October 2010 - Vol 5, Issue 3
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Fall is a busy time for bookish people. Publishers are bringing out their best new wares to tempt you as you plan for the book-filled winter nights ahead. This month we've gathered together some excellent suggestions for your consideration.

We're also bringing you news you can use:

  • Will Weaver visits M&Q on October 13
  • Walter Mondale will read from his new memoir on October 14 at the Westminster Town Hall Forum
  • Lee Sandlin tells you the Mississippi River history you won't find in Mark Twain when he reads at M&Q on October 25
  • and Books & Bars starts a new series of meetings at the Aster Cafe
Walter Mondale is one of America's most distinguished public servants. Born and raised in Minnesota, he holds a doctor of jurisprudence from the University of Minnesota Law School. He served the people of this state as Attorney General and U. S. Senator. He was elected Vice President of the United States in 1976 and has been recognized as one of the most effective vice presidents in American history. In 1993, he was appointed Ambassador to Japan by President Bill Clinton. His years of service are captured in his new political autobiography, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics.

Walter Mondale will launch his new book at the Westminster Town Hall Forum on Thursday, October 14, with a reading and Q&A at noon in the beautiful Westminster Presbyterian Church, at Nicollet Mall and 12th Street, in downtown Minneapolis. A public reception and small group discussion will follow the forum from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Town Hall Forums are also broadcast on the News and Information stations of Minnesota Public Radio.

Seating can be reserved for groups of 25 or more by calling the Town Hall Forum at 612-332-3421. Convenient parking is available across the street from Westminster at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Nicollet Mall and 13th Street, and at Orchestra Hall Ramp, Marquette Avenue and 11th Street.
M&Q is unpacking hundreds of great books for the fall. Here are just a few of them.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

In the store: $22.99
Online: $19.79 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $21.99
Available Now
Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life.

In "The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck," three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In "Hello Kitty," a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk," a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members.

Once again David Sedaris shows us the most outrageous, tender, absurd sides of ourselves in his "profoundly funny, well-crafted stories that somehow, magically, bring home a major point about fidelity or guilt or love"--Christian Science Monitor

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

In the store: $22.50
Online: $18.75 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $25.00
Available Now
Peter and Rebecca Harris are a mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts; he is a dealer, she is an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca's much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in thefamily as Mizzy, "the mistake"), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career--the entire world he has so carefully constructed.

Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.

Bound by Antonya Nelson

In the store: $22.50
Online: $18.75 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $25.00
Available Now
Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson's most accomplished and emotionally riveting work.

Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.

In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence

Room by Emma Donoghue

In the store: $22.49
Online: $18.74 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $24.99
Available Now
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

In the store: $22.45
Online: $18.71 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $24.95
Available Now
For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending her life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost fifty years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father's Budapest study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944.

These worlds are anchored by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. In the minds of those it has belonged to, the desk comes to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world-children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations. Nicole Krauss has written a hauntingly powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

In the store: $35.99
Online: $30.00 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $40.00
Available Now
In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president.

Despite the reverence his name inspires, Washington remains a lifeless waxwork for many Americans, worthy but dull. A laconic man of granite self-control, he often arouses more respect than affection. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow dashes forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional man. A strapping six feet, Washington was a celebrated horseman, elegant dancer, and tireless hunter, with a fiercely guarded emotional life. Chernow brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods. Probing his private life, he explores his fraught relationship with his crusty mother, his youthful infatuation with the married Sally Fairfax, and his often conflicted feelings toward his adopted children and grandchildren. He also provides a lavishly detailed portrait of his marriage to Martha and his complex behavior as a slave master.

In this unique biography, Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. With a dramatic sweep worthy of its giant subject, Washington is a magisterial work from one of our most elegant storytellers.
October's Events
Friday, October 8 Adam Golaski (Color Plates), John Cotter (Under the Small Lights), and Alan De Niro (Total Oblivion, More or Less), 7:30pm

Saturday, October 9, John Tottenham and Brian Beatty read from their new poetry, 7:30pm

Sunday, October 10 Ann Mullaney discusses the poetry of Teofilo Baldo, 4:00pm

Tuesday, October 12 Peter Smith reads from A Porch Sofa Almanac, 7:30pm

Wednesday, October 13 Will Weaver reads from The Last Hunter: An American Family Album, 7:30pm

Thursday, October 14 Walter Mondale discusses his memoir The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, 12:00pm at the Westminster Town Hall Forum, 1200 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis

Thursday, October 14 Jeanne Lemkau reads from Lost and Found in Cuba, 7:30pm

Friday, October 15 Sara Marcus discusses Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution; she will be introduced by Laurie Lindeen, author of Petal Pusher, 7:30pm

Saturday, October 16 Twin Cities Book Festival; visit raintaxi.com/bookfest for details.

Monday, October 18 Peter Geye reads from Safe from the Sea, 7:30pm

Tuesday, October 19, Jacob Paul reads from Sarah/Sara

Sunday, October 24 Laurie Ellis-Young discusses Friendship: The Art of Practice, 4:00pm

Monday, October 25 Lee Sandlin discusses Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, 7:30pm

Tuesday, October 26 The Big Bang Book Club discusses Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries, 7:00pm at duplex, 2516 Hennepin Ave S, Minneapolis, 7:00pm

Monday, November 1 Mary Westra discusses After the Murder of My Son, 7:30pm

Tuesday, November 2 Bruce Machart reads from Wake of Forgiveness, 7:30pm

Visit www.magersandquinn.com
for details on all our upcoming events.

Tuesday, October 12, 7:30pm--Peter Smith reads from A Porch Sofa Almanac

In the store: $15.25
Online: $12.71 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $16.95
Available Now
Peter Smith lives in Hopkins, Minnesota. He is a weekly contributor to Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Edition with Cathy Wurzer. A Porch Sofa Almanac is the first collection of Smith's essays for MPR--stories that keep close to the ground and reflect on the common experiences of being a Minnesotan: small-town football, stacks of Hudson's Bay blankets in an antique store, ice fishing, and even those soggy gloves that emerge from melting snowbanks each spring. Following the calendar year, Smith's reflections are the perfect season-by-season companion for that chair by the fireplace, a bench by the campfire, a seat on the bus or train--or, of course, a porch sofa. A Porch Sofa Almanac is a hilarious, often wry, and always remarkable portrait of everyday life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes that will resonate with Minnesotans from the state's biggest cities to its smallest towns.

"In his wonderful new book Peter Smith has assembled a year's worth of short pieces that prove the true power of story lies not in the ability to reveal but to conjure. In Peter's world we are verbs not nouns, always changing, living, experiencing, and yet like the seasons, bound to come around again. These little gems, or at times more like Pop Rocks, burst forth; we belong."--Kevin Kling

Wednesday, October 13, 7:30pm--Will Weaver reads from The Last Hunter: An American Family Album

In the store: $22.45
Online: $18.71 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $24.95
Available Now
Minnesota's Will Weaver has been a hunter since he was a young boy, following in the footsteps of his father, a dedicated and seasoned outdoorsman. As he writes in The Last Hunter, "in the fall, when Canada geese came through and when partridge season opened, [we] heard the far-off thudding report of shotguns--and in November the heavier poom-poom! of deer rifles." Hunting frames Weaver's childhood memories, his relationship with his father, and his own definition of self. And although one side of his family lineage includes men who would not hunt, or go to war, or carry a rifle, Weaver is caught off guard when his son and daughter show no interest in upholding the tradition of the hunt.

"Weaver . . . is a writer of uncommon natural talent. He's that rare Real Thing,a writer writing eloquently, often between the lines but always with an undertow of passion about what he knows, where he lives, what he's been through."--Los Angeles Times

Will Weaver is a writer of many books, including Red Earth, White Earth; Sweet Land: New & Selected Stories; and Full Service, one of several of his award-winning young adult novels. An avid outdoorsman, Weaver lives with his wife in Bemidji. Visit www.willweaverbooks.com for more information.

Friday, October 15, 7:30pm--Sara Marcus discusses Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

In the store: $13.45
Online: $11.24 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $14.99
Available Now
Sara Marcus discusses Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. She will be joined by local musician Laurie Lindeen, author of Petal Pusher.

"Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front is a great & true & real history. Thank God. At last."--Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Cool For You

Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of Riot Grrrl--the radical feminist uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s and included incendiary punk bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. A dynamic chronicle not just a movement but an era, this is the story of a group of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet.

"For a Second Wave feminist like myself, Girls to the Front evokes wonderfully the way the generation after mine soaked up the promise and the punishment of feminist consciousness: all in all, a richly moving story."--Vivian Gornick

Monday, October 18, 7:30pm--Peter Geye reads from Safe from the Sea

In the store: $22.45
Online: $18.71 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $24.95
Available October 15
Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other.

"Peter Geye has caught the essence of Minnesota's exotic and remote North Shore of Lake Superior juxtaposed with a story of the poignant struggle between adult children and elderly parents."--Anita Zager, Northern Lights Bookstore, Duluth, MN

Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PHD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. He was born and raised in Minneapolis and continues to live there with his wife and three children. Safe from the Sea is his first novel.

Wednesday, October 27, 7:30pm--Lee Sandlin discusses Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild

In the store: $23.99
Online: $20.21 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $26.95
Available October 19
"A gripping book that plunges you into a rich dark stretch of visceral history. I read it in two sittings and got up shaken."--Garrison Keillor

"What a wickedly wild ride of a read! I loved this book!"--William Kent Krueger, author of Heaven's Keep

Wicked River is a riveting look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America's historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River takes us back to a time before the Mississippi was dredged into a shipping channel, and before Mark Twain romanticized it into myth.

Drawing on an array of suspenseful and bizarre firsthand accounts, Lee Sandlin brings to life a place where river pirates brushed elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries shared passage with thieves--a world unto itself where, every night, near the levees of the big river towns, hundreds of boats gathered to form dusk-to-dawn cities dedicated to music, drinking, and gambling. Here is a minute-by-minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor being crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; and the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. And here is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, and unpredictable, lifeblood to the communities that rose and fell along its banks.

Tuesday, November 2, 7:30pm--Bruce Machart reads from The Wake of Forgiveness

In the store: $23.40
Online: $19.50 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $26.00
Available October 21
Bruce Machart's striking debut is a stunning novel that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy's fiction, with its crushingly tyrannical father and stark, sparse Texas landscape. This story grabs you by the throat from its first words and refuses to let go. In Machart's hands, frontier Texas is as unforgettable a character as are the Czech and Mexican immigrants who live there. And as the title promises, this is ultimately a very American story of redemption.

"The prose is polished and evocative, the physicality of rural Texas in the year 1910 shimmers with loving exactitude, and the story of Karel Skala is a gripping American drama of misplaced guilt, familial struggle, and a search for identity. ... What a fine, rich, absorbing book."--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

From an early age young Karel proves so talented on horseback that his father enlists him to ride a high-stakes race against a powerful Spanish patriarch and his alluring daughters. Hanging in the balance are his father's fortune, his brother's futures, and Karel's own fate. Fourteen years later, with the stake of the race still driven hard between him and his brothers, Karel is finally forced to dress the wounds of his past and to salvage the tattered fabric of his family.


To learn more about these and all our readings at Magers & Quinn, please visit our events page at magersandquinn.com.
In the store: $7.99
Near New Condition
Online: $7.99 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $13.99
Available Now
A stage adaptation of the best-selling novel by Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club is onstage now at the Guthrie Theater; tickets are available here. The play chronicles the intersecting lives of German immigrant and butcher Fidelis and sideshow performer Delphine as they settle into the small town of Argus, North Dakota. Bookended by the two World Wars and set against a tapestry of song, this moving story traces the bond between a mother and her child, the boundless friendship between two women, and one's life-changing discovery of true love.

Magers & Quinn has copies of Louise Erdrich's novel for the bargain price of only $7.99. Pick up a copy before you see the play, or buy several for your book club to discuss.
The Big Bang Book Club is a science book club for non-scientists. Our next meeting will be 7:00pm, Tuesday, October 26, at duplex restaurant.bar, 2516 Hennepin Ave S, in Minneapolis.

In the store: $14.35
Online: $11.96 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $15.95
Available Now
October's book is Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries. Colette Brooks reviews some of the most important discoveries and innovations from the last five centuries. Through a series of "thought experiments," she also encourages the reader to become immersed in the twists, turns, and surprises of each scientific leap forward.

The Big Bang Book Club mixes arts and science into a heady brew. It is sponsored by

Several of the year's bestsellers are out now in paperback. Check out our front table for these and many, many more good books.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

In the store: $14.40
Online: $12.00 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $16.00
Available Now
"Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all . . . . This is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears."--Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

In the store: $13.50
Online: $11.25 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $15.00
Available Now
The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace and Neal Stephenson

In the store: $14.35
Online: $11.96 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $15.95
Available Now
"[Wallace] brings to his task a refreshingly conversational style as well as a surprisingly authoritative command of mathematics. . . . A success."--John Allen Paulos, in the American Scholar

s infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and characteristic bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there was more than one kind of infinity. Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

In the store: $14.35
Online: $11.96 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $15.95
Available Now
Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.

Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman's own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman's wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman's name to promote his administration's foreign policy. Long after Tillman's nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had "probably" been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.

In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman's journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death.
In the store: $25.20
Online: $21.00 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $28.00
Available
Amid the massive coverage of Jonathan Franzen--the Oprah drama, the kidnapped eyeglasses, even the homegrown publicity stunts--it's easy to overlook an important fact about his latest novel: it's really good. We've been passing our promotional copy around among employees, and everyone loves the book.

"Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, like his previous one, The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction . . . Freedom is a still richer and deeper work--less glittering on its surface but more confident in its method . . . Like all great novels, Freedom does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew."--Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times Book Review

Find out for yourself. Copies of Freedom are available now. Get yours soon.

The tenth annual Twin Cities Book Festival will be Saturday, October 16. Plan now to attend the festivities at the Minneapolis Community & Technical College. The doors open at 10:00am.

In the store: $22.45
Online: $18.71 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $24.95
Available October 12
Among this years literary luminaries will be Alexander McCall Smith. He'll be signing copies of his latest book The Charming Quirks of Others. Isabel has been asked for her help in a rather tricky situation: A successor is being sought for the headmaster at a local boys' school. The board has three final candidates but has received an anonymous letter alleging that one of them has a very serious skeleton in the closet. Could Isabel discreetly look into it? And so she does. What she discovers about all the candidates is surprising, but what she discovers about herself and about Jamie, the father of her young son, turns out to be equally revealing. Isabel's investigation will have her exploring issues of ambition, as well as of charity, forgiveness, and humility, as she moves nearer and nearer to some of the most hidden precincts of the heart. Here is Isabel Dalhousie at her beguiling best: intelligent, insightful, and with a unique understanding of the quirks of human nature.

The full list of authors and events is available at www.raintaxi.com.
Books & Bars is now twice as good. You can attend a meeting at Bryant-Lake Bowl in Uptown... or starting this month, you can visit the Aster Cafe in St Anthony Main for an extra dose of literary fun.

Books & Bars at Bryant-Lake Bowl

In the store: $13.50
Online: $11.25 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $15.00
Available Now
Books & Bars--the Twin Cities' most unusual and interesting book club--meets Tuesday, October 12 at Bryant-Lake Bowl, 810 W Lake Street, in Minneapolis. Doors open at 6:00pm; the discussion begins at 7:00pm.

October's first book is This Is Where I Leave You by Jake Troppper. The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman clan has congregated in years. There is, however, one conspicuous absence: Judd's wife, Jen, whose affair with his radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the demise of his father and his marriage, Judd joins his dysfunctional family as they reluctantly sit shiva-and spend seven days and nights under the same roof. The week quickly spins out of control as longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed and old passions are reawakened. Then Jen delivers the clincher: she's pregnant.

Books & Bars At the Aster Cafe

In the store: $11.65
Online: $11.65 (plus S/H)
Publisher's price: $12.95
Available Now
Books & Bars is starting a new series of meetings at the Aster Cafe (125 SE Main Street, in St Anthony Main). Tuesday, October 26, they'll be discussing John Jodzio's book If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home--with the author himself. As always, doors open at 6:00pm; the discussion begins at 7:00pm. Call 612/379-3138 for reservations.

In twenty-one brief, funny stories, If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home tells of his characters' disappointment, frustration, and longing for a home that seems forever out of reach. By turns bleak and hopeful, cruel and tender, this is an exciting literary debut by a writer to watch.

"You may think you've read enough stories about penniless gay clowns who can't get over the loss of a dog, but--I assure you--you have not. John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new."--Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Books & Bars is not your typical book club. We provide a unique atmosphere for a lively discussion of interesting authors, fun people, good food and drinks. You're welcome even if you haven't read the book.

Magers & Quinn is the largest independent bookstore in the Twin Cities. Stop in today or check our inventory on our website any time.

We'll be back next month with more great book news.

Until then,
David Enyeart
Magers and Quinn Booksellers

Call us: 612/822-4611
Or visit our website: http://www.magersandquinn.com
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