Alex Danchev, acclaimed British Biographer and Professor, discusses his New Book Cézanne: A Life.  Co-sponsored by Rainy Day Books & The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Alex Danchev travels from his home in Nottingham, England discuss his definitive new portrait of the artist Paul Cézanne.  Alex will stop in just six cities (Kansas City, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Greenwich, CT).  This will be a rare opportunity to hear about and discuss a master painter.

One of the most influential painters of his time and beyond, Pual Cézanne was the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age who changed the way we see the world.  With brisk intellect, rich documentation, and eighty-eight color and fifty-two black-and-white illustrations, Alex tells the story of an artist who was originally considered a madman, a barbarian, and a sociopath.  Beginning with the unsettled teenager in Aix, Alex takes us through the trials of a painter who believed that art must be an expression of temperament but was tormented by self-doubt, who was rejected by the Salon for forty years, who sold nothing outside his immediate circle until his thirties, who had a family that he kept secret from his father until his forties, who had his first exhibition at the age of fifty-six, but who fiercely maintained his revolutionary beliefs.  Alex shows us how the beliefs Cézanne held and the life he led became the obsession and inspiration of artists, writers, poets, and philosophers from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg.

This Event is Friday, November 9, 2012 at 7:00 PM at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Atkins Auditorium, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111.  Please enter through the Bloch Building doors from the Parking Garage.

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Join us as #1 Bestselling Author Jeff Kinney introduces Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel (Book 7) and Author Autographs Books for readers & fans.   This Special Diary of a Wimpy Kid experience will offer photo opportunities with life-size characters, a dance party with a live DJ and treats! 

This Event is Tuesday, November 13, 2012 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

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Author and Editor-at-Large at TIME Magazine David Von Drehle discusses his New Book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year. 

This Event is Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Charles Fillmore Chapel, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

Camille Paglia, America's premier intellectual provocateur returns to the subject that brought her fame, the great themes of Western Art.  Camille Paglia will discuss her New Book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.  Co-sponsored by Rainy Day Books & The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  

This Event is Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 7:00 PM at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Atkins Auditorium, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111.   Please enter through the Bloch Building doors from the Parking Garage.

Read full details about this Event on our Website.

The Marseille Caper

Peter Mayle

Knopf

Lovable rogue and sleuth extraordinaire Sam Levitt is back in another beguiling, as-only-Peter-Mayle-can-write-it romp through the South of France. At the end of The Vintage Caper, Sam had just carried off a staggering feat of derring-do in the heart of Bordeaux, infiltrating the ranks of the French elite to rescue a stolen, priceless wine collection. With the questionable legality of the adventure-and the threat of some very powerful enemies!-Sam thought it'd be a while before he returned to France, especially with the charms of the beautiful Elena Morales to keep him in Los Angeles. But when the immensely wealthy Francis Reboul-the victim of Sam's last heist but someone who knows talent when he sees it-asks our hero to take a job in Marseille, it's impossible for Sam and Elena to resist the possibility of further excitement . . . to say nothing of the pleasures of the region. Soon the two are enjoying the coastal sunshine and the delectable food and wine for which Marseille is known. Yet as a competition over Marseille's valuable waterfront grows more hotly disputed, Sam, representing Reboul, finds himself in the middle of an increasingly intrigue-ridden and dangerous real-estate grab, with thuggish gangsters on one side and sharklike developers on the other.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays

David Foster Wallace

Little, Brown and Company

David Foster Wallace was beloved for his inimitable voice and wit-and, for many of his readers, admired as much for his astonishingly perceptive and inventive essays as he was for his fiction. Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time. Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more. In addition to these essays, Both Flesh and Not includes a selection from Wallace's personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions that serve as a reminder of Wallace's ferocious love of language. A sweeping, exhilarating collection of some of the author's most emotionally immediate work, Both Flesh and Not reminds us why A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times, called David Foster Wallace "The best mind of his generation."

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver

Harper

Set in the present day in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, Flight Behavior tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year-old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation and her husband's antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive flirtation with a handsome younger man. In the opening scene, Dellarobia is headed for a secluded mountain cabin to meet this man and initiate what she expects will be a self-destructive affair. But the tryst never happens. Instead, she walks into something on the mountainside she cannot explain or understand: a forested valley filled with silent red fire that appears to her a miracle. After years lived entirely in the confines of one small house, Dellarobia finds her path suddenly opening out, chapter by chapter, into blunt and confrontational engagement with her family, her church, her town, her continent, and finally the world at large.

Custer

Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster

On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked a large Lakota Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. He lost not only the battle but also his life-and the lives of all his men. It was the U.S. Army's worst defeat in the long and bloody Plains Indian War. Yet with no survivors and only unreliable Indian accounts, "Custer's Last Stand" reached mythic proportions and achieved Custer's name immortality. Larry McMurtry has long been fascinated by Custer and his rightful place in history, and in Custer, he examines how the "Boy General," who graduated last in his class at West Point, went on to earn distinction in the Civil War and rose through the ranks. In McMurtry's hands, Custer is brought to life in all his complexity-as the perpetually restless man whose complicated marriage, hunger for glory, and unwavering confidence in his abilities led him to ignore the warnings of scouts and comrades at Little Big Horn. In this engaging, handsomely illustrated volume, McMurtry not only delivers an honest assessment of Custer's legacy, demonstrating how through his power of personality, and as a product of his times, he achieved eternal fame, but also redefines our understanding of the American West.

The Shooting Salvationist: J. Frank Norris and the Murder Trial that Captivated America

David R. Stokes

Steerforth Press

The Reverend Doctor J. Frank Norris was many things in the 1920's: a pastor who led the nation's first megachurch, a provocative publisher, and a pioneer broadcaster. With the flair of a great showman, he railed against vice and conspiracies he saw everywhere to a congregation of more than 10,000 at First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. His church served as a venue for a steady stream of politicians and performers, from William Howard Taft to Will Rogers, but Norris himself was by far the biggest attraction. Following the death of William Jennings Bryan, he was poised to become the leading fundamentalist figure in America. This changed, though, in a moment of violence one sweltering Saturday in July when he shot and killed an unarmed man in his church office. Saturated with vivid detail, The Shooting Salvationist skillfully explores the events leading up to one of the most intriguing -- yet largely forgotten -- crime stories in America's history. Set against the backdrop of the post-World-War-I oil boom, when oilmen lit cigars with $1,000 bills in hotel lobbies, and while Prohibition was the law of the land, it leads to a courtroom drama pitting some of the most powerful lawyers of the era against each other with the life of a wildly popular, and equally loathed, religious leader hanging in the balance.

Fiction Ruined My Family

Jeanne Darst

Riverhead Trade

The youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated St. Louis family of prominent journalists and politicians on one side, debutantes and equestrians on the other, Jeanne Darst grew up hearing stories of past grandeur. And the message she internalized as a young girl was clear: While things might be a bit tight for us right now, it's only temporary. Soon her father would sell the Great American Novel and reclaim the family's former glory. The Darsts uproot themselves and move from St. Louis to New York. Jeanne's father writes one novel, and then another, which don't find publishers. This, combined with her mother's burgeoning alcoholism-nightly booze-fueled weepathons reminiscing about her fancy childhood-lead to financial disaster and divorce. And as Jeanne becomes an adult, she is horrified to discover that she is not only a drinker like her mother, but a writer like her father. At first, and for years, she embraces both activities-living in an apartment with no bathroom, stealing food from her babysitting gigs, and raising rent money by riding the subway topless and performing a one-woman show in her living room. Until gradually she realizes that this life has not been thrust on her in some handing-down-of-the-writing-mantle-way. She has chosen it; and until she can stop putting drinking and writing ahead of everything else, it's a questionable choice. "For a long time I was worried about becoming my father," she writes. "Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself." Ultimately, Darst sets out to discover whether a person can have the writing without the ruin, whether it's possible to be both sober and creative, ambitious and happy, a professional author and a parent.

Days of Blood & Starlight

Laini Taylor

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

In this stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Karou must come to terms with who and what she is, and how far she'll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, mysteries and secrets, new characters and old favorites, Days of Blood and Starlight brings the richness, color and intensity of the first book to a brand new canvas.

Perry's Killer Playlist

Joe Schreiber

Houghton Mifflin Books for Children

Double crossings, kidnappings, CIA agents, arms dealers, boat chases in Venetian canals, and a shoot out in the middle of a Santa Claus convention ensue in this laugh out-loud action packed sequel to the critically acclaimed Au Revoir Crazy European Chick.

ZooBorns The Next Generation: Newer, Cuter, More Exotic Animals from the World's Zoos and Aquariums

Andrew Bleiman, Chris Eastland

Simon & Schuster

The new generation of zoo babies will reset the standard for devastating cuteness. From the creators of the smash hit ZooBorns series of books, ZooBorns The Next Generation features full-color photos and fascinating facts on exotic baby animals from every corner of the world. Filled with brand-new species and some beloved favorites, this collection is irresistible to any animal lover. These babies are much more than just adorable furry faces. They are ambassadors for their species in the wild, helping educate about conservation while they entertain.