$33 includes admission and a signed copy of Change of Heart

Event takes place at the Pitman Theatre at Alverno College, 3401 S. 39th St., Milwaukee

Purchase tickets online or by calling the box office at 414-382-6044. There is a $5 handling fee for each order placed (per order, not per ticket). A Schwartz Bookshops gift card may be requested in place of book.

 

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Paul McComas
Planet of the Dates
Thursday,  February 21 * 7:00 p.m. reading * Downer Ave.

Milwaukee native and Whitefish Bay High School alum Paul McComas will offer a reading from his hilarious new novel, Planet of the Dates. Set in 1980s Milwaukee and peppered with references to beloved regional attractions like the Bong Recreational Area and Mars Cheese Castle, it is an earnest and unpretentious coming-of-age tale that takes a fresh look at the sometimes-awkward transition from adolescence to adulthood. 

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Manil Suri
The Age of Shiva
& Neeta Saluja
Six Spices: A Simple Concept of Indian Cooking
Saturday,  February 23 * 2:00 p.m. presentation * Mequon

Celebrate Indian culture with the author of The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri. His latest novel, The Age of Shiva, is the story of one woman's quest to establish herself in a male-dominated society set against the bakdrop of a country in turmoil. Joining Manil is Neeta saluja, who will discuss preparing simple, delicious Indian cuisine and offer a tasting based on her cookbook Six Spices.

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James McBride
Song Yet Sung
Saturday,  February 23 * 3:00 p.m. reading * Shorewood

The latest page-turner by the author of The Color of Water is a powerful story about a runaway slave and a determined slave catcher. Liz Spocott flees into the world of the underground railroad with its double meanings and unspoken clues known as "The Code." The web of relationships in a small Chesapeake Bay town collapses as Liz and her pursuer face off in this gripping drama.

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Chris Bohjalian
The Double Bind
Sunday,  February 24 * 2:00 p.m. reading * Brookfield

The author of Midwives is back with a literary thriller that travels between the roaring twenties and the twenty-first century. A formerly outgoing young woman, Laurel Estabrook withdraws into her photography and volunteer work at a homeless shelter after being attacked while riding her bicycle. At the shelter she meets Bobbie Crocker, who had been a successful photographer before becoming homeless. As her fascination with his former life grows, she becomes convinced that his photographs reveal a hidden secret.

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Dennis McCann
Rough Stuff
Thursday,  March 6 * 7:00 p.m. talk * Shorewood

Former Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Sunday Travel columnist Dennis McCann is a golf nut. When he's not writing about golf in the pages of Wisconsin Golfer, he's playing golf. Or watching golf. Or thinking about golf. For a change of pace he'll be speaking about golf when he visits to discuss the best of his columns about the game available now in his new book, Rough Stuff.

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Andy Mozina
The Women Were Leaving the Men
Friday,  March 7 * 7:00 p.m. reading * Downer Ave.

The first full-length fiction collection from Milwaukee native Andy Mozina, recently named winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for fiction, draws you into the everyday lives of his characters who are familiar yet intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, his characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives.

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Joshilyn Jackson
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Sunday,  March 9 * 2:00 p.m. reading * Mequon

Meet the author of the #1 Book Sense Picks Gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia. Her latest finds Laurel Gray Hawthorne shaken by a devastating discovery in her own backyard. Though her life seems neat and on track with a passionate marriage, beloved daughter, lovely home, and family skeletons safely buried, everything Laurel holds dear is threatened when the body of her teenage neighbor is found in the family swimming pool.

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Richard C. Longworth
Caught in the Middle
Monday,  March 10 * 7:00 p.m. talk * Downer Ave.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Richard Longworth explores the Midwest in a new globalized age. The Midwest has always been the heart of America, but as factory farms and global forces displace old ways of life, the United States is literally being transformed from the inside out. Ranging from the manufacturing collapse that has crippled the Midwest to the biofuels revolution that may save it, Longworth addresses what's right and what's wrong in the region and offers a prescription for how it must change if it is to survive.

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Charles Baxter
The Soul Thief
Friday,  March 14 * 7:00 p.m. reading * Downer Ave.

The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Feast of Love finds Nathaniel Mason, a new graduate student in upstate New York, drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just out of his reach. One of those people is Jerome Coolberg who seems to have taken parts of Nathaniel's past as his own. It's Jerome who triggers Nathaniel's total breakdown, and it's Jerome who shows up at his door thirty years later to suggest that Nathaniel's identity may not be his own.

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Scott Simon
Windy City
Friday,  March 21 * 7:00 p.m. reading * Shorewood

The host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition offers a wise and funny novel of politics Chicago style in Windy City. Alderman Sonny Roopini, a widower and transplant from India, finds himself thrust into the spotlight when the gluttonous mayor apparently eats himself into a fatal heart attack. But soon, Sonny begins to suspect that the mayor's death has a more human and malicious cause than cholesterol!

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Kevin Brockmeier * author of The View from the Seventh Layer
Tod Wodicka * author of All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well
Thursday,  March 27 * 7:00 p.m. reading * Downer Ave.

Literary fiction takes center stage at this event featuring two innovative authors. Kevin Brockmeier, whose recent novel, A Brief History of the Dead, was a bookseller favorite, offers a collection of inventive, emotionally complex stories that reveal his remarkable range as a writer. He will be joined by Tod Wodicka, whose debut novel introduces Burt Hecker, a tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor and a man seemingly at war with the modern world. The story unfolds to reveal the tragic details of his life and it becomes clear why he prefers living in a time other than his own.

 

Renegade's Magic
Part Three of the Soldier Son Trilogy
Robin Hobb
"Navarre Burvelle is a man governed by destiny, the second son of a second son, and fated to become a soldier.  He attempts to follow his future, only to see a Shaman steal part of his soul, and plagues destroy different parts of his life.  As he succumbs to a life that is not his, the world is thrown into conflict over what is manifest destiny and what is just greed.  Renegade's Magic concludes what I think is Hobb's best work!"-Jason Kennedy, Buyer
$25.95