In the store: $33.75 Online: $28.13 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $37.50 Available Now

After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, "Not all pioneers went west." Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life.

In the store: $24.30 Online: $20.24 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $26.99 Available June 7

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina's assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.

In the store: $13.45 Online: $11.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $14.95 Available June 14

"Hilarious!"--David Byrne, father of one

"This is the most honest children's book ever written."--A.J. Jacobs, father of three

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 Now

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

"Each story reads like a mini-novel because the paragraphs pack a punch; worlds are contained in a single page. And the writing ... oh, the writing."--San Francisco Chronicle

Robin Black's short stories are populated with men and women who face losses both real and unexpected. A philandering father learns the limits of his ability to fool his blind daughter about who he is. An artist paints the portrait of a man suffering from dementia while she mourns the end of a long love affair. A fifth grade show-and-tell session reveals the world to be stranger and more dangerous than one girl ever imagined. A father commits suicide on the same day his daughter's bathwater is charged with electricity, leaving her struggling to find meaning in the coincidence. A young widow finds herself envious of an acquaintance who has a prosthetic leg, and a living spouse. A dying woman fantasizes about persuading her selfish, bullying neighbor to see the value of her ebbing life. A mother gains sympathy for her adult daughter's infidelity even as her own world begins to expand in surprising ways. A man whose life is newly filled with love tries to reconnect with the daughter who staged her own disappearance years before. An accident on an Italian holiday and an unexpected connection with a stranger cause a woman to question her lifelong assumptions about herself.

"Ten incisive tales peopled with characters so fully imagined you'll feel they're in the room."--People magazine

Robin Black's stories and essays have appeared One Story, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Southern Review, and the anthology The Best Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Philadelphia.

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

"Why are you so unhappy?" That's the question that Zeke Pappas, a thirty-three-year-old scholar, asks almost everybody he meets as part of an obsessive project, "The Inventory of American Unhappiness." The answers he receives--a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint--create a collage of woe. Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women's magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some "prospects": a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola ("Why not aim high?").

"Dean Bakopoulos is our next great Midwestern writer."--Davy Rothbart, founder and editor of Found Magazine, contributor to public radio's This American Life

A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

Author of the award-winning debut novel Please Don't Come Back from the Moon ("This is a wonderful book."--Charles Baxter), Dean Bakopoulos is the founding director of the Wisconsin Book Festival and a creative writing professor at Iowa State University. He's online at www.deanbakopoulos.com.

In the store: $13.49 Online: $11.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $14.99 Available Now

Every day, women face new challenges that come with having control over and responsibility for their financial lives, and these issues always have an emotional side.

"Here's the book every woman (and most men) need: a clear, thoughtful, and beautifully written guide for how to cope with the myriad emotions caused by money."--Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, author of Aftershock

Psychotherapist Dr. Kate Levinson offers fresh approaches to navigating the astonishing range of beliefs about the role of money in our lives, coming to terms with our feelings about being "rich" or "poor," and exploring our inner money life so that we can put our feelings to work for us in a positive way. By understanding our intimate history and relationship with money we are better able to handle our money anxieties, solve our money problems, enjoy the money we have, and make room for other, more meaningful values.

"This is not just the best book about women and money that I have ever read, it is the best book about money-beautifully written, wise, accessible, practical, and profoundly healing."--Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom

A psychotherapist for more than 25 years, Dr. Kate Levinson currently works with individuals and couples in her private practice in Oakland and is on the supervising and teaching faculty at the Psychotherapy Institute. Dr. Levinson and her husband own Point Reyes Books in Pt. Reyes Station, CA.

In the store: $27.00 Online: $22.50 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $30.00 Available June 7

Get a taste of contemporary Scandinavian literature. Norwegian author Johan Harstad's debut novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion, is a bestseller in eleven countries. He will read from his book at Magers & Quinn Booksellers.

Harstad tells the story of Mattias, a thirtysomething gardener living in Norway whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to humbly work for the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Following a series of personal and professional disasters, Mattias finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the treeless Faroe Islands with a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he got there.

Mattias' odyssey through a world of unconventional psychiatry, souvenir sheep-making, the Cardigans, and the space between himself and other people is a journey as remote and dangerous as the trip to the moon itself.

Paolo Giordano, author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers says, "There's so much music, exuberance, bewilderment and sweet melancholy in Johan Harstad's Buzz Aldrin. It's rock 'n' roll, then heartbreaking, then rock 'n' roll again. I devoured every line."

Johan Harstad is the winner of the 2008 Brage Award (previously won by Per Petterson). He lives in Oslo.

This event is co-sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Honorary Consulate General. The Consulate General in Minneapolis provides consular services for the State of Minnesota. We represent the Norwegian government and serve Norwegian nationals that live in the area. The purpose of our presence is to take care of Norwegian interests ranging from consular services to the individual to promoting Norwegian culture, assisting Norwegian businesses and reporting on political and economic affairs of importance for Norway.

In the store: $11.70 Online: $9.75 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $13.00 Available Now

"Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

Half a Life begins as a personal tale of a tragic event and ends up opening into the story of how our lives are about defining moments, how we are affected by them, how they shape us. It is the true story of how one outing in his father's Oldsmobile resulted in the death of a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author. We follow Strauss as he explores his startling past--the collision, the funeral, the queasy drama of a high-stakes court case--and what starts as a personal tale of a tragic event opens into the story of how to live with a very hard fact: we can try our human best in the crucial moment, and it might not be good enough.

"Darin Strauss' Half a Life is the best anything I've read--novel, memoir, story--in a very long time. Incredibly, it's also the most moving."-David Lipsky, author of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Darin Strauss is the author of the books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and the bestseller More Than It Hurts You. He won the 2010 NBCC Award for Autobiography for his memoir Half a Life. Strauss currently teaches at New York University.

In the store: $23.35 Online: $19.46 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $25.95 Available June 7

"Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious."--Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic and Empire Falls

The Borrower is the story of Lucy Hull, a twenty-six-year-old children's librarian in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, who finds herself both kidknapper and kidknapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home.

Ian is an incredibly bright and quirky boy and obsessed with reading. Although Ian's mother, a strict evangelical, has requested that Lucy censor the books Ian checks out, Lucy slips books to Ian that his mother would never approve of. When Lucy learns that Ian's parents have enrolled him in a weekly "anti-gay" class with celebrity Pastor Bob, she finds Ian stowed-away at the end of the children's fiction aisle, prepared to run away.

Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. What follows is a comical journey that takes the pair from Missouri to Vermont, (via Chicago and Cleveland), but time is running out, and they are being followed.

With clever riffs of famous children's books, including Goodnight Moon, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, sprinkled throughout, The Borrower will delight readers of all ages.

In the store: $23.40 Online: $19.49 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $25.99 Available June 7

Rushmore McKenzie returns with a too-personal case that leads him up Minnesota's Highway 61 in David Housewright's eleventh novel.

Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed P.I. who does favors for friends. Yet he has reservations when his girlfriend's daughter asks him to help her father Jason Truhler, the ex-husband of McKenzie's girlfriend, and a man in serious trouble. En route from St. Paul to a Canadian blues festival on Highway 61, he met a girl, blacked out, and awoke hours later in a strange motel, with the girl's murdered body on the floor. Slipping away unnoticed and heading home, he thought he'd got away--until he started getting texts with photos of the body and demands for blackmail payments he couldn't pay. McKenzie soon finds that Truhler was set up in a modified honey trap, designed to blackmail him. But Truhler's version wasn't exactly the truth either. And McKenzie now finds himself trapped in the middle of a very dangerous game with some of the most powerful men in Minnesota on one side and some of the deadliest on the other.

David Housewright has won the Edgar Award once and two Minnesota Book Awards for his crime fiction. He lives in St. Paul. Learn more at www.davidhousewright.com.

• Sapphire (July 15)
• Lynne Jonell (July 16)
• Donald Ray Pollack (July 19)
• Steve Brezenoff (August 29)

7:30pm, Tuesday, June 21:

• Will Fellows discusses Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s
• Bronson Lemer discusses The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq

• Ryan Van Meter reads from his memoir If You Knew Then What I Know Now
• CM Harris reads from her novel Enter Oblivion

These events are co-sponsored by Quatrefoil Library. Quatrefoil Library is celebrating our 25th Anniversary in 2011. The volunteer-run, non-profit library collects, maintains, documents, and circulates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer materials and information in a safe and accessible space. Quatrefoil's collection includes books, videos, DVDs, and sound recordings, which members may check out, as well as a large collection of non-circulating periodicals. Learn more at www.qlibrary.org.

7:30pm, Tuesday, June 21

In the store: $24.25 Online: $20.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $26.95 Available Now

Will Fellows discusses Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s. Vivacious, unconventional, candid, and straight, Helen Branson operated a gay bar in Los Angeles in the 1950s--America's most anti-gay decade. After years of fending off drunken passes as an entertainer in cocktail bars, this divorced grandmother preferred the wit, variety, and fun she found among homosexual men. Enjoying their companionship and deploring their plight, she gave her gay friends a place to socialize. Though at the time California statutes prohibited homosexuals from gathering in bars, Helen's place was relaxed, suave, and remarkably safe from police raids and other anti-homosexual hazards. In 1957 she published her extraordinary memoir Gay Bar, the first book by a heterosexual to depict the lives of homosexuals with admiration, respect, and love.

Will Fellows interweaves Branson's chapters with historical perspective provided through his own insightful commentary and excerpts gleaned from letters and essays appearing in gay publications of the period. Also included is the original introduction to the book by maverick 1950s psychiatrist Blanche Baker. The eclectic selection of voices gives the flavor of American life in that extraordinary age of anxiety, revealing how gay men saw themselves and their circumstances, and how others perceived them.

In the store: $22.45 Online: $18.21 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $24.95 Available June 8

Bronson Lemer discusses The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq. In 2003, after serving five and a half years as a carpenter in a North Dakota National Guard engineer unit, Bronson Lemer was ready to leave the military behind. But six months short of completing his commitment to the army, Lemer was deployed on a yearlong tour of duty to Iraq. Leaving college life behind in the Midwest, he yearns for a lost love and quietly dreams of a future as an openly gay man outside the military. He discovers that his father's lifelong example of silent strength has taught him much about being a man, and these lessons help him survive in a war zone and to conceal his sexuality, as he is required to do by the U.S. military.

The Last Deployment is a moving, provocative chronicle of one soldier's struggle to reconcile military brotherhood with self-acceptance. Lemer captures the absurd nuances of a soldier's daily life: growing a mustache to disguise his fear, wearing pantyhose to battle sand fleas, and exchanging barbs with Iraqis while driving through Baghdad. But most strikingly, he describes the poignant reality faced by gay servicemen and servicewomen, who must mask their identities while serving a country that disowns them. Often funny, sometimes anguished, The Last Deployment paints a deeply personal portrait of war in the twenty-first century.

7:30pm, Thursday, June 23

In the store: $14.35 Online: $19.96 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.95 Available Now

Ryan Van Meter reads from his memoir If You Knew Then What I Know Now.The middle American coming-of-age has found new life in Ryan Van Meter's coming-out, made as strange as it is familiar by acknowledging the role played by gender and sexuality. In fourteen linked essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy--for bully and bullied alike. A father pitches baseballs at his hapless son and a grandmother watches with silent forbearance as the same slim, quiet boy sets the table dressed in a blue satin dress. Another essay explores origins of the word "faggot" and its etymological connection to "flaming queen." This deft is an argument for the intimate--not the sensational--and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.

"Ryan Van Meter's is both a charming and wounding intelligence. To read a book this observant, this fiercely honest, and this effortlessly beautiful is to feel the very pulse of contemporary American essays."--John D'Agata

Ryan Van Meter grew up in Missouri and currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre.

In the store: $13.50 Online: $13.50 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.00 Available Now

CM Harris reads from her novel Enter Oblivion. CM Harris' novel is the story of Vince, a young, moody boxer from Brooklyn with an oozing bullet wound and a spot awaiting him in the Narducci crime family. When Vince returns travelers' checks he's stolen from a British tourist, he soon finds himself in 1980s London, the epicenter of New Wave culture, unsure whether he will become a rock star, a rent boy, or a laughingstock. Vince's journey brings an awkward friendship with a glamorous drag queen, a stint in a post-punk rock band, a frustrating romance with a Bowie-esque pop star, and bloody quarrels with a misfit skinhead--Vince's own cracked reflection. In this quirky yet charming story of love and family and culture clash, Vince discovers his place in a rapidly changing world.

Magers & Quinn and Minneapolis College of Art and Design are teaming up to help you get smart--and save some money. M&Q newsletter subscribers are elligible for $25.00 off any adult education course at MCAD this summer. Just mention the discount code "MQDeal" when you register. (Limit one redemption per student. Offer is valid until July 31, 2011.)

MCAD offers hundreds of courses, of course. Two particularly bookish ones are

• In a Bind: Introduction to Book Binding
  Have you ever wanted to make your own sketchbooks, journals, or idea books? Adding the element of handmade paper makes them even more unique. In this course, students will learn a variety of binding techniques to do just that. We will begin with simple structures held together with folds and stitches. No previous experience necessary.
• Children's Book Illustration
  Capture a child's imagination with your own original artwork while learning the tricks of the illustration trade. This course will explore the wide range of children's book illustration, from traditional to contemporary. Students will learn what makes a children's book unique, how to communicate through illustration, and how to conceptualize and storyboard ideas. Demonstrations will be given on materials that can be used to illustrate a book. Students will then be encouraged to experiment with different media and begin to create their own children's books, from the sketch phase to final illustrations. Tips will be given on how to enter this competitive field and navigate the business practices of working as a children's book illustrator.

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

"A magical novel. Heartbreaking and oh so true, the voices of these characters, their lives and struggles will stay with you long after you reluctantly come to the end."--Robert Hicks, New York Times-bestselling author of The Widow of the South