We will be open again for browsing Friday, May 14th
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It's been a long time coming and we've all been waiting. We are finally ready to welcome our readers back into our store for the full bookstore experience.
Thank you to all of our supporters and readers for sticking with us throughout the last year.
We can't wait to see you in the store again in two weeks! We'll send out more details as the date approaches.
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In the meantime, come visit us for our appointment shopping.
Our booksellers are eager to pair you up with a book you'll love.
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"THIS PLANT REFERNCE HAS ALL THE PERFECT DESCRIPTORS; IT'S CHARMING, ERUDITE, EDUCATIONAL, AND AESTHETICALLY PLEASING." - BOOKLIST
Around the World in 80 Plants By Jonathan Drori, Illustrator Lucille Clerc
An inspirational and beautifully illustrated book that tells the stories of 80 plants from around the globe.
In his follow-up to the bestselling Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish "moss" of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilizations to flourish. With a colorful cast of characters all brought to life by illustrator Lucille Clerc, this is a botanical journey of beauty and brilliance.
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“EXCELLENT REVISIONIST HISTORY… ANOTHER GLADWELL EVERYTHING-YOU-THOUGHT-YOU-KNEW-WAS-WRONG PAGE-TURNER.”—KIRKUS
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War By Malcolm Gladwell
An exploration of how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war
In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?
In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”
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AUTHOR OF AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF EGYPT
From one of the foremost writers in the Arab world comes a new novel banned across much of the region--a devastating work of fiction about the Egyptian revolution, taking us inside the battle raging between those in power and those prepared to lay down their lives in the defense of freedom.
Cairo, 2011. After decades under a repressive regime, tensions are rising in the city streets. No one is out of reach of the revolution. There is General Alwany, a high-ranking member of the government's security agency, a pious man who loves his family yet won't hesitate to torture enemies of the state; Asma, a young teacher who chafes against the brazen corruption at her school; Ashraf, an out-of-work actor who is having an affair with his maid and who gets pulled into Tahrir Square through a chance encounter; Nourhan, a television personality who loyally defends those in power; and many more.
As these lives collide, a new generation finds a voice, love blossoms across class divides, and the revolution gains strength. Even the general finds himself at a crossroads as his own daughter joins the protests. Yet the old regime will not give up without a fight.
With an unforgettably vivid cast of characters and a heart-pounding narrative, Alaa Al Aswany gives us a deeply human portrait of the Egyptian Revolution, and an impassioned retelling of his country's turbulent recent history.
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“HISTORICAL FICTION AT ITS BEST.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS
Revelations By Mary Sharratt
Bishop’s Lynn, England, 1413. At the age of forty, Margery Kempe has nearly died giving birth to her fourteenth child. Fearing that another pregnancy might kill her, she makes a vow of celibacy, but she can’t trust her husband to keep his end of the bargain. Desperate for counsel, she visits the famous anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich.
Pouring out her heart, Margery confesses that she has been haunted by visceral religious visions. Julian then offers up a confession of her own: she has written a secret, radical book about her own visions, Revelations of Divine Love. Nearing the end of her life and fearing Church authorities, Julian entrusts her precious book to Margery, who sets off the adventure of a lifetime to secretly spread Julian's words.
Mary Sharratt vividly brings the medieval past to life as Margery blazes her trail across Europe and the Near East, finding her unique spiritual path and vocation. It's not in a cloistered cell like Julian, but in the full bustle of worldly existence with all its wonders and perils.
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SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE
Chaos on CatNet: Sequel to Catfishing on CatNet By Naomi Kritzer
It takes an AI to catch an AI in Chaos on CatNet, the follow-up to Naomi Kritzer's award-winning near future YA thriller.
When a mysterious entity starts hacking into social networks and chat rooms to instigate paranoia and violence in the real world, it’s up to Steph and her new friend, Nell, to find a way to stop it—with the help of their benevolent AI friend, CheshireCat.
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LIMITED SIGNED COPIES AND EMBROIDERED PATCHES AVAILABLE
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
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23rd US POET LAUREATE
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry By Joy Harjo
A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature la ureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
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AVAILABLE MAY 4th
Great Circle: A novel By Maggie Shipstead
"Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead, is sure to become a must-read novel in 2021. Brimming with characters to love or hate, it’s a can’t-put-down saga spanning 100 years in alternating narratives a lifetime apart."- Jean
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
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Upcoming virtual book events
Discover and new books from the comfort of your own home
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Sorrowland: A Novel By Rivers Solomon--Tuesday May 4th 2021, 5:00pm
Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.
** Purchase your copy of Sorrowland through Next Chapter Booksellers to gain entry to this event
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Outside the Margins: The Speculative Fiction Book Club discusses Tender Is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica--Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.
Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
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The Vines By Shelley Nolden in conversation with Editor Benee Knauer--Monday, May 10, 2021 - 7:00pm
In the shadows of New York City lies forbidden North Brother Island, where the remains of a shuttered hospital hide the haunting memories of century-old quarantines and human experiments. The ruins conceal the scarred and beautiful Cora, imprisoned by contagions and the doctors who torment her.
When Finn, a young urban explorer, arrives on the island and glimpses an enigmatic beauty through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past--and his own family's dark secrets. By unraveling these mysteries, will he be able to save Cora? Will Cora meet the same tragic ending as the thousands who've already perished on the island?
The Vines intertwines North Brother Island's horrific and elusive history with a captivating tale of love, betrayal, survival, and loss.
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Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations By Jonny Sun in conversation with Hrishikesh Hirway-- Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - 7:00pm
Jonny Sun is back with a collection of essays and other writings in his unique, funny, and heartfelt style. The pieces range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners.
Jonny's honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression will connect deeply with his fans as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world.
It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.
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Next Chapter Book Club discusses If I Had Your Face: A Novel By Frances Cha--Sunday, May 30, 2021 - 4:00pm
Kyuri is an achingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a Seoul “room salon,” an exclusive underground bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake threatens her livelihood.
Kyuri’s roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the heir to one of the country’s biggest conglomerates.
Down the hall in their building lives Ara, a hairstylist whose two preoccupations sustain her: an obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that she hopes will change her life.
And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to have a baby that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise in Korea’s brutal economy.
Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal, in which their tentative friendships may turn out to be the thing that ultimately saves them.
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Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else By Jordan Ellenberg in conversation with Steve Strogatz-- Tuesday, June 1, 2021 - 7:00pm
How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real.
If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.
Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word geometry, from the Greek for measuring the world. If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world--it explains it. Shape shows us how.
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The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World By James D’Amato-- Friday, June 4, 2021 - 7:00pm
The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World
Level up your Game Master skills with these fun, interactive prompts and activities to help your worldbuilding from RPG expert James D’Amato.
Make your next campaign truly unique with the help of this interactive guide to world building!
From RPG expert James D’Amato comes a fun new guide that teaches beginner and experienced gamers alike how to build and create their own game elements for customizing existing adventures or creating new stories from scratch. The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Worldbuilding Guide includes dozens of activities for a wide range of genres from fantasy and sci-fi to horror and x-punk. This lively and interactive book helps Game Masters create dynamic destinations, powerful items, shadowy organizations, compelling villains, and more.
Make the most of your gaming experience with these unique and personalized ideas for your gaming group’s next adventures!
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The Ninth Metal (The Comet Cycle #1) By Benjamin Percy-- Monday, June 7, 2021 - 7:00pm
IT BEGAN WITH A COMET…
At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet’s debris field and the sky rained fire.
The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon.
John Frontier—the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall—returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.
In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family—the Frontiers—hopes to control it all.
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Thanks for reading
all the way to the end.
We've got lots more great books in the store. We hope you'll talk to us soon for a recommendation. Follow us on social media for the latest news. We’re Next Chapter Booksellers on Facebook; we’re @nextchapterbooksellers on Instagram; and we’re @NextChapterMN on Twitter.
--all of us at Next Chapter Booksellers
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