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October
Special
This month, all
Mystery, Horror, and True Crime books are 20% off!
Don't miss out on our other specials! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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Our mega-sale is back, and it's bigger than ever! Join us at our new warehouse in Lincoln Park for your choice of more than 20,000 prime used books!
October 15 & 16 10 am to 4 pm Kids' & Softcovers $2 Hardcovers $3 Full Box $30
CASH ONLY
FREE Member Preview October 15, 8-10 am Have books to donate? Bring them with you! |
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Cuban Childhood
Chicago businesswoman Maria Martinez Aenlle will read from her debut book Cuban Stories: About People, Terraces, Food, Revolution, and Good-byes.
As a child in suburban Havana in the 1950s, Maria knew Cuba before and at the beginning of the Revolution. Join us!
October 13
6 pm
FREE
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Out of the Box: Weird and Wacky,
Halloween Edition
It cannot be denied that there is a fall chill in the air and Halloween is fast approaching! Therefore, there is no time like the present for a very special Halloween-themed edition of our exciting blog series Out of the Box: Weird and Wacky!
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October
Storytimes!
Join us this month for three fantastic storytimes!
October 8
11 am
with
Emerald City Theatre
October 20
11 am
with
More than Milk
October 30
1 pm
with
Blackbird Puppets
FREE
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New Face in the Store!
Please allow us to introduce our newest store intern, Anne! Read her "Intern Oath of Office" and give her a warm welcome!
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Upcoming Volunteer Orientations
Have a passion for reading? Spread the love! Volunteers needed in our literacy programs citywide.
Sign up now to join us at our next volunteer orientation!
October 20
6-7 pm
November 11
12-1 pm
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Quick Links
  
 
 | There's more fun where this came from! Check out our previous newsletters.
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"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul."
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Dear Friends of Open Books,
Halloween is a time for frights and scares, but there are few things scarier than knowing that easy access to books is not a certainty for the city's residents. With Borders' liquidation, there are roughly only 45 bookstores in the city limits. This number includes 4 bookstores which almost exclusively sell textbooks, 7 located in airports and accessible only by ticketed airline passengers, and various specialty stores. Not only are bookstores becoming more scarce, but these losses are happening at the same time that the Chicago Public Library system is facing budget cuts.
This October, while making room for your Halloween spiderwebs and tombstones, perhaps you'll find some forgotten books waiting for a good home. Consider donating them to Open Books so we can continue serving Chicago's youth through our literacy programs. Together, we can make Chicago a place where children and adults love to read and where they can easily find the next book that stirs their soul. Happy Halloween!
Sincerely,
Kevin and Lizzy
Bookstore Team
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Book Your Trip: Revelry 2011, Open Books' signature gala event, is ready to drop anchor Friday, November 4th at Catalyst Ranch. Entry includes fabulous food, astounding auctions, lively music, and a variety of eclectic entertainment including the following awesome activities:
Mega-Magnetic Poetry: Don't be averse to sharing your verse! Play with the larger-than-life Mega-Magnetic Poetry wall to leave a lyric, rhyme, or ditty for your fellow travelers.
Super-Size Scrabble: Display your deftness with diction at this super-sized version of the classic word game.
Sightseeing Snapshots: Capture a Kodak moment for your scrapbook! Take a souvenir photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, on a vintage cruise ship, in a hot air balloon, or in another exotic locale, all without leaving the Revelry.
Whopping Word Search: If solving a standard word search puzzle improves vocabulary, memory, and problem-solving skills, we can't wait to see the impact that finding words on the enormous wall-sized Whopping Word Search will have!
Passport Tour: No trip is complete without a walking tour! Hit all the highlights and mark your passport with where you've been. Collect at least 3 stamps to get a free Revelry Raffle ticket!
Don't delay: buy your tickets today!
All proceeds from Book Your Trip: Revelry 2011
support Open Books' literacy programs.
Can't make it to the Revelry, but still want to support the event? Purchase a raffle ticket for your chance to win round-trip airfare and 2 nights at the Ritz-Carlton, South Beach! |
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Open Books Welcomes:
Meghan O'Rourke
Open Books is proud to welcome nationally renowned literary critic, poet, and essayist Meghan O'Rourke for a reading and discussion of her newest book,The Long Goodbye: A Memoir of Grief. The memoir has its origins in O'Rourke's 2009 series of columns for Slate in which she chronicled her real-time grief of her mother's death to cancer on Christmas 2008.
"What I didn't want the book to be," O'Rourke says, "was just an account of my suffering that pretends it's important simply because I suffered. I wanted to write a book about how writing, how the act of making, is redemptive. But I felt that the honest act of making was intimate and raw." Ultimately, she wrote the book she needed available to her, but which did not exist.
In addition to the intimate and introspective handling of her specific experiences, O'Rourke tackles our current culture of grief, questioning our age's ability to provide healthy expressions of grief. She calls grief "the last taboo" because, she says, "it seems to me that Americans are very uncomfortable around the topic of death. I mean, it's understandable. Who wants to think about it? And yet if we don't, we're cutting ourselves off from a huge part of our human legacy." She also dethrones, at least for her, the traditional five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance: "After my mother died people kept mentioning the stages to me. Or they would say, 'You must be very angry.' The truth was, I had moments of being angry...but that was not my dominant emotion. The dominant emotion was yearning. I didn't know what my place in the world was anymore. I was more sad than angry."
Join us for an intimate conversation with the author, followed by a discussion and the opportunity to have your copy of The Long Goodbye signed by Meghan herself.
October 26 7 pm FREE Refreshments Will Be Served Copies of The Long Goodbye are now available for purchase at the Open Books store! |
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Open Book Club: October
This month, we're reading The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow.
The novel follows Depression-era Everyman (and perhaps anti-hero?) Augie March as he grows up in Chicago with his brothers and single mother, and meanders his way through a variety of jobs (many of them on the dark edges of society), women, and circumstance.
Check out our blog to see the list of questions we'll use for our discussion, then mark your calendars to join us -- no RSVP required!
October 11
6 pm
FREE
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Introducing Wĭt Rabbit Reading Series
Chicago's newest recurring reading series is calling Open Books home! Wĭt Rabbit (pronounced white) is an inter-genre reading series devoted to showcasing new poetry, fiction, and drama from the city's best and brightest writers.
Wĭt Rabbit will feature 3 new talented readers each month. The November lineup includes poets Tyler Mills and Anthony Madrid. Learn more about Wit Rabbit and how to submit work by visiting their Facebook page or emailing RareWitRareBit@gmail.com.
First Tuesdays of the Month
Launching November 1
7:30-8:30
FREE
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Open Books is a nonprofit social venture that operates an extraordinary bookstore, provides community programs, and mobilizes passionate volunteers to promote literacy in Chicago and beyond. We enhance lives through reading, writing, and the STORED-UP power of used books. The store is conveniently located at 213 W. Institute Pl. in River North, 1 block north of the Chicago/Franklin Brown/Purple stop, and is open Monday - Saturday from 10am - 7pm
and Sunday from 12noon - 6pm.
Learn more about it at http://www.open-books.org/store! |
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