Registration for our 8th annual summer art contest is now open. The registration fee includes a 4×12 canvas. Use the canvas to show your artistic abilities. Paint, collage, pencil, whatever suits your style.
For more information and to register please visit https://booksandbookskw.com/art-contest/
There’s nothing so interesting as reading a history of a profound event when you have an uncomfortable dread that you are living through a run-up to its successor, in this time when a modern “Demon of Unrest” is plaguing our nation.
Legendary story-teller Larson gives us a detailed account of the period from Lincoln’s election in November, 1860, to the fall of Ft. Sumter on April 13, 1861 and the beginning of the Civil War. We are with the protagonists, North and South, each step of the way as the opportunities for compromise slip away and war fever takes hold. The deadly bombardment of the Fort becomes not a military battle, but a grander version of the duels that still animated Southern manhood.
In this brilliant addition to Civil War literature, Larson is a master of the telling detail, the moment or quotation that makes us pause. Like this from the southern Senator and plantation owner James Henry Hammond, famed for claiming “Cotton is King.” Near the end of the war, he acknowledged:
We are here two races, white and black, now both equally American, holding each other in the closest embrace, and utterly unable to extricate ourselves from it, a problem so difficult, so complicated, and so momentous, never was placed in charge of any portion of mankind and on its solution rests our all.
Who among us now, one-hundred sixty-five years later, would say that we have found that solution.
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month invites us to explore and appreciate the cultures, history, traditions and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Here are a few of the AAPI books we are reading and recommending. Find more in-store or ask for a recommendation.
Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Buckle up tight as Damani takes you on a ride through her town, or is it any town? Full of fierce commentary on social injustice, the strength of community, loyalty and love in all its messy guises. Fast, furious and fun. A great read!
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds”, a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
– George Cooper (store co-founder)
https://shop.booksandbookskw.com/book/9780063031319Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
Raised by her mother in exile, Xingyin must flee her home in the middle of the night. Isolated and alone, she finds refuge in the royal court she’s trying to escape by hiding in plain sight. Xingyin trains as an archer and never wavers in rescuing her mother, battling epic monsters, other immortals and her own emotions. Xingyin finds her own power and strength. This is an enthralling tale that will sweep you off into the night.
– Rio (staff)
Summer Sisters, Judy Blume’s iconic novel of female friendship, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a beautiful new cover – and it’s the August 2023 Read with Jenna book pick!
Jenna writes, “It’s about that time in your life where you’re trying to figure out who you’re going to be. It is the perfect, perfect beach read but that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy read.” Read more of what Jenna says at https://www.today.com/shop/read-with-jenna.
Plus, keep an eye out for more news about the Summer Sisters tv show, currently in development.
You can order a signed copy of Summer Sisters from us. All copies ordered after this date (8/1/23) will feature the new cover. If you want the book signed, please note in your order comments that you’d like a signed copy. Due to volume, it will be signed only. Also, please note, signed copies ordered now will not ship until November 2023 at the earliest.
Do you want to fight climate change, battle a dragon, reminisce about lost friends, fight the patriarchy, and more!? Try this new Arthurian Legend on for size.
Bookseller Riona Jean picked Perilous Times as the August featured staff pick because it mixed her favorite genres, fantasy and dystopias.
“It remixes the Arthurian Legend in a new and dynamic way,” she writes.
“Mariam is an ecowarrior with FETA, fighting to save the planet from extreme climate change and rising sea levels. Kay is one of King Arthur’s knights, bound to a resurrection tree by Merlin, called to action whenever Britain is in trouble. With great swaths of the UK under water and major cities falling into ruin, Mariam and Kay stumble their way through trying to do the right thing. Watch out for Lancelot, corporate greed, and a nefarious plot to resurrect Arthur getting in the way!”
“Witty, insightful, and poignant, Perilous Times perfectly marries fantastical legend and dystopian new world order.”
Ed note: Riona read Perilous Times on her Kobo Clara 2E, it’s waterproof, made with recycled plastic, and we have them at the bookstore!
“With White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link puts her sui generis magic to work on the older magic of fairy tales, forging something revelatory. These stories delight and terrify us, and seem to say, Yes, this is the way the world works—haven’t you been paying attention? I am now. What a glorious and bewitching gift this book is.
— Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
Clare is better at this than I am. I just want to stand around the store and hand White Cat, Black Dog to people. Kelly Link’s newest collection of fairy tale-inspired short stories defies easy description, but is a joy to read.
It’s hard to explain, I say, but it’s really good. It’s smart, funny, creepy, and sneaky. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. It’s excellent – and different – and, after you read it, you might find yourself even more afraid of business travel.
Link takes a nugget of a fairy tale, even if you don’t know the story, you’ll recognize the elements – three princes sent on three quests, the dangers of debts owed to the fae. She takes something from the original tale, and weaves something new and unexpected, meaningful and unexplained.
These are the kind of stories that stick with you. Sometimes enchanting, sometimes scary, always thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Get out your headphones, THE FAREWELL TOUR will make you want to crank up the music. But first, we are delighted to introduce you to author Stephanie Clifford, who took time out of her busy book launch to chat with us. (Read Assistant Manager Allison’s review of THE FAREWELL TOUR.)
Q: How big a music fan were you before writing THE FAREWELL TOUR? What was the first album you bought with your own money?
A: I’ve always adored music, from opera to musicals to rock, and play piano and guitar. But I didn’t fall in love with country until high school—I grew up in Seattle, and worked one summer in Arkansas doing trail maintenance in a national forest there, where the only radio station we could get was country. Suddenly, I was hooked, and returned to Seattle at the height of the grunge era to listen to, like, Tammy Wynette—no one in Seattle understood what on earth I was doing.
First album—for some reason it wasn’t an album I first bought, but a cassette-tape single: Prince (cool), “Arms of Orion” (not very cool).
Q: What was the idea that sparked this novel?
A: Before I began writing this book, I happened to be on a literature-of-the-American-West kick, so Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. The landscapes they wrote about were arid and harsh, and I didn’t recognize them. I felt like there was this missing piece of the “Western” genre, that the Northwest, this place I had grown up in—and which, by the way, takes up a rather large geographical chunk of the West!—was completely ignored. So I began playing with the idea of writing a Western—not a shootout-and-saloons story, but one that considers the myth of the West, and how the landscape shapes its characters—that was set in the historical Northwest.
As I read more and more, I also came to feel that even for writers who were women or were sympathetic to women, like Wallace Stegner or Willa Cather, in the era I was writing about—the book starts in the 1920s—the women in these books literally didn’t get to leave their houses. They were stuck inside, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. And I thought of the fierce Northwest women I knew, who would basically skin a deer in the morning and then put on lipstick and go shopping at I. Magnin’s downtown in the afternoon, and I thought, just try keeping a Northwest woman inside her house; good luck.
That became the genesis for Lil, the main character. I wanted to get across the grit and battle scars that so many Northwest women of that era had, and also the desire to survive, and give her a life where she has to be out in the world—in this case, via singing country music—and see what happens.
Q: What was interesting to you about this particular time in history, women’s history or music history?
A: First of all, it’s just this incredibly rich time to imagine and research—Lil’s born on the cusp of the Depression, gets her start as a singer in WWII-era Tacoma, lands in Nashville in its golden era—all a gold mine for a writer. I also wanted her to have to navigate her career and art in a time that wasn’t very open to working women generally, and certainly not in the country music. She’s going to have to make real concessions in order to succeed, which is always interesting to write about.
Q: What were your top 3 songs of 2022? What would be your picks for saddest song? Happiest?
A: Because I was so deep into research for 2022, my Spotify most-played for the year looks like it’s out of 1962! Tammy Wynette, “Apartment No. 9” – Tammy makes everything sound heartbreaking; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Didn’t It Rain” – an incredible, pioneering guitar player; “He Is Fine,” Secret Sisters, a fabulous duo. Happiest – I love a musical number for a pick-me-up (my first book, Everybody Rise, has tons of musical references, and the title is from a Sondheim song) – so maybe a classic like “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Saddest, there’s a scene in the book where the characters are discussing the saddest country song, and I think Lil gets it right when she suggests Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham,” written after Harris’s musical partner, Gram Parsons, overdosed and died. Just try not to cry when you hear Emmylou sing that one.
Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?
A: I just (accidentally) read back-to-back two wonderful, thoughtful books on women during times of civil war/domestic terrorism in the ’70s: V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, set in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka during the civil war there; and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The books made perfect companions and almost talked to each other.
It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.
Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.
As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.
Allison enjoyed both the book and audiobook versions of this novel. She writes, “Stephanie Clifford fills out the singular story of one woman’s hard rise to country music stardom with the history of country music and the evolution of American culture. Water Lil is a character you won’t soon forget.”
“This well researched novel is also a love letter to country music and the west. If you’ve spent time with either, this novel will be hell bent on tugging at your heartstrings.”
Allison’s playlist for the book includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the song “Bo Weavil Blues” is central to the novel).
Local mover & shaker Cricket Desmarais is a writer, artist, dancer and scientist. She is also the author of LOVE ON THE ROCK, a compilation of her early 2000’s dating column in the Florida Keys Keynoter. We had a chance to chat with her, in advance of her Feb. 3 event (6:30 in person at Hugh’s View, register here), and find out why now is the time for a second chance for LOVE ON THE ROCK.
Q: If you would, tell us a little bit about LOVE ON THE ROCK?
A: LOVE ON THE ROCK is a compilation of work from my year as a dating columnist for Florida Keys Keynoter in 2005 – 2006. I like to think of it as a “time-capsule laugh” that paints a picture of what it was like (and possibly still is) to date on a tiny island. I spent that year with my dating life under a microscope and connected with other “Singletons” about theirs. I researched our human biological drive and social “norms” to make sense of it all. And I called on my readers to reflect on their own beliefs and behaviors. There’s some obvious humor in that, but there’s also a lot of heart.
Q: What made you decide now was the time to collect and republish a column that originally ran in 2005-2006?
A: I have wanted to do this for over a decade but the “free” time to do so just never seemed to arrive. I made a commitment last year to get several completed projects out of my computer and into the world. This one seemed like the easiest since I knew people had already read the original, lessening any anxiety of putting it out there.
Q: What was it like to reread work you’d written 17 years prior?
A: A little bit cringe but also a bit hopeful. I was reminded that I once had a sense of humor & a pretty active dating life
Q: What was the process of getting the book ready for publication like?
A: Grueling. Being an artist comes with a lot of bootstrapping. In an ideal world, someone else would do all the things. I highly recommend not copy editing your own work. Ever. You’ll regret it when you read teh first print run of you book, I garauntee. Wink.
Q: Did you edit the columns or is this what people would have read in the Keynoter?
A: There was some necessary copy editing and occasional sentence structure shifts or omissions, but it’s pretty much the same and in the same order as they came out. I thought about editing some of it to be more inclusive around gender identity but decided against it. This is a snapshot of life in the mid aughts. History is what it is, & erasing or changing that didn’t sit right.
Q: Give us a teaser. What’s one of your favorite stories from the book?
A: The columns were originally printed in a Keys-wide, family-friendly publication. You can imagine that talking about dating and all that goes with it can get pretty limited when you layer in censorship. I had to be creative and used a lot of innuendos. Midway into the year, my publisher finally gave me the green light to write a piece on sex. I invited people to email me their insights, stories, and secrets to help me write “The Proper Naughty Column” and got an inbox full of – nothing.
That column actually became one of my favorites because I somehow managed to not only come up with a column for that week but also include a fantastic Sharon Olds’ poem (“The Solution”). It starts like this:
Finally, they got the Singles problem under / control, they made it scientific They opened huge/ Sex Centers – you could simply go and state what you / wanted and they would find you someone who wanted that/ too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like To/ Be Touched and Held and when someone came and / stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.
It gets more saucy & hilarious after that. Sharon Olds was one of my professors at NYU, so including her felt like an homage to her.
It also references interesting tidbits about the sexual behavior of animals. Because everyone should know that “Australian marsupial mice die of exhaustion from their twelve-hour romps, bat rays are romantics and do it only in the moonlight, and a pig’s big O is said to last half an hour Lucky, lucky.”
Q: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
A: Mostly I just want to give people a laugh & a bit of an escape. If they could take anything away from it, I’d hope for them it would be a sense of humor about their own dating history, an invitation to take the time to explore & enjoy who they truly are without the need for that special “other” while maintaining hope for what’s to come.
Q: How long have you lived in Key West? What originally brought you here and from where?
A: I came to Key West in 1997-1999 from Brooklyn during my grad school summer & winter breaks, working as a mate in the charter boat industry while staying at my mom’s. The creative culture of the City fed me but not as much as the daily connection to the sea I had when here. After I graduated, I came back “for now,” thinking I’d save money to move back to the central coast of California, where I lived prior to NYU. I did move there shortly thereafter but quickly circled back. It’s special there, too, but there’s no place like home.
Q: In addition to being a writer, you’re an artist, a dancer, a yoga practitioner and teacher, as well as a marine scientist. How do your interests come together and feed your writing?
A: I don’t know that they’re ever apart, really. It’s a bit more symbiotic, I think, even though the expression of each is different from one to the other. The common thread is observation—of the self & of the outer world— powered by a discipline of showing up for it, for staying in the moment of what is & keeping an open heart while doing so. Writing a poem, monitoring coral, dancing in the Studios’ window dressed like a wind-up doll – they all evoke a sense of connection & wonder for & in me. All of that informs & influences my life & the expression of it.
Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?
A: I’m reading Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald. It’s a gorgeous and relatable blend of science writing & memoir – coral ecology & restoration & her daughter’s mental health struggle— that explores hope and healing against all odds.
Black history and the contemporary Black experience encompass an incredible range of emotions, lives and circumstances. Come explore Black rage, and Black joy, Black curiosity and Black hope. Read about what makes our experiences universal, what we share as Black communities and cultures, and what makes us unique.
Here are the books featured in this graphic, but we have many more in store. Stop by or follow us on social media for recommendations during Black History Month and throughout the year.
Nigel and the Moon by Antwan Eady, illustrated by Gracey Zhang
The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones & Renée Watson, illustrated by Nikkolas Smith
Stones: Poems by Kevin Young
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival by Jabari Asim
The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings
The Keeper by Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes, illustrated by Marco Finnegan
