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54 Fairfield St.   Watchung Plaza   Montclair NJ 07042   973-744-7177   

Mon-Fri 10-7   Sat- Sun 10-5

 
Of course, we are OPEN 24/7 at 

www.watchungbooksellers.com 

 
Dear Friends,

Apologies to all for the incomplete links on last week's newsletter.  It was a technical problem that should now be resolved.  Let me know if they don't work again.

After a month of worrying about snow, snowbanks, polar vortexes and frustrated drivers - we may face it all again!  No, really.  We are wishing the snow away so you can join us and meet these great authors.  And to cap off the week, help us toast Marina on Friday evening as she embarks on her new life.

TONIGHT, February 26 at 7pm at the bookstore
Kevin Pyle
A docu-comic - yes!  Graphic novelist Kevin Pyle brings us an incredibly researched graphic history of censorship and banning about games and pastimes that youth love!  Comics, games (dice, chess, Dungeons and Dragons), technology, and on!  Come and get educated - and bridge the divide between youth and parents.

TONIGHT, February 26 at 7pm at MKA Middle School
Andrew Solomon
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
A compassionate and revolutionary book about the most important job: parenting.   Through the stories of several family, Solomon shows us how parents deal with differences. 
Free and Open to the Public.   

Joni Marie Newman 
Thursday, February 27, 7pm
125 Food Classics Reinvented with an Ethnic Twist!  Newman is visiting from California and excited to share her innovative vegan recipes featuring whole foods that can readily be found at the grocery store.

George O'Connor 
Friday, February 28, 4pm
If you have the other 5 Olympians graphic novels, you've been waiting for this one!  If you haven't discovered this series yet, come and meet George O'Connor, artist extraodinaire and master of all things Olympian.  Ages 9 and up.

Join us to Raise a Toast to Marina Cramer 
Friday, February 28, 6-8pm 
Marina is retiring from Watchung Booksellers this Friday.  We are grateful to her for twelve years of bookselling at our bookstore.  Marina inspired us with her literary knowledge, creating and fostering poetry readings, the Writing Matters series, and guiding her book groups.  Please read Marina's lovely letter below, and do join us to celebrate her new life!

Saturday Author/Illustrator Storytime: 
SuJean Rim, Birdie's Big Girl Hair has been rescheduled to Sat, March 29th.  This Saturday morning, 10:30 our very own Liane Freed will share some of her favorite new books.

Below you will find a sampling of some of the newly arrived paperback releases.  Paperbacks are a way of welcoming back an old friend.  If we loved them in hardcover, or overlooked them that first time, we can now greet these books with renewed enthusiasm.  Ah, the life of a book.... 

Enjoy! Margot, Carolyn, Nicole, Marisela, Liane and Jeanne  

 

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For more musing from your favorite booksellers:
Paperback Releases, YAY!
February 2014    
Eleanor Morse
  
Several of you have picked up this book out of curiosity and come back, almost trembling, to tell us how much you loved it.  Thank you for sharing your love of books with us.  Eleanor Morse's rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story. 
History that began in our own back yard and how it transformed our society as a whole.  A quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.  Paperback or eBook 
   
Kristopher Jansma

An inventive and witty debut about a young man's quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe.  Clever and smart, it's a funhouse, postmodern of a model.
Allison Amend

A smart page turner about people losing their moral compass.  The worlds collide of a smart classy New York art house director and a desperate Spanish artist in Paris.  A flawlessly rendered, totally engrossing, class-and-continent hopping story.  Paperback and eBook  
Claire Messud
 
Claire Messud's chronicle of a year in the life of 37-year old schoolteacher Nora Eldridge, is gorgeous and brutal, tender and fierce.  Whether you are a fan of The Emperor's Children or Messud's earlier book, The Last Life,  The Woman Upstairs should be your next read.
Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner.
"A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives."-Newsweek
 Paperback or eBook 
Marisa Silver

Bestselling author Marisa Silver takes Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph as inspiration for a story of two women-one famous and one forgotten-and their remarkable chance encounter.  A wise and compassionate novel.
Willy Vlautin
Award-winning author of The Motel Life, Northline and Lean on Pete, Willy Vlautin demonstrates his extraordinary talent for confronting issues facing modern America, illuminated through the lives of three memorable characters who are looking for a way out of their financial, familial, and existential crises in The Free.   Paperback and eBook
 
A Farewell Message

Dear booklovers,

February 28th marks the end of my thirty-years' journey in the bookselling trade. For a lifelong reader and aspiring writer, what could have been better than spending many, many hours among the shelves, talking with people about books?

Looking back, I see a panorama of familiar faces, remember conversations in which I learned much I had not known before. I relive the satisfaction of placing a book in your hands, hoping it will take you where you want to go, please a fortunate recipient, or enrich the life of a child.

Book passion is a curious thing; it is both personal and shared, immutable yet always changing, open to new literary experiences while looking for another story 'just like this one'. Thank you for allowing me into your lives. It has been a privilege to know you.
                                            Marina Antropow Cramer