In the store: $14.40 Online: $12.00 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $16.00 Available Now

Discover the advantages of having sheep as the planet's "self-propelled lawn mowers" and the scary truth behind "wrinkle free" clothing as Catherine Friend reveals what it really means to be sheepish--and why it might not be such a bad thing after all.

What do you do when you love your farm... but it doesn't love you? After fifteen years of farming, Catherine Friend is tired. After all, while shepherding is one of the oldest professions, it's not getting any easier. The number of sheep in America has fallen by 90 percent in the last ninety years. But just as Catherine thinks it's time to hang up her shepherd's crook, she discovers that sheep might be too valuable to give up. What ensues is a funny, thoughtful romp through the history of our woolly friends, why small farms are important, and how each one of us-and the planet-would benefit from being very sheepish, indeed.

"Fans of Hit by a Farm will get another dose of Catherine Friend's signature wit and moxie with Sheepish, as she faces a rough patch on the farm, but still manages to be hilarious. In the end, Friend's enthusiasm will make you want to raise sheep, or at least wear wool undies."--Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

Catherine Friend is the author of Hit by a Farm and The Compassionate Carnivore, as well as seven children's books and three novels. She farms in Minnesota with her partner of twenty-seven years.

In the store: $21.60 Online: $18.00 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $24.00 Available Now

The inspiration for The Bird Sisters came to Rebecca Rasmussen while reading her grandmother Kit's journals. Kit lost both her parents at age 17 just after a crisis revealed the failings in their marriage. As she grew older, she grew away from her only sister, Virginia. This novel is Rasmussen's imaginings of what could have been, had Kit and Virginia learned to cling to each other rather than turn away.

"The Bird Sisters is that immensely satisfying combination of indelible characters and a suspenseful and cunningly revealed plot. ...Full of wonderful surprises, The Bird Sisters is a splendid debut that will stay with the reader long after the last page."--Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

Milly and Twiss weren't always two old spinsters known to everyone in Spring Green, Wisconsin as the Bird Sisters. There was a time when people called Milly "Goldilocks" because of her beautiful hair, and Twiss played Lewis and Clark on the course with her golf-pro father. Rebecca Rasmussen's masterfully written debut novel, The Bird Sisters, takes readers though the routines of a single day in the lives of these elderly sisters, from waking up in their childhood beds to sharing a glass of ice tea on the porch of the wind-worn house they grew up in. Their minds are fixed on the summer of 1947, the summer their Cousin Bett came down from Deadwater, Minnesota to stay and nothing was ever the same again. The two narratives twist and turn like the Wisconsin River, ultimately revealing how the sisters' hearts came to be broken and why they have spent their lives healing birds and sometimes people.

"Rebecca Rasmussen's gorgeous debut is infused with a certain grace: there remains hope that damaged things, wild or tame, can still be nursed back together again."--Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

Rebecca Rasmussen teaches creative writing and literature at Fontbonne University. Her stories have appeared in Triquarterly magazine and the Mid-American Review. She was a finalist in both Narrative magazine's 30 Below Contest for writers under the age of thirty and Glimmer Train's Family Matters Contest. She lives with her husband and daughter in St. Louis.

In the store: $16.20 Online: $13.50 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $18.00 Available Now

Minnesota music history comes alive at M&Q when rock's preeminent historian sits down with a local legend to discuss Bob Dylan.

Previously published as Invisible Republic and already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism, The Old, Weird America is Greil Marcus's widely acclaimed book on the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967--a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was more than thirty years ago.

As Mark Sinker observed in The Wire: "Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse, and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock, are where that community as a whole gets to speak." But the country mapped out in this book, as Bruce Shapiro wrote in The Nation, "is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me... It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America.'" This odd terrain, this strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history--which Luc Sante (in New York magazine) termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"--is the territory that Marcus has discovered in Dyaln's most mysterious music. And his analysis of that territory "reads like a thriller" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly) and exhibits "a mad, sparkling brilliance" (David Remnick, The New Yorker) throughout.

"Marcus draws bold freehand loops around Dylan's music, loops so wide and loose that they take in not just the breadth of American folk music, but huge chunks of American history as well. This is the best kind of history book, one that acknowledges that mythology is sometimes the truest kind of fact."--Stephanie Zachareck, Newsday

One of America's most original and incisive critics of pop music and pop culture, Greil Marcus is the author of Double Trouble, Lipstick Traces, and Mystery Train. He lives in Berkeley, California.

In the store: $11.65 Online: $26.10 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $29.00 Available May 17

From director and author John Sayles comes a monumental new novel--968 pages--set at the dawn of the twentieth century.

It's 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall both Doctorow and Deadwood, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights--from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women--Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country's new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley's assassin among them.

Traveling from the Yukon gold fields, to New York's bustling Newspaper Row, to Wilmington's deadly racial coup of 1898, to the bitter triumphs at El Caney and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and to war zones in the Philippines, A Moment in the Sun is a book as big as history itself.

In the store: $14.40 Online: $12.00 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $16.00 Available June 1

Milkweed Editions brings a new literary voice to the Twin Cities.

Neil Fox has made a fortune off the "head we win/tails you lose" venture capital deals negotiated by his brother, costing him almost everything but money. His ex-wife and daughter spurn him, and he lost his young son. He now lives a carefully plotted life, working as a lawyer at a small investment banking firm and spending nights at home with a drink.

When the affable Bud Younger moves in next door--on a parcel that Neil had sold off-Neil takes an almost instant dislike to him. Bud is nearly everything Neil is not--a gregarious, energetic striver loved by his intact family. When Bud asks Neil to fund a new business venture, he reluctantly accepts, setting in motion events that hurtle to a startling and haunting conclusion.

A rock-star line-up of writers comes to Magers & Quinn. It's a triple bill of great authors--with no cover charge.

In the store: $14.35 Online: $11.96 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.95 Available May 31

Yoga stalkers, guns and gold, babies with iron stomachs, drunkards with t-shirt cannons, and warlocks--lots of warlocks-populate John Jodzio's latest short story, "Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever." It's one of five pieces of flash fiction in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves from Rose Metal Press.

John Jodzio is the author of If You Lived Here, You'd Already Be Home and a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in McSweeneys, One Story, Opium, The Florida Review, and Rake. He's won a Minnesota Magazine fiction. More information is available at www.johnjodzio.net.

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Dessa is a Minneapolis musician and writer. Spiral Bound, her collection of essays and poetry, was dubbed a "dazzling literary debut" by the City Pages and "witty and desperately honest" by Alive Magazine.

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In the store: $14.35 Online: $11.96 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.95 Available Now

What would have become of Nick Adams if he'd been born along the ragged edges of a new American city, one with more churches per capita than any other, and twice the suicide rate? Meet Nick Danze, the main character of David Philip Mullins's vital debut collection, Greetings from Below. In these stories, Danze prowls Vegas, with its gilded casinos, neon-tinted suburbs, and dingy, outer-ring strip clubs. He visits a swingers' club on Christmas Eve, obsesses over obese middle-aged women, and meets the love of his life, Annie, only he's not sure he loves her and he's compulsively unfaithful.

In the store: $14.40 Online: $12.00 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $16.00 Available June 1

James Wallenstein reads from The Arriviste, followed by a moderated discussion between Wallenstein and his editor at Milkweed Editions, Ben Barnhart.The two will talk about the collaborative process between author and editor, publishing a debut novel in the current reading climate, and what really goes on between the time when a book is bought and when it is published. Crowd participation is encouraged, and refreshments will be served.

The Arriviste is Wallenstein's first novel Neil Fox has made a fortune off the "head we win/tails you lose" venture capital deals negotiated by his brother, costing him almost everything but money. His ex-wife and daughter spurn him, and he lost his young son. He now lives a carefully plotted life, working as a lawyer at a small investment banking firm and spending nights at home with a drink.

When the affable Bud Younger moves in next door--on a parcel that Neil had sold off--Neil takes an almost instant dislike to him. Bud is nearly everything Neil is not--a gregarious, energetic striver loved by his intact family. When Bud asks Neil to fund a new business venture, he reluctantly accepts, setting in motion events that hurtle to a startling and haunting conclusion.

• Dean Bakopoulos (June 8)
• Darin Strauss (June 22)
• Sapphire (July 15)
• Lynne Jonell (July 16)
• Donald Ray Pollack (July 19)
• Steve Brezenoff (August 29)

In the store: $13.45 Online: $11.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $14.95 Available Now

Not to be outdone, David Thorne, creator of the hilarious website www.27bslash6.com and author of The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius, is sending a few of his own gorgeous tresses around the country. The locks will be at Magers & Quinn from June 1 to 5. Stop by, have your picture taken with the hair, and donate a dollar to the National Children's Cancer Society. Everybody wins.

• Magers & Quinn Booksellers
• Secrets of the City--the daily digest of Twin Cities culture
• duplex restaurant.bar

Congratulations to Marquita Jaeger. She won our first drawing for a Book Club Bag, donated by Algonquin Press. In addition to the bag, Marquita received four books to read and discuss

• The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow
• Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt
• A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell
• A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

In the store: $13.45 Online: $11.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $14.95 Available Now

"Pitch perfect. . . . Is there anything Egan can't do in this mash-up of forms? Write successfully in the second person? Check. Parody celebrity journalism and David Foster Wallace at the same time? Check. Make a moving narrative out of a PowerPoint presentation? Check. . . . Although shredded with loss, A Visit From the Goon Squad is often darkly, rippingly funny. Egan possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart. . . . No one is beyond the pale of her affection; no one is spared lampooning."--Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

Oh, yeah, and it won the Pulitzer Prize this year.