"The World's Fastest Novelist" Burt Levy visits M&Q to read from his books, spin yarns, and sign copies of all his books.

Burt Levy's books--The Last Open Road, Montezuma's Ferrari, The Fabulous Trashwagon, Toly's Ghost, The 200MPH Steamroller, and The Potside Companion--"transport the reader to the summer of 1952," says Vintage Motorsport magazine. Burt's hilarious series of novels follow 19-year-old, blue-collar gas station mechanic Buddy Palumbo as he is swept up in the dangerous, glamorous, upper-crust world of open-road sportscar racing during the Eisenhower fifties. His exploits chronicle one of the most dangerous and glamorous eras in auto racing.

In the store:$19.95 Online (plus S/H): $14.99 Publisher's price: $19.95 Available Now

Author Jill Breckenridge tells the story of her charismatic yet wildly unreliable father, whose pursuit of that elusive "big deal" led to financial disaster and a prison term. Miss Priss and the Con Man is a tale of silver mines, movie stars, booze, and violence, told from the perspective of the little girl who lived through it all.

"You won't want to climb down from the horse during this wild and wonderful ride across the landscape of the West. I was moved to tears and laughter by Breckenridge's account of growing up in a fervidly dysfunctional family and struggling toward understanding and forgiveness, all told without a moment of self-pity or self-congratulation."--Faith Sullivan, author of The Cape Ann

"In Miss Priss and the Con Man, Jill Breckenridge brings her counselor's insight, her poet's voice and a daughter's love to her tales of growing up in what seems like a truly wild West. And she is up to the role too, of heroine, in a place and a time filled with shysters and horses, and booze that never stops flowing. Would that every con man had a Miss Priss to tell his story."--Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World

Jill Breckenridge is the author of The Gravity of Flesh and How to Be Lucky. She is a former director of The Loft Literary Center, where she began the Mentor Series, a program in which nationally known writers work with local writers. Today, Jill shares her life with playwright, John Fenn, in Minneapolis, where they raised a combined family of five children and two dogs, sundry cats, snakes, lizards, and guinea pigs. Learn more at www.jillbreckenridge.com.

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

Somewhere in Della's consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, a bomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last. Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della's revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant coworkers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. In search of clarity, and unburdened by ideological posturing, Della calls in bomb threats to various locations throughout her city. She relishes the panic and confusion incited by her fabrications. But when real explosions suddenly strike her imagined targets, Della is lured into a catastrophic plot from which there may be no return.

"Vanessa Veselka's debut novel Zazen is so immersive and lyrical, I found myself piecing the novel out over a couple of weeks so the experience of reading it would last as long as possible. Zazen is a literary gem, a post-9/11 work filled with fear, terrorism, beauty and hope."--Largehearted Boy

"Vanessa Veselka's gritty frenetic writing serves up an exciting new flavor among today's literary menu of MFA influenced prose; not a conventional, well-crafted tale but a streaking flash of barbed satire and 21st century malaise."--New York Journal of Books

Vanessa Veselka, of Portland, Oregon, has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in Arthur, Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, and elsewhere. Zazen is her first novel.

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Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

In the store:$14.40 Online (plus S/H): $12.00 Publisher's price: $16.00 Available February 14

"Beneath the shadowless Norman Rockwell contours of Baxter's Midwest lurks a chilling starkness and sense of isolation reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful work of Edward Hopper."--New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2011"

Baxter once described himself as "a Midwestern writer in a postmodern age": at home in a terrain best known for its blandness, one that does not give up its secrets easily, whose residents don't always talk about what's on their mind, and where something out of the quotidian-some stress, the appearance of a stranger, or a knock on the window-may be all that's needed to force what lies underneath to the surface and to disclose a surprising impulse, frustration, or desire. Whether friends or strangers, the characters in Baxter's stories share a desire--sometimes muted and sometimes fierce--to break through the fragile glass of convention. In the title story, a substitute teacher walks into a new classroom, draws an outsized tree on the blackboard on a whim, and rewards her students by reading their fortunes using a Tarot deck. In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to believe and what we need to believe.

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

In the store:$24.30 Online (plus S/H): $20.25 Publisher's price: $27.00 Available February 7

New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo visits Minnesota with a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter--Annawadi's "most-everything girl"--will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries readers headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

Katherine Boo has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003 and a contributor since 2001. Her writing focusses on issues of poverty, opportunity, social and economic policy, and education. She has also been an editor and writer for the Washington City Paper and The Washington Monthly. In 2000, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and, in 2002, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, in recognition of her body of work on the disadvantaged.

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Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

Lonnie Dupre has spent most of his adult life either traveling in the Arctic or planning his next trip there. His new book, Life on Ice: 25 Years of Arctic Exploration, is an important chronicle of Arctic life as well as climate change in the polar region. Life on Ice covers Dupre's significant achievements, including the world's first circumnavigation of Greenland and a summer expedition to the North Pole that reached 68 million people worldwide. During his travels over the Arctic's disappearing ice, Dupre has participated in both scientific research and cultural exchanges, working with and gathering data for organizations such as the National Geographic Society, Greenpeace, the Explorers Club, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the U.S. Department of Atmospheric Sciences. His findings have been called "the Holy Grail of global warming data."

During an Arctic career spanning 25 years, Lonnie Dupre has traveled more than 15,000 miles throughout the high Arctic and polar regions by dog team, ski and kayak. Dupre is internationally recognized for his exploration of the Arctic region. In 1991/92, he and Malcolm Vance completed the first west-to-east, 3,000-mile winter crossing of Canada's famed Northwest Passage by dog team. Between 1997 and 2001, Dupre, along with John Hoelscher, achieved the first circumnavigation of Greenland, a 6,500 mile, non-motorized journey by kayak and dog team. Dupre has pulled sleds on skis from Canada to the North Pole twice. The first time was in 2006 in the One World Expedition, which sent the message about climate change to 68 million worldwide. The second North Pole expedition was in 2009, when Dupre led a three-man team and endured -56F temperatures on the 650-mile journey.

• William Alexander--March 6
• Kevin Fox and Erin Hart--March 13
• Scott Wrobel--April 20

In the store: $13.540 Online: $11.25 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.00 Available Now

"[A] prismatic debut... beautiful, subtle, [and] original."--The New Yorker

In the store: $23.40 Online (plus S/H): $19.50 Publisher's price: $26.00 Available February 21

The pre-Civil War South comes brilliantly to life in The Healing (available February 21), the new novel from the author of The View from Delphi.

Plantation Mistress Amanda Satterfield's intense grief over losing her daughter crosses the line into madness when she takes a newborn slave child as her own and names her Granada. Troubled by his wife's disturbing mental state and concerned about a mysterious plague that is sweeping through the plantation's slave population, Master Satterfield purchases Polly Shine, a slavewoman known as a healer. But the master gets more than he bargained for when Polly's sharp tongue and troubling predictions cause unrest throughout the plantation.

Complicating matters further, Polly recognizes "the gift" in young Granada, and a domestic battle of wills ensues that raises tantalizing questions about who Polly Shine really is: a clever charlatan, a meddlesome witch, or a divine redeemer.

Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel The View from Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. In 2003, along with Minneapolis civil rights leader and city councilperson Don Samuels, Jonathan founded the Institute for Authentic Dialogue to spark conversations across race. He appeared before thousands of business executives, clergy, community and government leaders, and educators, teaching the skills for authentic dialogue through sharing his own race story. He has also designed and implemented Heart Jumps!, a literary intervention for elementary and middle school children that uses story creation as a way to increase a child's love for reading and writing, self-esteem and classroom safety. Learn more at www.jon-odell.com.

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Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

• Tuesday, February 7, 7:00pm, at the School II (600 Market St, Chanhassen)
• Wednesday, February 15, 7:00pm, at the Aster Cafe (125 SE Main Street, St Anthony Main, Minneapolis; call 612/379-3138 for table reservations)
• Wednesday, February 29, 6:15pm, at the Amsterdam Bar & Hall (6 W Sixth St, Saint Paul)