Posts by Robin Wood | Books & Books

All posts by Robin Wood

Cheers to Our Volunteers!

May 5, 2019

Thanks to all of our wonderful volunteers. We had a great high season and we are grateful for all of your help, at events, keeping the store looking beautiful and neat, helping customers find their #nextfavoriteread.

For those of you headed up north, have a wonderful summer, we’ll see you in the fall.

Volunteers supplement our booksellers’ work, aiding in both retail and back office activities. This extraordinarily well-read group also give us a much wider sense of what’s worth reading by sharing insights and recommendations.

We are always looking for new volunteers, so if you’re interested, introduce yourself next time you’re visiting the store and we’ll tell you how it works.

Books & Books @ The Studios Makes All the Lists

May 5, 2019

by Robin Wood

Books & Books @ The Studios is getting great media exposure these days.

Magazine and website Mental Floss celebrated Independent Bookstore Day by making a list of bookstores worth seeking out — and Books & Books @ The Studios was their pick for Florida.

The magazine highlights our founders, Judy Blume and George Cooper, as part of what sets our store apart, but also notes our beautiful space, our carefully curated mix of books and our art supplies room.

Read the full article at The Best Bookstores in All 50 States.

Additionally, Buzzfeed recently noted 8 Author-Owned Bookstores Every Book Lover Needs To Visit, which puts Books & Books @ The Studios in the company of fabulous stores including Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic and Nashville’s Parnassus Books.

BBTSKW & KWLS Host Nicole Dennis-Benn

May 5, 2019

by Robin Wood

Books and Books and the Key West Literary Seminar are pleased to welcome Nicole Dennis-Benn to Key West. Dennis-Benn will read from her latest novel PATSY at the store (533 Eaton Street) on Friday June 28th at 7pm. Signing to follow.

PATSY has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and has been lauded by the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, Vanity Fair, among others.

“PATSY fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness,” raves Time Magazine; and according to NPR, “Dennis-Benn is quickly becoming an indispensable novelist, and PATSY is a brave, brilliant triumph of a book.” The National Book Review describes PATSY as “exquisitely written, highly nuanced, and powerful” and Nylon has proclaimed that “[this] stunning second novel only serves to solidify [Dennis-Benn’s] place as one of the finest novelists writing today.” Award-winning author, Alexander Chee, calls PATSY “a stunningly powerful inter-generational novel,” and Man Booker Prize finalist, Chigozie Obioma, deems PATSY as “beautiful, shattering, and deeply affecting.”

Her debut novel, HERE COMES THE SUN, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Times Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award.

Time Out New York described Dennis-Benn as one of the “few immigrants and first-generation Americans who are putting their stamps on NYC,” and Vice included her in a round-up of immigrant authors “who are making American literature great again.”

Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls and Cornell University; and holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught in the writing programs at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, and City College; and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Hurston/Wright, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

Dennis-Benn is in Key West to serve as Distinguished Visiting Writer for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Young Writers Studio, a writing program for high school students across Monroe County. The program is designed to highlight Key West’s literary history, give students access to prominent working authors and help them develop and practice key writing skills and techniques. This year’s theme is Island in the Works from James Merrill’s poem of the same name, which he wrote from his Elizabeth Street home in the 1980s.

Key West Literary Seminar’s Young Writers Studio

May 5, 2019

by Robin Wood

Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of PATSY (reading and signing at the store on Friday June 28th at 7pm) is in Key West to serve as Distinguished Visiting Writer for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Young Writers Studio, an innovative writing program for local high school students.

KWLS executive director Arlo Haskell, who is also a historian and the author of THE JEWS OF KEY WEST: SMUGGLERS, CIGAR MAKERS, AND REVOLUTIONARIES graciously took some time out of his busy schedule to chat with us a little about the Young Writers Studio.

Q: Please tell us a little about the Young Writers Studio?

A: This is the second year of the program, but it was in development for a few years before that. All the extra time and thinking that went into it really paid off. We recruited a number of current and former high school students to serve as an advisory committee and ran through brainstorming sessions with them that were really eye-opening. We also spent time talking with local teachers to get their input. Then Kate Peters, Nick Vagnoni, and I created and refined the prompts and reading materials and tested out various excursion, so we felt like it was fully-formed by the time it launched last summer.

It’s totally different from our adult programs — five full days with a travel/excursion component each day, the highlight being a trip to Dry Tortugas National Park. The idea is to have a really immersive experience in Key West, use this place as inspiration for new writing, and end up seeing “home” in a whole different way.

Q: Has KWLS had any other youth focused programs in the past?

A: We’ve brought speakers to the high school in January for years, but this is the first fully-developed youth program that we’ve launched. Hopefully not the last! Eventually, I’d like to create a full-time educational department at KWLS to work hand-in-hand with teachers throughout the county and strengthen the literary education of local students.

Q: How many young adults participate each year?

A: Anywhere from 12 to 16, with some returning students and Key West High School graduates serving in a junior staff role.

Q: How do you select the visiting authors?

A: The Seminar in January is a great way to evaluate the writers we want for this program. I look for writers who have been on our stage and who make a big, immediate impression, who have charisma and a natural ability to connect with people from various backgrounds. A well-developed sense of empathy is hugely important. And of course they have to be kind, generous, and caring.

Getting Victor LaValle (author of THE CHANGELING) to teach for us last year was huge. He’s an incredible writer and an even more incredible human being. Seeing how inspired our students were by the work they did with him was enormously gratifying.

Q: What are your favorite books to recommend to young adults, either classic or current?

A:Young people should read whatever grabs their attention, and they should also seek out books that challenge their idea of the world. It’s good to be pushed outside of your comfort zone — that’s how we grow. These seem like cliché choices now, but the books that had the biggest impact on me in high school were Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, Herman Hesse’s SIDDHARTA, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.

Q: In general, what are you reading and recommending these days? What do you consider a beach read and why?

A: At the beach these days, I’m usually eagle-eyes watching my two young daughters (they can’t swim yet!) and don’t get much reading done. But outside the beach, I’m reading a lot by and about the late great Harry Mathews. I’m editing his Collected Poems for publication early next year, so of course I’ve read through all of his poems in an insanely-close-reading-proofreading kind of way. I’ve also been reading his “Autobiography” and other prose pieces like “For Prizewinners” and “Mathews’s Algorithm” to get a better sense of what made him tick as an artist, plus a great book called MANY SUBTLE CHANNELS by Daniel Levin Becker, which is a history of the Oulipo, the French group of mathematicians and writers that Harry was part of.

But back to the beach and beach-reading! How about this great 1966 poem of Harry’s, “The Swimmer”:

Removing my watch, pleased with the morning weather,
I dove—I would cross the Atlantic by myself Neither she,
Nor I, nor Brooklyn minded.

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

New B&BTSKW Reusable Straws Help Reduce Plastic Ocean Pollution

May 4, 2019

by Robin Wood

The newest addition to the B&BTSKW family of products is reusable stainless steel drinking straws. We are proud to join the straw-free Key West movement seeking to reduce the amount of micro-plastics polluting the ocean and harming sea life.

These straws are this year’s Booklovers Loyalty Club member gift. So if you’re a member (thank you!) pick yours up next time you’re in the store.

They are also for sale. $5, includes a pipe cleaner to make the reusable part easy as Key Lime pie and Cuban coffee.

Don’t know about the Booklovers Club, find out here: booksandbookskw.com/loyalty

Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World – Richard Kreitner

April 24, 2019

by Robin Wood

A practical, armchair travel guide that explores eighty of the most iconic literary locations from all over the globe that you can actually visit.

A must-have for every fan of literature, Booked inspires readers to follow in their favorite characters footsteps by visiting the real-life locations portrayed in beloved novels including the Monroeville, Alabama courthouse in To Kill a Mockingbird, Chatsworth House, the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and the Kyoto Bridge from Memoirs of a Geisha. The full-color photographs throughout reveal the settings readers have imagined again and again in their favorite books.

Organized by regions all around the world, author Richard Kreitner explains the importance of each literary landmark including the connection to the author and novel, cultural significance, historical information, and little-known facts about the location. He also includes travel advice like addresses and must-see spots.

Booked features special sections on cities that inspired countless literary works like a round of locations in Brooklyn from Betty Smith’s iconic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and a look at the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice.

Locations include:

Central Park, NYC (The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger)

Forks, Washington (Twilight, Stephanie Meyer)

Prince Edward Island, Canada (Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery)

Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario (Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood)

Holcomb, Kansas (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)

London, England (White Teeth, Zadie Smith)

Paris, France (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo)

Segovia, Spain, (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway)

Kyoto, Japan (Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden)

About the Author

Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer at The Nation magazine. His work on politics, history, and literature has also appeared in Slate, The Baffler, and The Boston Globe. A lover of books and travel, he is the author of “The Obsessively-Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trip,” featured in Atlas Obscura in 2015. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Praise For…

“If you like exploring real places related to literature, this book is a good place to start.”—GeekDad

“Booked provides full-color photographs of 80 famous literary locations, including To Kill a Mockingbird‘s courthouse in Monroeville, Ala.; the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice‘s Pemberley; and Memoirs of a Geisha‘s Kyoto Bridge.”—Publishers Weekly, Spring Announcements feature

Walking: One Step At a Time – Erling Kagge

April 24, 2019

by Robin Wood

A lyrical account of an activity that is essential for our sanity, equilibrium, and well-being, from the author of Silence (“A book to be handled and savored.” —The Wall Street Journal)

Placing one foot in front of the other, embarking on the journey of discovery, and experiencing the joy of exploration—these activities are intrinsic to our nature. Our ancestors traveled long distances on foot, gaining new experiences and learning from them. But as universal as walking is, each of us will experience it differently. For Erling Kagge, it is the gateway to the questions that fascinate him—Why do we walk? Where do we walk from? What is our destination?—and in this book he invites us to investigate them along with him.

Language reflects the idea that life is one single walk; the word “journey” comes from the distance we travel in the course of a day. Walking for Kagge is a natural accompaniment to creativity: the occasion for the unspoken dialogue of thinking. Walking is also the antidote to the speed at which we conduct our lives, to our insistence on rushing, on doing everything in a precipitous manner—walking is among the most radical things we can do.

About the Author

Explorer, art collector, publisher, and author, ERLING KAGGE is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.

Praise For…

“[Kagge] challenges readers to take steps toward a better understanding of one’s self and finding a peaceful place in the scheme of life. Recommended for all libraries, especially collections on the environment. The poetic and inspirational words will remind readers of Henry David Thoreau’s work by the same name.”—Library Journal [starred]

“Candid . . . lyrical and sometimes philosophical . . . His awe and wonder are contagious . . . a perfect companion for those who seek mindfulness and meditation in their everyday lives.”—Booklist

“An homage to walking . . . Throughout this brief but eloquent meditation, the author makes a convincing case for the importance of walking. For him, walking is not simply taking a series of steps; it is something thrilling and amazing . . . A thoughtful book-length essay on a taken-for-granted human activity . . . Fascinating.”—Kirkus Reviews

“It is much more subtle than a typical self-help tome . . . he uses his acquaintance with extreme environments to reflect on the mental and physical benefits of walking.”—The Economist

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World – Melinda Gates

April 24, 2019

by Robin Wood

“The Moment of Lift is an urgent call to courage. It changed how I think about myself, my family, my work, and what’s possible in the world. Melinda weaves together vulnerable, brave storytelling and compelling data to make this one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page.”

—Brené Brown, Ph.D., author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Dare to Lead

“Melinda Gates has spent many years working with women around the world. This book is an urgent manifesto for an equal society where women are valued and recognized in all spheres of life. Most of all, it is a call for unity, inclusion and connection. We need this message more than ever.”—Malala Yousafzai

“Melinda Gates’s book is a lesson in listening. A powerful, poignant, and ultimately humble call to arms.” — Tara Westover, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller EDUCATED

A debut from Melinda Gates, a timely and necessary call to action for women’s empowerment.

“How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings – and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”

For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

In this moving and compelling book, Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. As she writes in the introduction, “That is why I had to write this book—to share the stories of people who have given focus and urgency to my life. I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up where we live.”

Melinda’s unforgettable narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention—from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. And, for the first time, she writes about her personal life and the road to equality in her own marriage. Throughout, she shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world—and ourselves.

Writing with emotion, candor, and grace, she introduces us to remarkable women and shows the power of connecting with one another.

When we lift others up, they lift us up, too.

About the Author

Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, Melinda Gates has dedicated her life to achieving transformational improvements in the health and prosperity of families, communities, and societies. Core to her work is empowering women and girls to help them realize their full potential. In 2015, Melinda created Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company that enables her to bring together other new and emerging strands of her advocacy and philanthropic work focused in the US. Melinda received a bachelor’s degree from Duke and an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School. After joining Microsoft Corp. in 1987, she helped develop many of the company’s multimedia products. In 1996, Melinda left Microsoft to focus on her philanthropic work and family.

Praise For…

“An inspirational look at the need to empower women to make change in the world.” —The Washington Post

“[The Moment of Lift] is a moral appeal, imploring each of us who reads it to look around — at our own families, our own workplaces, our own place in a gigantic, but highly connected, world — and get to work making it more equal.” – Chicago Tribune

“At a time when beneficial globalization is being threatened by nationalism, and women’s rights are in danger of being rolled back to nineteenth-century norms, Gates offers urgent reminders of why it’s necessary to help women everywhere achieve their full potential.”—Booklist, starred review

“Part memoir, part call to action, Gates’s compassionate narrative underscores her determination to leave a positive mark on this world. She inspires and emboldens in this eloquently argued work.”—Publishers Weekly

“This book is a beautiful and concise mission statement on what we need to do to move society forward–continue to empower women. At every level and in all places women are truly the bedrock supporting their communities.”—Trevor Noah

“Melinda Gates uplifts and inspires by weaving a narrative of fortitude and hope. She pushes us to challenge the status quo and never settle.” —Mellody Hobson

“The Moment of Lift is a gift to humanity. With concrete stories and examples, Melinda Gates helps us see and embrace the great truths – “The goal is for everyone to be connected. The goal is for everyone to belong. The goal is for everyone to be loved.” Melinda’s message is so real, so personal, so intelligent, so needed. If only everyone would read it and know it, we would all rise up together!” –Richard Rohr

“The Moment of Lift is a book about gender equity and its golden thread is empathy. This book lifts up the voices of women and girls whose experiences have been entirely unlike Melinda’s own. They’ve taught her a great deal, and in this beautifully crafted and artful memoir, Melinda Gates invites the reader to learn from them too.” —Paul Farmer, M.D., co-founder of Partners In Health

“I think this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.” — Warren Buffett

Machines Like Me – Ian McEwan

April 24, 2019

by Robin Wood

New from Ian McEwan, Booker Prize winner and international bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act

Machines Like Me takes place in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first synthetic humans and—with Miranda’s help—he designs Adam’s personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and clever. It isn’t long before a love triangle soon forms, and these three beings confront a profound moral dilemma.
In his subversive new novel, Ian McEwan asks whether a machine can understand the human heart—or whether we are the ones who lack understanding.

About the Author

IAN McEWAN is the bestselling author of seventeen books, including the novels Nutshell; The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

Praise For…

“[McEwan] is not only one of the most elegant writers alive, he is one of the most astute at crafting moral dilemmas within the drama of everyday life. Half a century ago, Philip K. Dick asked, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,’ and now McEwan is sure those androids are pulling the wool over our eyes. McEwan’s special contribution is not to articulate the challenge of robots but to cleverly embed that challenge in the lives of two people trying to find a way to exist with purpose. That human drama makes Machines Like Me strikingly relevant even though it’s set in a world that never happened almost 40 years ago.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Witty and humane . . . a retrofuturist family drama that doubles as a cautionary fable about artificial intelligence, consent, and justice.”
—Julian Lucas, The New Yorker

“Reminds you of [McEwan’s] mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling. The narrative is propulsive, thanks to our uncertainties about the characters’ motives, the turning points that suddenly reconfigure our understanding of the plot, and the figure of Adam, whose ambiguous energy is both mysteriously human and mysteriously not . . . Morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author.”
—Marcel Theroux, The Guardian

“Thought provoking . . . consistently surprising . . . an intriguing novel about humans, machines, and what constitutes a self.”
—Publishers Weekly

“McEwan brings humor and considerable ethical rumination to a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence.”
—Kirkus