Lauren Oliver, New York Times Bestselling author of Before I Fall and Liesl & Po, will appear for her new middle-grade novel The Spindlers.

Watch Lauren Oliver describe her inspiration for The Spindlers. 

This Event is Tuesday, October 9, 2012 at 4:30 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Damien Echols appears for his New Memoir Life After Death.  This Special Event is Co-Sponsored by Rainy Day Books and Midwest Innocence Project.

A powerful true story of injustice, told by the man who experienced it all.

This Event is Friday, October 12, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Kansas City's own Gennifer Albin will appear for her new debut novel Crewel.

This Event is Monday, October 15, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Judy Schachner appears for her adventure by the coolest cat around Skippyjon Jones: Cirque de Olé!  

This Event is Monday, October 22, 2012 at 1:00 PM at Village Presbyterian Church, Friendship Hall, 6641 Mission Road, Prairie Village, Kansas 66208.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Ree Drummond, AKA, The Pioneer Woman appears for her New Holiday Picture Book Charlie and the Christmas Kitty!  

This Event is Saturday, November 3, 2012 at 1:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Attention all Princesses!  OLIVIA has a New Book OLIVIA and the Fairy Princesses!  Join us for a gathering of the Fairy Princesses and get your photos taken with the costumed character OLIVIA.  We'll have Prizes and Surprises for every Princess (young ones, anyway).

This Event is Monday, November 5, 2012 at 4:30 PM at Village Presbyterian Church, Friendship Hall, 6641 Mission Road, Prairie Village, Kansas 66208.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

Bee Wilson

Basic Books

In Consider the Fork, award-winning food writer Bee Wilson provides a wonderful and witty tour of the evolution of cooking around the world, revealing the hidden history of everyday objects we often take for granted. Knives--perhaps our most important gastronomic tool--predate the discovery of fire, whereas the fork endured centuries of ridicule before gaining widespread acceptance; pots and pans have been around for millennia, while plates are a relatively recent invention. Many once-new technologies have become essential elements of any well-stocked kitchen--mortars and pestles, serrated knives, stainless steel pots, refrigerators. Others have proved only passing fancies, or were supplanted by better technologies; one would be hard pressed now to find a water-powered egg whisk, a magnet-operated spit roaster, a cider owl, or a turnspit dog. Although many tools have disappeared from the modern kitchen, they have left us with traditions, tastes, and even physical characteristics that we would never have possessed otherwise. Blending history, science, and anthropology, Wilson reveals how our culinary tools and tricks came to be, and how their influence has shaped modern food culture.

Silent House

Orhan Pamuk

Knopf

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan's grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf-and the doctor's illegitimate son. Despite mutual dependency, there is no love lost between mistress and servant, who have very different recollections-and grievances-from the early years, before Cennethisar grew into a high-class resort surrounding the family house, now in shambles. Though eagerly anticipated, Fatma's grandchildren bring little consolation. The eldest, Faruk, a dissipated historian, wallows in alcohol as he laments his inability to tell the story of the past from the kaleidoscopic pieces he finds in the local archive; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün, has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin, a high school nerd, tries to keep up with the lifestyle of his spoiled society schoolmates while he fantasizes about going to America-an unaffordable dream unless he can persuade his grandmother to tear down her house. But it is Recep's nephew Hasan, a high school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey's tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.

A Working Theory of Love

Scott Hutchins

Penguin Press

Settled back into the San Francisco singles scene following the implosion of his young marriage just months after the honeymoon, Neill Bassett is going through the motions. His carefully modulated routine, however, is soon disrupted in ways he can't dismiss with his usual nonchalance. When Neill's father committed suicide ten years ago, he left behind thousands of pages of secret journals, journals that are stunning in their detail, and, it must be said, their complete banality. But their spectacularly quotidian details, were exactly what artificial intelligence company Amiante Systems was looking for, and Neill was able to parlay them into a job, despite a useless degree in business marketing and absolutely no experience in computer science. He has spent the last two years inputting the diaries into what everyone hopes will become the world's first sentient computer. Essentially, he has been giving it language-using his father's words. Alarming to Neill-if not to the other employees of Amiante-the experiment seems to be working. The computer actually appears to be gaining awareness and, most disconcerting of all, has started asking questions about Neill's childhood. Amid this psychological turmoil, Neill meets Rachel. She was meant to be a one-night stand, but Neill is unexpectedly taken with her and the possibilities she holds. At the same time, he remains preoccupied by unresolved feelings for his ex-wife, who has a talent for appearing at the most unlikely and unfortunate times. When Neill discovers a missing year in the diaries-a year that must hold some secret to his parents' marriage and perhaps even his father's suicide-everything Neill thought he knew about his past comes into question, and every move forward feels impossible to make.

Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

Mark Nepo

Free Press

Known for his penetrating books on resilience and suffering, poet, philosopher, and cancer survivor Mark Nepo continues to go deeper into what matters and to sift the wisdom that comes from confronting and recovering from the physical and spiritual challenges of life. In Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, he offers new lessons and insights on the importance of giving our full attention to all that life has to offer. Written in Nepo's beautiful, lyrical style, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen traces the story of his own hearing loss while unfolding a deeper understanding of how to listen to the world around us and to honor its connections to our internal life and callings. A moving exploration of self and our relationship to others, the book unpacks the many ways we are called to redefine ourselves and to name what is meaningful as we move through the changes that come from experience and aging and the challenge of surviving loss. "Listening is the way we befriend the life we're given," Nepo writes, and he has structured the book around three lasting friendships: our friendship with wisdom, with experience, and with each other. By listening and tending to each, he explains, we can awaken to life and restore our vitality.

Summer and Bird

Katherine Catmull

Dutton Juvenile

When their parents disappear in the middle of the night, young sisters Summer and Bird set off on a quest to find them. A cryptic picture message from their mother leads them to a familiar gate in the woods, but comfortable sights quickly give way to a new world entirely--Down--one inhabited by talking birds and the evil Puppeteer queen. Summer and Bird are quickly separated, and their divided hearts lead them each in a very different direction in the quest to find their parents, vanquish the Puppeteer, lead the birds back to their Green Home, and discover the identity of the true bird queen.

This Is Not My Hat

Jon Klassen

Candlewick

When a tiny fish shoots into view wearing a round blue topper (which happens to fit him perfectly), trouble could be following close behind. So it's a good thing that enormous fish won't wake up. And even if he does, it's not like he'll ever know what happened. . . . Visual humor swims to the fore as the best-selling Jon Klassen follows his breakout debut with another deadpan-funny tale.