democracy, setting the stage for an autocratic leader like Donald Trump to take power.
Kendzior follows Trump decade by decade, from 1980s tabloid king and real estate tycoon to early aughts reality show star to the invention of today’s Tweeting politician, but she also illuminates what was happening in the shadows, behind all that glitz and glam, from changes in legislation that undermined democracy and shifts in the media landscape that paved the way for politics to become an arena for the rich, the famous, and the crooked. Her work draws on varied sources in the public record—including a 1984 Washington Post interview in which Trump discusses his desire to forge an alliance with Russia, evidence of Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election from NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, and the philosophy of Hannah Arendt—to uncover the threat that has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

As someone who has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Kendzior sits in the perfect vantage point to tell this story. She worked at the New York Daily News when print media was on the brink of collapse, lived in New York City when the Twin Towers fell and in St. Louis when Michael Brown was shot, and studied media and authoritarianism right as Trump emerged using the very same tactics as post-Soviet dictators. And now, she is a mother raising children who will inherit a nation forever changed, and who wonder aloud, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT gives readers an in-depth, comprehensive narrative to hold on to in the shifting sands of a 24-hour news cycle driven by click bait, drawing connections between events that span nearly forty years. In this bitingly honest book, Kendzior takes her singular commitment to speak the truth from the digital space, where she has over half a million followers on Twitter, to the printed page to document whispers of criminal activity and leave a record for generations to come.

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, and The New York Times.