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Dear Reader,
Our "September Issue" isn't filled with ads for fancy cars and nail polish. Nor is it the fact that summer's almost over and I am somehow less tan than when it started. This one's simply stocked with what we love: meaningful books, inspired events, and candy. Wait, no, that's October. You'll notice too a theme of wandering, not just in my prose, but in this issue as a whole, as we set out on a stroll this month down memory lane, with a newly curated selection of Back-to-School books, and go in-depth with two booksellers on the beauty in losing one's sense of direction. So while you cannot use this issue as a paperweight or mode of self-defense against large insects, we're sure you'll find it useful nonetheless. Grab a book and join us as we walk away from summer toward our shadows and the quiet of the mind as it looks forward to a colorful and bountiful and hopefully long fall.
Colin, et al. at Common Good Books
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 Returning to the neighborhood where it all began,
the 12th book in his Cork O'Connor detective series
The St. Clair Broiler, just a few blocks south of Common Good Books, was something of a writer's retreat for author William Kent Krueger. He writes, "For several years after moving to St. Paul, we lived at the edge of a quiet neighborhood called Tangletown. (The streets were confusing and lovely.) A block away stood a caf� that opened its doors at 6:00 a.m. I began rising at 5:30 to groom and prepare for the day, then I'd hit the Broiler and spend an hour or so writing before I hustled off to my job that kept food on the table and a roof over our heads. Mostly I wrote short stories, some of which were published, and a couple of which won awards. Writing longhand in cheap wire-bound notebooks in booth #4 at the Broiler became for me a part of the magic of the creative process."Jayne Jones and Alicia Long sign copies of their novel Capitol Hell
Tuesday, September 18 at 7:00 p.m.
Read James Wood's rave review in The New Yorker
Wednesday, September 19 at 7:00 p.m.
 John Milton, along with John Kaul, former chief of staff for the late Senate Majority Leader Coleman, and John
Lindley, executive director of the Ramsey County Historical Society will discuss the career and achievements of Nick Coleman. Former Senator George Conzemius,
Senator Coleman's assistant majority leader,
will also participate in the evening's discussion.
Barton Sutter and Jim Johnson read from their poetry 
Discover why John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, E.B. White, Muriel Spark, and Calvin Trillin were variously charmed by a certain receptionist's "Midwestern pleasantness and capability"
...when Garrison Keillor and Janet Groth discuss
All events are free and in-store, unless otherwise noted
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Back to School Book Sale!
Now through September 15th, all IN-STOCK Children's and Young Adult books are 15% off! Not sure where to begin? Why not start with The Templeton Twins Have An Idea, the first book in a new series for young readers (9-13) which not unlike Secret deodorant is strong (and funny) enough for adults. Read an excerpt from our upcoming interview with author and humorist Ellis Weiner (below). And check out this exclusive excerpt
"I suspect that most 'funny' middle-grade (and YA) books are written by adults who don't particularly laugh at what they've written, but who think that kids will find it funny. (And who, I assume, are often correct. But that doesn't mean that the adult readers will.) I've been writing humor for 36 years and can't do it without trying to make myself laugh. So I decided early on to stick to that, and let an editor tell me if I've gone too far."
And hurry in before the bell rings on our brand newly curated school of books for students, teachers, and anyone whose sense of wonder is alive and well. Take a walk down memory lane with three of our collegiate favorites in a league of their own.
Most college freshmen could probably relate to Penelope, the protagonist of Rebecca Harrington's (Deputy College Editor for the Huffington Post) debut novel. If not, they have definitely met someone like her in their orientation group--someone who seems as though their parents threw them out of the car too quickly during move-in day and they still aren't quite sure where they are, what's going on, or what college even is. For Penelope, college seems to just sort of happen to her. As she maneuvers through the freshman rites of passage (being vomited on at your first party, finding yourself in random dorm rooms with people who have suddenly become your best friends, etc.) Harrington actually normalizes the absolutely ridiculous things that happen when you allow barely legals to live all together. Current college freshman are bound to find many parallels to what they're currently experiencing, and for those of us whose first year of college seems like a chapter out of another life, this book will transport you back to experiences that you have been telling yourself didn't happen, but actually did, and quite frankly should not have.
-Emma van Emmerick, Macalester College '14
We're used to college settings as a backdrop for debauchery and author-zealous incantations of alcohol and sex based "rights" of passage, cringing toward some always indiscernible, slurred stage of independence. Yet the actual and artfully responsible reality of introduction to such otherwise elusive states of change, is what the academic novel seems to want and fails so often to attend. John William's novel Stoner, published by NYRB Classics, achieves the near impossible, braving its own image and concision in a mirror of perfect sentences which, in their self-awareness, appear to come from someone and from nowhere all at once, but seem still destined to describe young William Stoner, the son of poor, dirt-dyed Missouri farmers at the start of a new century, dancing in the light of reassurance from an unexpected source by the prospect of becoming "someone other than he had been," knotted up and soiled with the unnameable ink of "what remain[s] hidden within," a loneliness as bright and inexhaustible as our endeavor to seek knowledge outside of ourselves in the first place, and over time to recognize that motion anywhere as truth.
hits shelves next week, brush off the dust on one of Chabon's earliest acclaimed bestsellers. With a La-Z-Boyish melancholy, alert only to self-destruction, this story of cloudy highs and daylight lows inside a small Pennsylvania university English department bookended by the seemingly washed up Grady Tripp and his alternately reclusive student, James Leer, crackles with the life of a right word at the right time that hasn't happened yet; a shot about to fire. Or so we think. As perhaps do the characters in this dazzlingly empty glass, pot calling the kettle black like struggle between life and death as written in the stars and in the pages of a book. |
Uncommonly Good Books
What We Love
By turns hilarious and touching, Beautiful Ruins asks good questions: how do we do the right thing? Can we make amends? In it, we follow the lives of characters so real and so well drawn, we need to know what becomes of them.
With stories tautly plotted and interwoven, Jess Walter looks at life, that "glorious catastrophe" with a satirical, yet kind and discerning eye.
Read the rest of Common Good Books' Keelin Kane's Good Book of the Week review
 A fellow independent bookseller (featured in Read This!) and staff writer at Rookie, Emma Straub's first novel is an enchanting story of a Midwestern girl who escapes a family tragedy and is remade as a movie star during Hollywood's golden age. Entertainment Weekly gives the book an "A" and calls the book "a stunningly intimate portrayal of one woman's life." As a matter of fact, Straub makes an appearance this month in that other September Issue.
 The 2001 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Macalester College graduate shares here his unique experiences during the terrorist attacks of September 11; the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; the war between Israel, Hizbollah, and Lebanon; the brutal conflicts of Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia; and the geopolitical transformations following the end of the Cold War. With eloquence and unprecedented candor, Interventions finally reveals Annan's unique role and unparalleled perspective on decades of global politics.
It's hard to imagine poetry, an art form capable of losing the collective interest of nearly 38 million people, inciting prompt and adamant response from government authorities. But dissent-stippled rhyme was all the (hurriedly deferred) rage in Pre-Revolutionary France, in the spring of 1749. The truth behind the lines, of course, is much more interesting than meets the eye, or ear. What's more is how it came about. Alas, I'd say more if I could, but this insightful, boldly researched book is like a missing verse to history, an enlightening infiltration of our sense of "modern" social networks, and a sure reification of what distinguishes power from control you'll want to recite for yourself. Read our Good Book of the Week review
A labor of scholarship, devotion and timeliness, Jacques Berlinerblau traces the history of the non-establishment
of religion in the US through the centuries with flashes of humor and refreshing irony, but never fanaticism. Anyone prone to slogans, generalizations and special pleading will have to go elsewhere.
-Elmer Pierre, Customer
Also Available
Zadie Smith's first novel in seven years is the story of the northwest corner of a city full of guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between, "alive with the cacophony of urban life and animated by a vibrant sense of how people live and talk." -The New York Times
In this vivid and compelling memoir, Binyavanga Wainaina tumbles through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. In One Day I Will Write About This Place, named a 2011 New York Times notable book, Wainaina brilliantly evokes family, tribe, and nationhood in "Glimmering, strobe-lit language . . . a complex, cosmopolitan African experience too rarely depicted in books." -GQ  The author of Trainspotting transports us to 1980s Edinburgh: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred, a decade which changed Britain for ever, where the old crew's just getting started. Full of scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour, Skagboys is "Quite simply a masterpiece... as assured and vibrant in its characterization as Trainspotting, and even more on the money politically." -Scotsman Coming Soon 
With all of the complexity and virtue of his previous collection of short stories, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao returns with a perceptive and hysterical, but always true to life look at the many shapes love takes in the guise of the pedestrian. The language, ripe with slang and racial ambiguities, speaks for the street itself, containing in it "multitudes" which question and reintroduce our everyday experience of the human vernacular.
-Bookseller Joe
The End of Men, by Hanna Rosin (9/11), The Oath, by Jeffrey Toobin (9/18), and A Wanted Man, by Lee Child (9/11) Psss! Don't miss Junot Diaz and Jeffrey Toobin in September in conjunction with the Talking Volumes Fall 2012 Season at The Fitz |
The Forces of Common Good Books and Micawber's Unite!
Thirsty for more? Read our interview with Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books and editor of Read This!
An indispensable new volume, with more than 1,000 recommendations from indie-bookstores across the country. It's smart, it's entertaining, and it's the only way to put a bookseller in your pocket, without having to press charges. And while you're at it...
 You can download a brand new episode of Indeed, the book brims with sex, violence, alcohol and descriptions of billiard halls that make shooting an eight ball sound as high and technical an art form as handcrafting violins, but these things act as props rather than plot points, serving insofar as to make Jack Levitt's loneliness as apparent to himself as all the whiskey in the world. At least, that's what I think. Tune in and decide for yourself!
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Get to Know a Bookseller
Molly: The best was when I had to explain what "erotica" was to a woman my mother's age.
Colin: How'd that go?
Molly: I just kind of said the word "erotica" again, but in a whispery voice.
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Common Good Books 38 Snelling Ave S, St Paul, Minnesota 55105
phone 651.225.8989 www.commongoodbooks.com hours Monday-Saturday, 9 - 9 / Sunday, 10 - 7
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