Florida Keys & Key West Chef’s Table by Victoria Shearer

Surrounded by water, the Florida Keys yields a bounty that easily could qualify as the eighth wonder of the world. The Keys can confidently boast that nowhere else in the continental US will you find fresher, more innovatively prepared fish and seafood. Special natural resources, from stone crabs and yellowtail snapper to cracked conch and key limes, are served any way you like and the relaxed atmosphere of the restaurants is reflected in the cuisine. Be it a roadside cafe or a resort dining room, the cuisine is all “Keys casual.” With recipes for the home cook from Florida’s most celebrated eateries and showcasing over 200 full-color photos featuring mouth-watering dishes, famous chefs, and lots of local flavor, Florida Keys & Key West Chef’s Table is the ultimate gift and keepsake cookbook for both tourists and residents of the Keys.

Gift cards = happy choices

Not sure if your gift recipient would enjoy The Marriage Portrait or Ina Garten’s Go-To Dinners? Give a Books & Books @ The Studios of Key West gift card and let your loved ones pick out their own #nextfavoriteread.

Call the store or order online. Individual gift cards are mailed First Class mail for free. Gift cards are good for books, art supplies and holiday gifts, and your recipient can shop online or in store.

We have several ways to make your gift card stand out. For $4.99 (plus shipping), add a fun pouch that makes a great gift card presentation and then can be used for coins or other small knickknacks.

For $2.00 extra (First Class shipping included free) have the gift card mailed in a festive holiday card. For any of these gift card options, upgrade to tracked, 3-day expected Priority mail for $9.00. Note your upgrade choices in the comments section if ordering online.

Courtesy of the American Booksellers Association

November Staff Pick: A Minor Chorus

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (W. W. Norton & Company), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

From November 2022: The first thing we ask when we meet a new bookseller is: What are you reading and recommending?

Allison Rand, our new assistant manager, hit her answer out of the park, offering up this month’s featured staff pick, A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Read her review below.

Allison is an experienced bookseller, having worked at RJ Julia in Madison, CT, The Harvard Coop in Cambridge, MA, and Collected Works in Santa Fe, NM.

Her favorite genre is literary fiction. She recently read Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout and The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, and is currently reading Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux.

***

A gorgeously written debut novel that poses the question, how can I write a novel, how can I expose myself to life and love through the lens of queer indigenous authenticity.

Growing up Cree in Northern Alberta, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s narrator knows he has to leave the rez. Now, living in Edmonton as a grad student and meeting men on Tinder, he starts slipping into a depression.  He begins to ask, what of love, of excess, of finding the loudness, the bigness of one’s own voice and expression?  He poses these questions and more to his people from the past and academic present. 

In a stream of conversations, Belcourt uses the language of academia and literature to find a path to the heart. If you loved Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, and Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark, you won’t want to miss A Minor Chorus

~ Allison, Assistant Manager

    

Shop Books & Books for the Holidays

In addition to books for all ages and a wide range of interests and tastes, we have lots of fun gifts – some you can only find in store during the lead up to the holiday season. Come see what’s new!

There are art supplies and tarot cards, puzzles and games, socks and crafts and swag with our name on it. We’re happy to help you find just the right gift for everyone on your list, and wrap it for you! Or add a Books & Books tote bag to your gift for instant eco-minded wrapping.

And, if you’re just not sure, a gift card is always a perfect fit!

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, on sale December 6th, 2022

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father— the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

“A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important.” —Ron Chernow

“A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography…Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them.” —Oprah Daily

Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

No Plan B by Jack Reacher

The gripping new Jack Reacher thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child

No Plan B is not to be missed. A perfectly plotted, fast-paced thriller, with bigger twists than ever before. It’s no wonder Jack Reacher is everyone’s favorite rebel hero.”—Karin Slaughter

In Gerrardsville, Colorado, a woman dies under the wheels of a moving bus. The death is ruled a suicide. But Jack Reacher saw what really happened: A man in a gray hoodie and jeans, moving stealthily, pushed the victim to her demise—before swiftly grabbing the dead woman’s purse and strolling away.

When another homicide is ruled an accident, Reacher knows this is no coincidence. With a killer on the loose, Reacher has no time to waste to track down those responsible. 

But Reacher is unaware that these crimes are part of something much larger and more far-reaching: an arsonist out for revenge, a foster kid on the run, a cabal of powerful people involved in a secret conspiracy with many moving parts. There is no room for error, but they make a grave one. They don’t consider Reacher a threat. “There’s too much at stake to start running from shadows.” But Reacher isn’t a shadow. He is flesh and blood. And relentless when it comes to making things right.

For when the threat is Reacher, there is No Plan B.

Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser

For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës.

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family’s considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come.

But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration. With Scott’s more prolific publication and even greater fame, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters’ incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age 14 in 1793, through to Jane’s fall from the pinnacle of fame in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family’s massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.

Author visit to Sigsbee!

S.A. Rodriguez at Sigsbee Charter School
Friday, November 4th 2022 @ 2pm

On Friday, 11/4 author S.A. Rodriquez will visit Sigsbee to discuss her book Treasure Tracks with students.

Order your copy of Treasure Tracks here by Tuesday November 1st (11:49pm ET) to have your copy available for the author to sign at the event at Sigsbee on the 4th. (Select “in-store pick up” and we will deliver to the school the day of the event). Use coupon code SIGS15 to save 15%.

Orders received after 11/1 will be delivered to the school before Thanksgiving break.

To purchase a copy of the book at the event bring cash or check (payable to Books & Books) for $20, includes tax.

Twelve-year-old Fernando “Fin” joins his grandfather on a secret quest to find a long-lost treasure swept to sea. But when their first mission takes a near-deadly turn, leaving his abuelo weak and unable to speak, Fin’s left to navigate the hunt alone. Well, not exactly alone—his boring, totally unadventurous dad agrees to help out. With danger lurking at every turn, Fin dives into the mission in order to save Abuelo’s life. But between Dad’s constant worrying, unwanted diving babysitters, and harrowing encounters in the deep sea, the boy finds himself in a race against time to locate the treasure. If he can’t succeed? He fears he might lose Abuelo for good.

Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition by Amber Tamblyn and others

Amber Tamblyn, Jessica Valenti, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jia Tolentino, Samantha Irby, Meredith Talusan, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Amy Poehler, America Ferrera, Ada Lim n, and Huma Abedin are among the impressive list of authors contributing to this powerful collection of essays that takes a fresh and powerful look at our relationship to intuition and how we can harness it to change our everyday lives and the world.

For generations, women have been taught to ignore their intuitive intelligence, whether in their personal lives or professional ones, in favor of making logical, evidence-based decisions. But what if that small voice or deeper knowing was our greatest gift, an untapped power we could use to affect positive change?

Edited by award-winning author, activist, and actress Amber Tamblyn, Listening in the Dark is a compilation of some of today’s most striking women visionaries across industries–in literature, science, art, education, medicine, and politics–who share their experiences engaging with their own inner wisdom in pivotal, crossroad moments.

Filled with deeply personal and revelatory essays, Listening in the Dark will empower readers to reconnect with their own unique intuitive process, to see it as the precious resource it is, and to be unafraid to listen to all that it has to say and all that it has to offer.