Howdy, readers! We're currently getting set up for the David Mura event here in an hour or two. But I have a lot to tell you about today -- this newsletter is a doozy.

David has added a small section of Spanish-language books! Though it's not a huge number of titles, there's a wide variety on offer here, including some of our bestsellers. David had this to say:

To peruse our Spanish selection on the website, go to our advanced search page and select 'Spanish' in the language dropdown menu!

Joe ordered us some zines from our friends at Microcosm Publishing! The focus here is on train-hopping: self-published journal/memoirs about riding the rails in different countries. It's a fascinating topic, and reading one of these will take you there. We've also got some other Microcosm favorites here and around the store, including the only commercially available book that explains how to induce abortion.

For my part, I was focused on our kid's section, expanding our Graphic Novels for Young Readers shelf with some personal favorites and popular authors we'd been missing out on. Kids love comics!! All-ages graphic novels are also, in my opinion, easier for older readers to enjoy than many all-ages prose books: unlike written language, the language of image knows no age. Favorites on this shelf for young and old alike include Bone, Nimona, Salt Magic, Mamo (see below), Island Book, Squire, and Little Monarchs.

We were forced to close early Wednesday and remain closed Thursday last week due to so much snow. We made the difficult choice to push back last Friday's meeting of the Sci-Fi Fantasy Club to March 31st (see below for further details).

We're very excited about local author Kat Howard's next book, A Sleight of Shadows, sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians. It's coming out April 25th, and we'll be having a special release event here at 6pm. Preorder here for a personalized copy!

Chairs have returned to the store, as the pandemic weighs less heavily on our minds (and Minnesota's numbers remain solid).

Our rotating zodiac display has entered Pisces Season! The books on this display will change daily, so come check it out!

The Levee — William Kent Krueger

An audio original novella from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and the Cork O'Connor series, The Levee is a propulsive, heartfelt tale of courage, cowardice, and sacrifice in a historic moment when the indomitable human spirit is pitted against the destructive power of nature. It’s 1927, and the most devastating flood in American history has swelled the Mississippi River to a width of eighty miles. In an attempt to save a family trapped by the rising water, four men in a tiny rowboat battle the treacherous flow: three are convicts, on loan from the local prison and pressed into service; the fourth, the leader of the team, is driven by his own hidden motives. But to their surprise upon arrival at Ballymore, an ancestral home protected by a high, circular levee, not everyone in the family feels the need to be saved. Pride, greed, loyalty, and even love create their own complex currents behind the massive wall. As the threat from the flood increases and time ticks away, the crew and the family must decide on a course of action, and a desperate plan is hatched to save the weakening levee and all it was built to protect.

The Lives We Actually Have — Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie

We live in a world that demands relentless perfection, but what if our actual lives don’t feel very #blessed? Might our everyday existence be worthy of a blessing too? Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie offer creative, faith-based blessings that center gratitude and hope while acknowledging our real, messy lives. Formatted like a prayer book, The Lives We Actually Have is an oasis and a landing spot for weary souls, with blessings that focus on the full range of human moments: garbage days, lovely days, grief-stricken days, and even (especially) completely ordinary days. These heartfelt blessings are a chance to exhale when we feel everything from careworn to restless, devastated to bored. Let’s have a reminder that we don’t need to wait for perfect lives when we can bless the lives we actually have.

The Crane Husband — Kelly Barnhill

Enchantment — Katherine May

Many of us feel trapped in a grind of constant change, perpetually depleted. In Enchantment, Katherine May invites us on a journey to reawaken our innate sense of wonder and awe. She shares stories of her own struggles with work, family, and the aftereffects of pandemic. She explores the restorative properties of the natural world, identifying the quiet traces of magic that can be found only when we look for them. Through deliberate attention and ritual, she unearths the potency and nourishment that come from reconnection with our immediate environment. Blending lyricism and storytelling, Enchantment invites us to open the door to human experience in all its sensual complexity, and to find the beauty waiting for us there.

Old Babes in the Wood — Margaret Atwood

One of the great visionaries of the modern canon returns with fifteen stories exploring the full warp and weft of experience. The two sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” is told by the daughter of a purported witch. At the heart of the collection are seven stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after. Returning to short fiction for the first time since 2014, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

Birnam Wood — Eleanor Catton

On New Zealand’s South Island, a landslide has left a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, the guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops where no one will notice: to occupy the farm would mean a shot at solvency at last. But billionaire Robert Lemoine has purchased the plot to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Birnam Wood; though they’re poles apart politically, they have common enemies. But can they trust one another? A gripping thriller from a Booker winner, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are.

As always, our newsletter can't fit everything, so check out the other new arrivals and recent bestsellers on our website!

Literary Bridges marks 50 years of the Onionskins, a writing group, featuring Pat Barone, Carol Masters, Sharon Chmielarz, Donna Isaac, Mary Kay Rummel, Norita Dittberner-Jax, and Kate Hallett, Dayton. Host Donna Isaac states: "It has been my privilege to be part of this writing group for several years, but it has been around for 50, so it's time to honor that dedication. We will also remember Ethna McKiernan, who sadly passed away, but who was integral to the group, and Margaret Hasse, who will be out of town. Since it is Women's History Month, how fitting to celebrate these talented, brilliant women poets!"

V. V. Ganeshananthan (Brotherless Night) with Zeke Caligiuri and Aamina Ahmad, moderated by Leslie Nneka Arimah

Jaffna, 1981: sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. As a vicious civil war tears through her home, she becomes a field medic instead, for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state violence, are fighting for a separate homeland. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers Sashi decides to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, embarking on a dangerous path that will change her forever. Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home. V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She also co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Manga Club: Solanin

Come to NCB at 5pm on the second Saturday of every month to talk manga with other weebs! Hosted by our resident manga experts Emily and Graham (yours truly), the Manga Club provides free Japanese snacks, a 10% discount on ALL manga in the store, and most importantly, a forum to discuss a new title every month. For our fifth meeting, we're finally reading Inio Asano's Solanin! Join us to discuss this sweet and wistful coming-of-age story about the difficulty of finding your place in society and the liberating power of self-expression. It would be incredibly reductive to call it the Japanese 'Scott Pilgrim,' but I already said it, so there.

Join us at 6pm on Tuesday, March 14 for an evening of delightful poetry! We'll have three acclaimed local poets:

Heidi Barr is a writer and wellness coach with over fifteen years of experience in health promotion. Her work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She is also editor of "The Mindful Kitchen," a wellness column in The Wayfarer Magazine. She lives with her family in Minnesota. Collisions of Earth and Sky is an invitation to live in a way that is attuned to nature. It is a journey of self-inquiry for digging into our origins and roots, figuring out what it means to be a good community member--both to other humans and to nonhumans--and integrating those truths so we can add to the healing of the world.

Ellie Roscher is hosts the Unlikely Conversations podcast and teaches writing and yoga at The Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Writing Project, and Up Yoga. She lives in Minneapolis with her spouse and sons. The Embodied Path tells more than twenty body stories to do the essential work of resistance and repair at the individual and communal level, including the story of a woman who sees her hijab as an extension of her body, a quadriplegic woman who became a lawyer to advocate for herself, and a transgender man who underwent a transition after birthing two children. It also includes profoundly simple, beautiful stories of broken bones, motherhood, sickness, and healing toward wholeness.

Rachael Hanel — Not the Camilla We Knew

Rachael Hanel is associate professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her book We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, also from the University of Minnesota Press, was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award.

Sci-Fi Fantasy Club: Amatka

There's no final frontier for the Sci-Fi Fantasy Club! Join us the last Friday of every month as we uncover and rediscover forgotten classics, titles that blur genres, small press stunners, and all the books you missed because they don't have Brandon Sanderson's marketing budget. Our second meeting has been pushed back to March 31st due to the snowstorm. We'll be discussing Amatka, a surreal debut novel set in a world shaped by language, in the tradition of Atwood and Le Guin. Vanja is sent to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka to collect intelligence for her employer. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. But everyone in Amatka keeps secrets, and Vanja and Nina's world -- a world holding back chaos through labels and names -- is about to collide with the ineffable. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice.

Mamo – Sas Milledge

Amazon, through its platform Audible, has claimed upwards of 90% of the audiobook market, by some estimations. This stake is expanded through predatory consumer practices and heavy use of digital rights management software (preventing you from, for example, sending an audiobook you own through Audible to a friend). The audiobook alternative for readers concerned with protecting independent bookstores is Libro.fm, a digital audiobook retailer which donates a portion of every sale to a bookstore of the buyer's choice. (You can support Next Chapter on Libro.com here.)

50 Ways to Protect Book Stores, by Danny Caine

For the Dorito dust:

For the wings:

-from Fake Meat by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

For those who've tried them, what's your favorite flavor among our new candy bars?

Ah, interesting! We've already sold out of the Kitchen Sink bars, so those seem to be the most appealing initially, but going from those who've bought the bars here, seems like they're second to Coffee Break. Well, we still have Coffee Break in stock, as well as the other four, so try one next time you're in! (For Kitchen Sink, we'll be reordering once we run through some of the other flavors. Sorry if you didn't get a chance to try it yet. I bought the last one!)

Now for this week's poll! (Sorry for being repetitive; consider it market research.) This is a multiple-choice question, so click the 'Select' button to choose an answer. I'll include the results in the next newsletter. And our question is:

2. Order online or over the phone for in-store pickup. We'll let you know when your books are ready, then you can swing by and pick them up at your leisure.