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Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of FASTING GIRLS & THE BODY PROJECT

February 1, 2019

Thursday, March 28, at 6pm, a reading and book signing with Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of FASTING GIRLS & THE BODY PROJECT. Join us for a fascinating and timely discussion about women, girls, body image and social change.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is the award-winning author of FASTING GIRLS: THE HISTORY OF ANOREXIA NERVOSA and THE BODY PROJECT. She is a Stephen H. Weiss Professor at Cornell University, where she holds a unique appointment teaching in the fields of history, human development, and women’s studies. Her research and sensitive writing about American women and girls have been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.

Winner of four major awards, the updated edition of Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s FASTING GIRLS, presents a history of women’s food-refusal dating back as far as the sixteenth century. Here is a tableau of female self-denial: medieval martyrs who used starvation to demonstrate religious devotion, “wonders of science” whose families capitalized on their ability to survive on flower petals and air, silent screen stars whose strict “slimming” regimens inspired a generation. Here, too, is a fascinating look at how the cultural ramifications of the Industrial Revolution produced a disorder that continues to render privileged young women helpless. Incisive, compassionate, illuminating, FASTING GIRLS offers real understanding to victims and their families, clinicians, and all women who are interested in the origins and future of this complex, modern and characteristically female disease.

A hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner beauty: a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why?

In THE BODY PROJECT, Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls’ attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with character to our modern focus on outward appearance—in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, THE BODY PROJECT explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project.

Practicing Yoga with Michelle C. Johnson, author of SKILL IN ACTION

February 1, 2019

by Robin Wood

Michelle C. Johnson will read from her book SKILL IN ACTION: RADICALIZING YOUR YOGA PRACTICE TO CREATE A JUST WORLD on Friday, February 8, at 6pm. We had the opportunity recently to ask Michelle a few questions to give you an idea of the concepts she will discuss during her presentation.

Q: Please tell us a little about the links between yoga and social justice work?

A: Yoga is a transformative practice physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The practice of yoga is about more than our individual transformation, it is also about our collective liberation. The principles of yoga invite practitioners to consider how to live in ways that decrease harm, increase being truthful about the cultural context and our social location and to live with an awareness of our devotion to something bigger than us. Given these times, it is important for yogis to consider how they can live into their yoga and transform the world.

Q: How did you come to this combined practice of yoga and social justice work?

A: I was an activist before a yogi. I entered into my teacher training with an anti-racism lens and a liberatory framework. With each introduction of the tenants of yoga I heard justice infused in them. I have only practiced yoga in this country and my experience as a black yoga teacher has reflected my experience as a black woman navigating the dominant culture. Yoga can be exclusive and a I don’t fit the norms of yoga in the U.S. based on race and body type. Given my experience of oppression in the world and oppression in the yoga room I saw the need for the yoga community to begin to explore the ways in which it is exclusive and not living into the universal truth of our oneness. I have had times when I experience liberation on my yoga mat but in the room I don’t feel free because I am the “only one” or I don’t see myself reflected in the class or teacher.

Q: What will people who aren’t yoga practitioners get from your presentation?

A: Justice is created through social change. Each one of us moves on this planet and needs to be thinking about our identities, our power, our privilege and the healing that needs to happen based on the identities that are oppressed by dominant culture. My presentation is for everyone because yoga and justice are for everyone. I speak about yoga as a way of living and being, not as a physical practice. Often the practice begins when we roll up our mat or step off our meditation cushion. Everyone can relate to navigating a culture with an awareness that we are moving in different ways. The presentation is for anyone interested in social change, creating a just world and deepening their understanding of power and privilege.

Q: What are you reading and recommending currently?

A: EMERGENT STRATEGY by Adrienne Maree Brown
RADICAL DHARMA by Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams
THE HEALING by Saeeda Hafiz

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

We Cast a Shadow – Maurice Carlos Ruffin

January 29, 2019

by Robin Wood

A “brilliant and devastating” (Booklist) debut for fans of Get Out and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, about a father’s obsessive quest to protect his son—even if it means turning him white.

“An incisive and necessary work of satire.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

“You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.” This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their nose narrowed. A complete demelanization will liberate you from the confines of being born in a black body—if you can afford it.

In this near-future Southern city plagued by fenced-in ghettos and police violence, more and more residents are turning to this experimental medical procedure. Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. The darker Nigel becomes, the more frightened his father feels. But how far will he go to protect his son? And will he destroy his family in the process?

This electrifying, hallucinatory novel is at once a keen satire of surviving racism in America and a profoundly moving family story. At its center is a father who just wants his son to thrive in a broken world. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work evokes the clear vision of Ralph Ellison, the dizzying menace of Franz Kafka, and the crackling prose of Vladimir Nabokov. We Cast a Shadow fearlessly shines a light on the violence we inherit, and on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.

Advance praise for We Cast a Shadow

“A full-throated novelistic debut of ferocious power and grace . . . a story that refracts the insanity of the world into a shape so unique you wonder how this book wasn’t there all along.”—Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2019

“Propulsive . . . We Cast a Shadow proves that the eeriest works of speculative fiction are those that hit closest to home.”—Vulture, 37 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2019

“One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2019.”—Los Angeles Times, 11 Authors to Watch in 2019

“A biting satire of anti-blackness in the US.”—Buzzfeed, 66 Books Coming in 2019 That You’ll Want to Keep on Your Radar

About the Author

Maurice Carlos Ruffin has been a recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and a winner of the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. A native of New Orleans, Ruffin is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

Praise For…

“Set in the post-post-racial South, We Cast a Shadow tells the story of a man—one of the few black men at his law firm—desperate to pay for his biracial son to undergo demelanization, desperate to ‘fix’ what he sees as his son’s fatal flaw. It is this desperation that haunts this novel and, in this desperation, we see just how pernicious racism is, how irrevocably it can alter how a man sees the world, himself, and those he loves. It is a chilling, unforgettable cautionary tale, and one we should all read and heed.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

“Propulsive . . . We Cast a Shadow proves that the eeriest works of speculative fiction are those that hit closest to home.”—Vulture, 37 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2019

“One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2019.”—Los Angeles Times, 11 Authors to Watch in 2019

“A biting satire of anti-blackness in the US.”—Buzzfeed, 66 Books Coming in 2019 That You’ll Want to Keep on Your Radar

“We Cast a Shadow is like a dispatch from the frontlines of the African-American psyche. Written with ruthless intelligence, it’s the story of a father’s love and how he tries to protect his son in a country that devours black lives through violence, incarceration, and poverty. . . . [Ruffin] can drive his story to the outer limits and beyond, and never lose the threads of bitter reality that make it so haunting. We Cast a Shadow soars on Ruffin’s unerring vision.”—Renée Graham, The Boston Globe

“A powerful novel of just how far one father will go to keep his son safe from the outside world.”—Parade, Debut Novels Everyone Will Be Reading in 2019

All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf – Katharine Smyth

January 29, 2019

by Robin Wood

A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most.

Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief.

Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console.

Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.

About the Author

Katharine Smyth is a graduate of Brown University. She has worked for The Paris Review and taught at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Praise For…

Nylon: “6 Great Books to Read This January”
Town & Country: “The Best New Books to Read This January”

Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived:

“Beautifully written…a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief… you’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”
— Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal

“Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story… gently entwining observations from Woolf’s classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her loe for her father, his profound alcoholism and hte unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”
— TIME

“This gorgeous, moving book gracefully moves between memoir and literary criticism…. Smyth’s writing possesses a unique ability to wend its way into your head, traveling into all the darkest corners of your mind, triggering thoughts on love and loss and family and memory you hadn’t known were lurking; it’s a profound experience, reading this book—one not to be missed.”
— Nylon

The Falconer – Dana Czapnik

January 29, 2019

by Robin Wood

“Coming-of-age in Manhattan may not have been done this brilliantly since Catcher in the Rye. That comparison has been made before, but this time, it’s true. Get ready to fall in love.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The Falconer is a novel of huge heart and fierce intelligence. It has restored my faith in pretty much everything.” —Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and co-owner of Parnassus Books

New York, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. At turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed, Lucy is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, scion to a prominent New York family who insists he wishes to resist upper crust fate.

As she navigates this complex relationship with all its youthful heartache, Lucy is seduced by a different kind of life—one less consumed by conventional success and the approval of men. A pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York’s bohemia invite her into their world, but soon even their paradise begins to show cracks.

Told in vibrant, quicksilver prose, The Falconer is a “wholly original coming-of-age story” (Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists), providing a snapshot of the city and America through the eyes of the children of the baby boomers grappling with privilege and the fading of radical hopes. New York Times bestselling author Claire Messud calls The Falconer an “exhilarating debut,” adding that “Dana Czapnik’s frank heroine has a voice, and a perspective, you won’t soon forget.”

About the Author

Dana Czapnik is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she was awarded an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. Czapnik earned her MFA at Hunter College where she was recognized with a Hertog Fellowship. She’s spent most of her career on the editorial side of professional sports including stints at ESPN the Magazine, the United States Tennis Association, and the Arena Football League. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan with her husband and son.

Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country – Pam Houston

January 29, 2019

by Robin Wood

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief…to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

Knopf presents: A Conversation with Susan Conley, author of ELSEY COME HOME

January 28, 2019

by Robin Wood

Publishing company Alfred A. Knopf put together an excellent Q & A with Susan Conley, author of ELSEY COME HOME to get you ready to meet her in store on January 31 at 6pm.

Q: How would you describe Elsey to readers meeting her for the first time?
A: Elsey is someone you want to talk to at the dinner party, because she’s self-deprecating and also bitingly funny. She can read a room and has a warm smile, and what might really attract you to her is that she’s curious about you and asks good questions. But she doesn’t want you to ask questions about her, because she doesn’t want to give her secrets away. She’s known great success as an acclaimed painter, so she moves through the world with a certain level of confidence on the outside. In this way she seems self-possessed, but by the time we meet her she’s struggling, and her life is unraveling, and she’s trying hard to hide it.

Along with her reading and book signing on Jan. 31, Susan Conley’s ELSEY COME HOME is our current Virtual Book Club pick. Read the book along with us and interact with us on social media by posting and following the hashtag #bbkwbookclub. Share your thoughts and photos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We’re @booksandbookskw.

Read the full Q & A from Alfred A. Knopf at: Conley Q&A

Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH

January 28, 2019

by Robin Wood

Photo credit: Gary A. Rosen

Sunday, February 10, at 2pm, a reading and book signing with Holly Goldberg Sloan, co-author of TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH. Meet author Holly Goldberg Sloan and get TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH two days before its official release.

Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of the New York Times bestsellers Counting by 7s and Short, has teamed up with Meg Wolitzer, the New York Times-bestselling author of novels for adults and kids, on TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH, a moving, exuberant, laugh-out-loud novel about friendship and family, told entirely in emails and letters.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Avery Bloom, who’s bookish, intense, and afraid of many things, particularly deep water, lives in New York City. Bett Devlin, who’s fearless, outgoing, and loves all animals as well as the ocean, lives in California. What they have in common is that they are both twelve years old, and are both being raised by single, gay dads.

When their dads fall in love, Bett and Avery are sent, against their will, to the same sleepaway camp. Their dads hope that they will find common ground and become friends – and possibly, one day, even sisters.

But things soon go off the rails for the girls (and for their dads too), and they find themselves on a summer adventure that neither of them could have predicted. Now that they can’t imagine life without each other, will the two girls (who sometimes call themselves Night Owl and Dogfish) figure out a way to be a family?

EARLY PRAISE FOR To Night Owl From Dogfish:

“Featuring a dramatic climax and a host of surprising twists, the novel affirms that families conventional and unconventional are families just the same.” – Publishers Weekly

“The Parent Trap gets a modern makeover in this entertaining and endearing middle-grade novel about two 12-year-old girls, one camp, and a summer that will bond them for a lifetime….A sweet and amusing tale that celebrates diversity while reinforcing the power of love and the importance of family.” – Kirkus

Debra Butler, contributing designer to SOME LIKE IT HOT

January 28, 2019

by Robin Wood

Tuesday, January 29, at 6pm, a meet & greet and book signing with Key West designer Debra Butler, contributing designer to SOME LIKE IT HOT.

New design book SOME LIKE IT HOT is a visual masterpiece and offers a peek into the minds of acclaimed Florida interior designers as they discuss their inspiration sources and what truly makes a room. More than 220 vibrant color images capture completed rooms and show a range of décor styles, from fresh takes on traditional to modern to “uniquely Florida.” The editorial is eloquent, presenting personal anecdotes, complex philosophies, and expert opinions in an approachable manner that appeals to readers of varying levels of interest. Words of wisdom leap off the pages to boldly anchor each chapter.

Specializing in custom cabinetry and design since 2006. Debra Butler launched All Out Designs, a home design & consulting business in 2011. Collaborating with other industry professionals and tradespersons to provide her clients with an all-inclusive, superior, high quality result, she opened Debra Butler Design Studio in 2012. Debra offers complete start to finish interior design and remodeling services, including custom cabinetry, countertops, tile, wall coverings, paint, appliances, plumbing fixtures, furniture, lighting, window coverings, original art and accessories.Debra’s inspiration combines her creative and artistic expressions with her client’s personalities and desires to ultimately reflect superior design results.

Contributing designers for SOME LIKE IT HOT range from global sensations such as Fanny Haim, Sam Robin, Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque, Jennifer Garrigues, and Todd Davis & Rob Brown to creative souls like Robert Rionda, Sharron Lannan, and Hillary Littlejohn Scurtis. Exceptional designers Amy Herman, Amy Kelly, Anil Kakar, Brianna Michelle, David L. Smith, Deborah Wecselman, Debra Butler, Eve Glass Beres, Jonathan Parks, Juan Poggi, Judith Liegeois, Kurt Dannwolf & Lachmee Chin, Laura Martzell, Leili Fatemi, Margarita & Cristina Courtney, Pamela Iannacio, Phil Kean, Robert Zemnickis, Sandra Diaz-Velasco, Sarah Zohar, Susan Lovelace and Whitney Bloom divulge their philosophies about style and taste through insider tips and accessible advice, covering everything from how to best begin a project to how to select just the right finishing touch. Many have designed residential spaces for celebrities, dignitaries, politicians, and titans of business, yet each approaches his or her process with a method that is unique to their talent. Several are award-winners, having collected some of their industry’s most impressive titles. But all are artists, drawing on personal and professional experience to consistently deliver environments that perfectly capture their clients’ hopes and wishes.

The featured designers are all based in Florida, from Miami and South Beach to Central Florida and the Panhandle, but many possess histories and cultures that crisscross the globe. Whether you are seeking someone to complete your next major project or searching for a spark of creativity for your own home, SOME LIKE IT HOT has plenty of inspiration as you immerse yourself in the world of beautiful interior design.