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Thanks to all of our wonderful customers and friends, last year we won for Best Bookstore! We're hoping to do the same again this year with your support. Polls are now open, and all you need to do is click here to vote. It just takes a minute!

On Sunday, February 20 at 4 pm we will welcome C.B. 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.

C. B. Shiepe is a writer who lives in Southern California. Understanding that "at one time or another we all go over the falls," he continues to write and speak to an inter-generational audience about the Cliff Falls experience. "It's one thing to believe in something when you don't need it to be true. It's another when everything is riding on it."

On Sunday, February 27 at 2 pm we will be hosting a Book Swap, which is also a fundraiser for the Friendship Shelter. There is a suggested $10 donation for The Friendship Shelter in honor of International Friendship Month.

  

Please bring one to ten books to swap for an equal number of books; good quality, fiction, non-fiction, mystery, childrens, anything really. There will be a special book raffle at 2:30 pm.  

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, March 3 at 7 pm.

The next event will be for The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan, who will be attending. Sandy has just returned from the Middle East, and will have the most up-to-date info on recent developments there.

  

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.

This monthly salon, hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, features authors, literary agents, and others involved in the field of writing. Set in the atmospheric Scape Gallery in Corona del Mar, the salon is a mecca for literary devotees who listen to readings, take part in discussions, and attend book signings.

 

Join the salon on Tuesday, March 15 at 7 pm when authors Tatjana Soli and Lisa Fugard visit to discuss their books. They will join Marrie Stone, writer and co-host of Writers on Writing, which airs on KUCI-FM on Wednesday mornings at 9 am PT. 

 

Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, was a New York Times Bestseller and 2010 New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Third Coast, Sonora Review and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications. Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

 

Lisa Fugard was born in South Africa and came to the United States in 1980. After working in the theater, performing in New York, London and South Africa, she turned her attention to writing. Her short fiction has been published in Story, Outside and literary magazines. Her many travel articles, essays and book reviews have been published in the New York Times. Skinner's Drift, her first novel has been published in the USA, UK, and South Africa. Named a notable book of 2006 by the New York Times, Skinner's Drift was also a finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the runner-up for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. 

 

$20.00 includes nibbles, sips, and sometimes cake. Advance tickets are required to guarantee a seat. Walk-ins are discouraged as seating is limited. Tickets are available through the Pen on Fire website.

 
Bertie, who has suffered from a debilitating speech impediment all his life, is suddenly crowned King George VI of England after the death of his father King George V and the scandalous abdication of King Edward VIII. With his country on the brink of war and in desperate need of a leader, his wife, Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, arranges for her husband to see an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue. After a rough start, the two delve into an unorthodox course of treatment and eventually form an unbreakable bond.  

 
Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction. It takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.  

 
The Memory Palace is a breathtaking literary memoir about the complex meaning of love, truth, and the capacity for forgiveness among family. Through stunning prose and original art created by the author in tandem with the text, The Memory Palace explores the connections between mother and daughter that cannot be broken no matter how much exists -- or is lost --between them.

 
Beneath a dark winter sky... death waits patiently. A journalist is murdered in the frozen white landscape of a northern Swedish town. Annika Bengtzon, a reporter at a Stockholm-based tabloid, was planning to interview him about a long-ago attack against an isolated air base nearby, and now she suspects that his death is linked to that attack. Against the explicit orders of her boss, she begins to investigate the event, which is soon followed by a series of shocking murders. And Annika knows the murders are connected.

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