| Teresa Strasser Event |
 Join us on Thursday, January 13 at 6 pm for a red carpet affair with Teresa Strasser, author of Exploiting My Baby.
 Everyone loves babies -- and pregnant women -- so TV and radio personality Teresa Strasser decided to use this obsession to her advantage. She came up with a way to provide for her newfound family and help other mommies-to-be with this down-and-dirty memoir about first-time pregnancy.
Exploiting My Baby is a must-read for anyone pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or who is just more crazy than baby-crazy. Hopping on a trail pioneered by such lions as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Erma Bombeck, and Tori Spelling, Teresa has no problem using her pregnancy, childbirth and difficult relationship with her own mother for material. It's her blunt and plain-spoken approach to exploiting her family for literary success that sets her apart.
Teresa Strasser is an Emmy Award-winning writer (Comedy Central's Win Ben Stein's Money) and Emmy-nominated television host (TLC's While You Were Out). Radio audiences know her as the co-host of The Adam Carolla Show, syndicated on CBS radio stations throughout the West Coast. As journalist, Strasser is a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for The Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Her first person essays have garnered three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year. |
| Jane Porter Event |
Round up your girlfriends and join author Jane Porter for wine, little bites, and a fun discussion followed by a signing. Jane will be at the store on Friday, January 14 at 7 pm for her latest book, She's Gone Country.
 Shey Darcy, a 39-year-old former top model for Vogue and Sports Illustrated, led a charmed life in New York City with a handsome photographer husband until the day he announced he'd fallen in love with someone else. Left to pick up the pieces of her once happy world, Shey decides to move back home to Texas with her three teenage sons. Life on the family ranch, however, brings with it a whole new host of dramas. It doesn't take long before Shey realizes that in order to reinvent herself, she must let go of an uncertain future and a broken past, to find happiness -- and maybe love -- in the present.
The bestselling author of 30 novels, Jane Porter has been a finalist for the prestigious RITA award from Romance Writers of America in 2002, 2003, and 2008. Jane's July 2006 release, Flirting With Forty, picked by Redbook as its Red Hot Summer Read, went back for seven printings in six weeks before being made into a December 2008 Lifetime movie starring Heather Locklear. A busy mother of three sons, Jane holds an MA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and makes her home in Bellevue, Washington where she's working on her next novel. |
| St. Mary's Reads Aloud Event |
We wanted to let you know about St. Mary's Reads Aloud, a monthly event that our community partner, St. Mary's Episcopal Church, is hosting on the third Thursday evening of every month. The next event will be on Thursday, January 21 from 7 to 8 pm and they will be discussing The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan.  We were fortunate enough to host an event with Sandy a couple of years ago, and it was an illuminating evening spent discussing this moving, well-crafted book. In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust.
On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR's Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation. This event will be held at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, located at 428 Park Avenue in Laguna Beach. For more information, check out their website. |
| Marcia Sargent Event |
Join us on Sunday, January 23 at 3 pm for a special event with Laguna resident Marcia Sargent, author of Wing Wife.
Wing Wife is a memoir of the first few years of Marcia's marriage to a Marine fighter pilot. Although she never flew high performance aircraft, she learned to appreciate and maneuver through the irreverent, technical, and dangerous world of the Marine aviator -- at and under her husband's wing.
Navigating the unfamiliar skies of officers' wives, military expectations, and the loss of loved ones, Marcia journeyed to a realization of the risks of loving a man who flew, and accepted her ties to the women who picked up the pieces when the men crashed and burned. Wing Wife brings the reader intimately into the bawdy, comedic, and tragic world of the Marine Corps aviator and the aviator's wife.
As a Marine fighter pilot's wife, Marcia interacted with military aviators when they still had a great time and damned the consequences. Wing Wife is set in a time after Vietnam and before the Gulf War and the Iraq conflict, giving it a universal appeal unencumbered by political viewpoints. Yet it addresses timely issues many women -- military wives in particular -- face today. |
| Miles Corwin Event at Laguna Beach Assistance League |
On Saturday, January 29 from 5 to 7 pm we are pleased to welcome Miles Corwin, author of Kind of Blue. This event is co-sponsored by the Laguna Beach Assistance League and Laguna Beach Books. It will be catered and the cost is $15.  When a legendary ex-cop is mudered in L.A, the pressure is on to find the killer. Lt. Frank Duffy needs his best detective on the case, but his best detective, Ash Levine, quit a year ago. A tenacious, obsessive detective, Ash resigned after Latisha Patton, the witness in a homicide case he was working, was murdered. Without his job, Ash is left unanchored -- and consumed with guilt that he somehow caused Latisha's murder.
Corwin, a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of three nonfiction books: The Killing Season, a national bestseller; And Still We Rise, the winner of the PEN West award for nonfiction and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and Homicide Special, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Kind of Blue is his first novel. Corwin lives in Altadena with his family and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
This event will take place at the Assistance League Chapter House at 547 Catalina Street. Parking is available at 526 Glenneyre. Please RSVP to Judy Sterner at 949-661-2374. |
| Reading with Barbara DeMarco Barrett's Workshop Students |
Join us for the third annual reading of local author Barbara DeMarco-Barrett ( Pen on Fire; Orange County Noir) and her private writing workshops on Sunday, January 30 at 4 pm. Free food and drink will be served. |
| Pamela Madsen Event |
On Wednesday, February 2 at 6 pm we will welcome Pamela Madsen, author of Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure... and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner. This book is scheduled to be released on January 18.  At age 43, Pamela Madsen had a successful career as a nationally-renowned fertility advocate, was mother to two teenage boys, and was happily married to the man she fell in love with as a teenager. On the surface, she had it all. Yet, Pamela felt a growing sexual restlessness that wouldn't let up, despite her lasting love for her spouse. Deep down, she knew that she needed something more. But what possibilities were available to her, outside of cheating on her husband, something she refused to do? Shameless is not just another book about sex -- it's an intimate examination of how Pamela's experiences healed lifelong issues with food and body image and, most important, helped her weave the disparate roles -- daughter, friend, partner, mother and workplace wonder -- that she played, that all women play in one way or another, into one integrated being. That was the last thing that she expected but the best surprise of all. Pamela Madsen is the founder of the American Fertility Association and one of the nation's most outspoken fertility and sexuality educators and advocates. Her daily blog, The Fertility Advocate, is a breakfast essential for reporters, writers, and policymakers who want to know what is happening in the world of reproductive health and fertility. She has also participated in more than 1,500 interviews with print, online, and broadcast media including appearances on Oprah, Dateline NBC, Today, and 60 Minutes. |
| Lisa Napoli Event |
On Sunday, February 13 at 5 pm we will welcome Lisa Napoli, author of Radio Shangri-la: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth. This book is scheduled to be released on February 8.  Lisa Napoli was in the grip of a crisis, dissatisfied with her life and her work as a radio journalist. When a chance encounter with a handsome stranger presented her with an opportunity to move halfway around the world, Lisa left behind cosmopolitan Los Angeles for a new adventure in the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan -- said to be one of the happiest places on earth. Thousands of miles away from everything and everyone she knows, Lisa creates a new community for herself. As she helps to start Bhutan's first youth-oriented radio station, Kuzoo FM, she must come to terms with her conflicting feelings about the impact of the medium on a country that had been shielded from its effects. Immersing herself in Bhutan's rapidly changing culture, Lisa realizes that her own perspective on life is changing as well -- and that she is discovering the sense of purpose and joy that she has been yearning for.
Earlier in her career, Lisa was the Internet correspondent for MSNBC, a columnist for MSNBC.com, and the first staff reporter/columnist at the NY Times Cybertimes, now defunct. She began her career at CNN in 1984. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Lisa is a graduate of Hampshire College. Check out her website for more info about her travels to Bhutan. |
| Cliff Shiepe Event |
On Sunday, February 20 at 4 pm we will welcome Cliff Shiepe, author of Cliff Falls, to the store.  The night of his eighteenth birthday, Clay Grant, exploited child star of 80's sitcom hit "Little Guy Mike", disappears after a mysterious fire destroys the Hollywood studio backlot. Chased by the media and haunted by his past, he's been on the run for fifteen years, until a fight with a determined photographer lands him in jail ending his self-imposed exile. Just when the media is descending, motivational pastor Reagan Mitchell shows up in Clay's cell and offers him a deal to buy his freedom. Unsure if he can trust Reagan, but out of options, Clay arrives in majestic Cliff Falls under an overcast sky and quickly discovers no one escapes life. What happens when you run into everything you've been running from? In a world where entertainment has become our religion and religion our entertainment, Cliff Falls wrestles with the question of what does it mean to be truly human; comfortable in your own skin when everyone wants you to be someone or something else? What Clay discovers will change his life and perhaps yours. |
| Fabulous New Fiction | |
Dinaw Mengestu
$25.95
One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before?
Steve Martin $26.99
Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take the NYC art world by storm. Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights -- and, at times, the dark lows -- of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today. |
| 2010 National Book Award Winners | |
Jaimy Gordon
$25.00
Lord of Misrule is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong. With her first novel since her acclaimed Bogeywoman in 1999, Jaimy Gordon bears comparison to other great writers of the American demimonde, such as Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and Eudora Welty. She is also the winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction.
Patti Smith $16.00
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. |
| Namaste | |
Claire Dederer
$26.00
Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love. Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read -- because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.
Angie Newsom $19.95
Yoga and Pilates offers step-by-step routines for all ages and abilities that you can do without the need to race out to a gym. Blending yoga and Pilates is the perfect solution to improve flexibility, strength, and endurance while at the same time creating a more balanced inner spirit and heightened self-esteem and coordination. And each workout can be tailored to your personal level of fitness simply by flipping the pages and choosing which of the suggested routines you want to do. |
| Leading the Way | |
Deepak Chopra
$19.99
Leadership is the most crucial choice one can make -- it is the decision to step out of darkness into the light. Bestselling author and spiritual guide Deepak Chopra invites you to become the kind of leader most needed today: a leader with vision who can make that vision real. In this unique handbook you are shown how to do just that, in words as practical as they are uplifting. The future is unfolding at this very minute, and the choice to lead it lies with each of us, here and now.
Sarah Ban Breathnach $24.99
This is Sarah Ban Breathnach's answer to the world's -- and her own personal -- financial crisis. As only Ban Breathnach can, she culls together this compendium of advice, deeply personal anecdotes, and excerpts from magazines, books, and newspapers -- particularly those of the Great Depression -- to inspire readers who are mired in today's financial difficulties. Focusing on her own personal path, Sarah Ban Breathnach will relate never-before revealed details about how she fell from the financial top to the bottom. |
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