Saturday, April 27, 10:00am Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Independent Bookstore Day at Magers & Quinn

It's the 5th annual Indie Bookstore Day! Join us all day (10am - 11pm) for exclusive items.

Pick up and stamp your Twin Cities Bookstore Passport to unlock coupons and prizes from the variety of wonderful indie bookstores in the Twin Cities area!

Plus, meet local author Kristin Tipping as she signs her adorable A Book for Sad Pets. She'll be in the store 1:00-3:00pm.

We can't wait to celebrate the joy of independent bookstores with you, the ones who have supported us for nearly 25 years!

Sunday, April 28, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

The Mill City Reading Series is a monthly showcase of works in progress by MFA in Creative Writing students at the University of Minnesota.

For more information visit their Facebook page.

As always, this event is free and open to the public. Don't miss the opportunity to see these fresh faces share their talents, and maybe someday you'll be saying "I saw them when..."

Tuesday, April 30, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Louis Bayard presents Courting Mr. Lincoln

From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln, the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a sparky, marriageable Mary Todd and Lincoln’s best friend, Joshua Speed.

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he’s a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma.

It’s not long, though, before she sees the Lincoln that Speed knows: a man who, despite his awkwardness, is amiable and profound, with a gentle wit to match his genius and a respect for her keen political mind. But as her relationship with Lincoln deepens, she must confront his inseparable friendship with Speed, who has taught his roommate how to dance, dress, and navigate the polite society of Springfield.

Told in the alternating voices of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, and rich with historical detail, Courting Mr. Lincoln creates a sympathetic and complex portrait of Mary unlike any that has come before; a moving portrayal of the deep and very real connection between the two men; and most of all, an evocation of the unformed man who would grow into one of the nation’s most beloved presidents.

Louis Bayard is a New York Times Notable Book author and has been shortlisted for both the Edgar and Dagger awards for his historical thrillers, which include The Pale Blue Eye and Mr. Timothy. His most recent novel was the critically acclaimed young-adult title Lucky Strikes. He lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at George Washington University. Visit him online at www.louisbayard.com.

Wednesday, May 1, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Heidi Barr presents What Comes Next

Job loss.  It’s not something that most people want to think about, whether it happens to them or not – but in modern society, it’s all too common for the words “lay off” and “company downsize” to grace a conversation about how life is going.  Through an honest look at the emotions, feelings, and everyday challenges that can come with losing a job, author Heidi Barr illustrates what going through such an event is like. From disbelief to financial concerns to anxiety over the prospect of a two hour commute after ten years of working from home, this essay explores the uncertainty of not knowing what might be coming next, along with the potential for uncovering the beauty that might just be hidden under what feels like destruction.

Heidi Barr lives in Minnesota with her husband and daughter where they tend a large organic vegetable garden, explore nature and do their best to live simply.  As a mother, spouse, gardener, and wellness coach, she is committed to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities and the planet. Visit her at heidibarr.com.

Thursday, May 2, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Maria Kuznetsova presents Oksana, Behave!

When Oksana's family begins their new American life in Florida after emigrating from Ukraine, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her depressed mother sits home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets when she walks Oksana to school, not realizing that the street they're walking down is known as Prostitute Street. Oksana just wants to have friends and lead a normal life—and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting herself in trouble.

As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted (and expensive-to-replace) key to New York City's Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. As her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, her father gets a job at Goldman Sachs, and her mother knits endless scarves, Oksana longs for a Russia that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew.

When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about Baba's wartime past and her lost loves, Oksana begins to see just how much alike they are, and comes to a new understanding of how to embrace life and love without causing harm to the people dearest to her. But will Oksana ever quite learn to behave?

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. Her debut novel, Oksana, Behave! was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in March 2019 and is a Barnes & Noble spring Discover Pick. Her work also appears in Guernica, Threepenny Review, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, and the Southern Review. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and daughter.

Monday, May 6, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Joan Crosby presents Tucker Lake Chronicle: Thirteen Months in the North Woods

Fifty years ago, Joan Crosby and her husband, Dick, moved from the Minneapolis suburbs to spend a winter on the outskirts of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in a primitive one-room cabin without road access or modern conveniences. She baked pies in a Dutch oven while Dick kept the woodpile topped up. They heard the wolves howl and the loons call, watched the seasons change, entertained occasional visitors—invited or not—and made periodic trips across two lakes and a connecting portage to their vehicle, then on into Grand Marias to do laundry and replenish supplies.

They also blazed a trail through the woods to the road in anticipation of those difficult weeks when the lakes would be half-frozen, hence impassible. Dick added a room to the structure, doubling its size, but they dropped the idea of erecting walls around the privy. Why bother? The arrival of a new stove revolutionized their meals. Visits to new-found friends at nearby lodges and wildlife adventures stirred up by their malamute, Nooky, punctuated days that were more often filled with household chores, woodcutting, and pine-scented lakeside reveries.
It was a good life. But when the money began to run low, they realized  the time had come to make some difficult decisions about what form their future would take.

Joan Crosby lives near Grand Marais, Minnesota, with her husband, Dick, and her beloved pug, Mr. Magoo. She has been a columnist for the Cook County News Herald for the past two decades.

Tuesday, May 14, 5:30pm Fig + Farro (3001 Hennepin Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408)

Magers + Fig Book Club discusses Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

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 will be held at  Fig + Farro. All participants receive 10% off food and drink!

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

Upcoming titles:
5/14: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
5/28: Eating Animals
6/11: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
6/25: Diet for a Small Planet

About this session's title: The director of the Climate Outreach and Information Network explores the psychological mechanism that enables people to ignore the dangers of climate change, using sidebars, cartoons and engaging stories from his years of research to reveal how humans are wired to primarily respond to visible threats.

Thursday, May 16, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

RESCHEDULED: Robert Rorke presents Car Trouble

This event has been rescheduled to May 16 at 7pm!

Set in 1970s Brooklyn, Car Trouble is an uncommonly warm coming of age debut novel from a fierce new talent. The story follows Nicky Flynn: an aspiring young actor at St. Michaels Diocesan high school. Nicky is keenly observant—especially when it comes to his abusive, alcoholic father, Patrick. Enigmatic, coasting on charm and desperation, Patrick enjoys picking up old junkers for cheap at NYPD auctions—each sputtering, tail-finned treasure subsidized by poker games. But when Patrick’s love for broken-down vintage cars begins to rival his obsession with alcohol, he threatens his family’s stability and careens wildly out of control.

Robert Rorke was born and raised and lives in Brooklyn. He is a TV editor at the New York Post who has also previously written for Publishers Weekly, TV Guide, Los Angeles Times, and Seventeen. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his MA in English from Stanford University.

Saturday, May 18, 1:00pm Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave NE, Minneapolis MN 55413

Eric Gorges presents A Craftsman's Legacy Panel Discussion

Join us during Art-a-Whirl® for a panel discussion featuring local artisans and craftspeople, featuring author and television host Eric Gorges! Saturday, 5/18, 1-2pm, during Art-A-Whirl®, presented by NEMAA.

The host of Public Television's A Craftsman's Legacy makes the case that the craftsman's way‑‑the philosophy, the skills, and the mindset‑‑can provide a blueprint for all of us in our increasingly hurried, disposable world.
 
These days, in the name of technological progress, we have devalued and minimized the personal, the imperfect, and the handmade. We've become distant from the process of creating and shaping real things, which can even diminish our power to shape our own destinies. As a metal shaper, Eric Gorges has visited and learned from the fellow craftsmen he has profiled for his popular public television program. In this book he tells the stories and shares the collective wisdom of these modern‑day makers while also celebrating the culture of all craftsmen.
 
A Craftsman's Legacy is filled with insights‑‑about the physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of craftsmanship‑‑from calligraphers, bit and spur makers, potters, stone carvers, glassblowers, engravers, wood workers, and others. Gorges identifies shared values: take time to slow down and enjoy the process; embrace failure; know when to stop and when to push through; accept that perfection is an illusion. He extols the benefits of getting out of our comfort zone, the pleasure of making something lasting, and the importance of being in touch with the traditions of the past in order to carry those values into the future. Along the way, Gorges tells his own story about leaving the corporate world to focus on what he loves.
 
This is a book for makers, for seekers of all kinds, an exhilarating look into the heart and soul of craftsmen‑‑and how they can inspire us all.

Eric Gorges has been the host of Public Television's A Craftsman's Legacy since it began in 2014. Before that, he worked in the corporate world until a health crises caused him to reevaluate his life. He sought out one of the best metal shapers in the country and signed on as his apprentice. In 1999, he struck out on his own, opening the custom motorcycle shop, Voodoo Choppers, in Detroit, MI, where he lives today.


Art-A-Whirl® is an open studio tour In Northeast Minneapolis showcasing the work of NEMAA members.

Art-A-Whirl® is a federally registered trademark of NEMAA.

Sunday, May 19, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Phyllis Root and Betsy Bowen present The Lost Forest

A forest, of course, doesn't need a map to know where to grow. But people need a map to find it. And in 1882 when surveyors set out to map a part of Minnesota, they got confused, or tired and cold (it was November), and somehow mapped a great swath of ancient trees as a lake. For more than seventy-five years, the mistake stayed on the map, and the forest remained safe from logging—no lumber baron expects to find timber in a lake, after all.

The Lost Forest tells the story of this lucky error and of the 144 acres of old-growth red and white pine it preserved. With gentle humor, Phyllis Root introduces readers to the men at their daunting task, trekking across Minnesota, measuring and marking the vast land into townships and sections and quarters. She takes us deep into a stand of virgin pine, one of the last and largest in the state, where U.S. history and natural history meet. With the help of Betsy Bowen's finely observed and beautiful illustrations, she shows us all the life that can be found in the Lost Forest.

Accompanying the story is a wealth of information about the Cadastral Survey and about the plants and animals that inhabit forests—making the book a valuable guide for readers who might want to look even deeper into the history of Minnesota, the flora and fauna of old-growth forests, and the apportioning of land in America.

Phyllis Root is the author of more than forty books, including Creak! Said the Bed and Lily and the Pirates, both named in Smithsonian's 2010 Notable Books for Children; Aunt Nancy and Old Man Trouble, winner of a Minnesota Book Award; Big Momma Makes the World, winner of the Boston Globe Horn Book Award; and, published by Minnesota, Plant a Pocket of Prairie and One North Star, both winners of the John Burroughs Riverby Award, and Searching for Minnesota's Native Wildflowers. She was awarded a 2006 McKnight Fellowship for Lucia and the Light. She has taught at the Loft and currently teaches in Hamline University's MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.

Betsy Bowen has written and illustrated numerous children's books, including Helen Hoover's Great Wolf and the Good Woodsman (Minnesota, 2005) and Phyllis Root's Big Belching Bog (Minnesota, 2010), Plant a Pocket of Prairie (Minnesota, 2014), and One North Star (Minnesota, 2016). She lives in Grand Marais, Minnesota.

Monday, May 20, 7:00pm Grace-Trinity Church (1430 W 28th St, Minneapolis, MN 55408)

Max Porter presents Lanny, in conversation with Fiona McCrae of Graywolf Press

Lanny is the entrancing new novel by Max Porter, the award-winning author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

In a village an hour from London, with a pub, a church, and redbrick cottages, a mythical figure known by local schoolchildren as Dead Papa Toothwort awakens after a long nap. He listens to the symphony of voices around him: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home: Lanny.

With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant and bewitching novel thrums with anarchic energy and a tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and solidifies Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.

Advance Praise for Lanny

“The writing is stunning and deeply affecting. The plot thunders along. This is a book that resolutely refuses to be categorised but to get somewhere close, think: Under Milk Wood meets Broadchurch.”—Nathan Filer

“Max Porter writes like no one else and it is impossible not to be swept along and astounded. Lanny is a wonder.”—Daisy Johnson

“It takes a special kind of genius to create something which is both so strange and yet so compulsive.”
—Mark Haddon

Tuesday, May 28, 5:30pm Fig + Farro (Calhoun Square - 3001 Hennepin Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408)

Magers + Fig Book Club discusses Eating Animals

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 will be held at  Fig + Farro. All participants receive 10% off food and drink!

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

Upcoming titles:
5/28: Eating Animals
6/11: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
6/25: Diet for a Small Planet
7/9: The Climate Report
7/23: Forks Over Knives


About this session's title: The award-winning author of Everything Is Illuminated exposes common misconceptions about how animals are slaughtered and processed for food, drawing on sources from popular culture to national tradition to reveal how the meat industry misrepresents its practices.