Thank you for your interest in attending our event(s)! All of our events, unless otherwise noted, are held virtually via Zoom.

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To view past event recordings check out our YouTube channel! If you don't see what you're looking for, send a recording request to events@booksaremagic.net. 

We will be hosting storytimes on weekends via Youtube and Youtube Live at 11am. See our channel for videos!

3/21: Aram Kim: Sunday Funday in Koreatown. | Watch

4/11: Steve Light: Road Trip | Watch

4/18: Bruce Handy & Hyewon Yum: The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in its Mouth | Watch

4/25: Monika Vaicenaviciene: What Is a River?



 

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A haunting ghost story about navigating grief, growing up, and growing into a new gender identity

 

It’s the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug’s best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn’t particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there’s something more important to worry about: A ghost is haunting Bug’s eerie old house in rural Vermont…and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they’re trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light—Bug is transgender.

 

Kyle Lukoff is the author of books like the Stonewall-award winning “When Aidan Became A Brother,” “Explosion at the Poem Factory,” and the forthcoming picture book biography "If You're A Kid Like Gavin," written in collaboration with trans activist Gavin Grimm. While becoming a writer he worked as a bookseller for ten years, and then nine more years as a school librarian. "Too Bright To See" is his debut novel.

 

Maulik Pancholy is an award-winning actor, author and activist. His career has spanned hit television shows (30 Rock, Weeds, Whitney), animated favorites (Phineas and Ferb, Sanjay and Craig), the Broadway stage and films. His debut novel, The Best at It, was named a Stonewall Honor Book, a Junior Library Guild Selection, a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books and a New York Times Best Audiobooks for Road Trips with Kids. He served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and he co-founded the anti-bullying nonprofit ActToChange.org.

 

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An exhilarating debut by a young writer from Pakistan: provocative, funny, disarmingly original stories that upend traditional notions of identity and family, and peer into the vulnerable workings of the human heart.

 

From the high-stakes worlds of television and politics to the intimate corridors of home—including the bedroom—these wryly observed, deeply revealing stories look at life in Pakistan with humor, compassion, psychological acuity, and emotional immediacy. Childhood best friends agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret. A young woman with an anxiety disorder discovers the numbing pleasures of an illicit love affair. A radicalized student’s preparations for his sister’s wedding involve beating up the groom. An actress is forced to grow up fast on the set of her first major tv show, where the real intrigue takes place off-screen. Every story bears witness to the all-too-universal desire to be loved, and what happens when this longing gets pushed to its limits. Are You Enjoying? is a free-spirited, confident, indelible introduction to a galvanizing new talent.

 

Mira Sethi is an actor and a writer. She grew up in Lahore and attended Wellesley College, after which Sethi worked as a books editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Sethi regularly appears in mainstream Pakistani drama series on television. She lives in Lahore, Karachi, and San Francisco. Photo credit: Bilal Siddiqi. 

 

Diksha Basu is the author of The Windfall and Destination Wedding. Originally from New Delhi, India, she now divides her time between New York City and Mumbai.

 

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Everyone in Popisho was born . . . with a little something… The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing that felt so inexpressibly your own.
 

Somewhere far away-- or maybe right nearby-- lies an archipelago called Popisho. A place of stunning beauty and incorrigible mischief, destiny and mystery, it is also a place in need of change.
 

Xavier Redchoose is the macaenus of his generation, anointed by the gods to make each resident one perfect meal when the time is right. Anise, his long lost love, is on a march toward reckoning with her healing powers. The governor’s daughter, Sonteine, is getting married, her father demanding a feast out of turn. And graffiti messages from an unknown source are asking hard questions. A storm is brewing. Before it comes, before the end of the day, this wildly imaginative narrative will take us across the islands, their history, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.

 

Popisho is a masterful delight: a playful love story, a portrait of community, a boldly sensual meditation on desire and addiction, and a critique of the legacies of corruption and colonialism. Inspired by the author's Jamaican homeland, inflected with rhythms and textures of an amalgam of languages, it is a dazzling, major work of fiction, in conversation with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy.

 

Leone Ross is a fiction writer and an academic. She was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and her second novel, Orange Laughter, was chosen as a BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour Watershed Fiction favorite. Her first short story collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Ross has taught creative writing in London for twenty years and worked as a journalist throughout the nineties. She lives in London but intends to retire near water. Photo credit: Hayley Benoit.

 

Amber Sparks is the author of The Unfinished World and And I Do Not Forgive You, and her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

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Sexual identity, female friendship, and queer experiences of love

 

Fraught with obsession, addiction, and unrequited love, Catherine Pond’s Fieldglass immerses us in the speaker’s transition from childhood to adulthood. A queer coming-of-age, this collection is a candid exploration of sexual identity, family dynamics, and friendships that elude easy categorization, offering insight on the ambiguous nature of identity.

Saturated by her surroundings and permeated by the emotional lives of those close to her, the speaker struggles with feelings of displacement, trauma, and separateness. She is perpetually in transit, with long drives, flights, and train rides—moving most often between the city and the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. As the collection unfolds, the speaker journeys toward adulthood, risking intimacy and attempting to undo her embedded impulses toward silence and absorption.

 

Reflective, graceful, and understated, Pond’s images accumulate power through restraint and suggestion. Deeply personal and intense, searching and yearning, associative and lyric, Fieldglass is a confessional about growing up, loving hard, and letting go.

 

Catherine Pond was born in New York City. She is the author of Fieldglass (Southern Illinois University Press 2021), winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Nonrequired Reading, AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, and other publications. She is a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2013. Pond lives in San Francisco.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry including, Love and Other Poems, Together and by Ourselves, Begging for It, and the chapbook American Boys. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. Previously, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. Dimitrov also founded the queer poetry salon Wilde Boys (2009-13), which brought together emerging and established writers in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. On Twitter he writes an endless poem called “Love” in real time, one tweet a day. With Dorothea Lasky he co-founded Astro Poets and is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and lives in New York, where he’s working on a novel.

 

Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in New York City. She was born in Canada and moved to the Philadelphia area when she was seven. Her family are East African Goans.

 

Fernandes has work forthcoming or published or in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015). Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize (2018), the Saturnalia Book Prize (2018), and was published with Tin House Books in February 2020.

 

Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.

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A genre-defying, continents-spanning saga of Korean myth, scientific discovery, and the abiding love that binds even the most broken of families.
 

Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last.
 

Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family, a sickness no less ravenous than the ancestral curse hunting her.
 

When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance.

 

Angela Hur received a B.A. in English from Harvard and an MFA in Creative Writing from Notre Dame, where she won the Sparks Fellowship and the Sparks Prize, a post-graduate fellowship. Her debut The Queens of K-Town was published by MacAdam/Cage in 2007. Folklorn was chosen by Kelly Link for a Tin House novel mentorship through the Tin House Summer Workshop, where Hur also studied with Alexander Chee and Mat Johnson, and later with Peter Ho Davies at the Napa Valley Writers Conference.
 

Alexander Chee is most recently the author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor to the New Republic, an editor at large for VQR, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His essays and stories have also appeared in T Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review and the Sewanee Review, and were recently anthologized in Best American Essays 2016 and 2019. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

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A reading featuring Kendra DeColo, Eloisa Amezcua, Adrian Matejka, Erika Meitner & José Olivarez!

 

About I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World:
 

Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy
 

Kendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World revitalizes the way we look at mothering: pushing its boundaries and reclaiming one's spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.

 

About the readers:

Kendra DeColo is the author of I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and she has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
 

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, Eloisa is the founder of Costura Creative. Her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
 

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin, 2009), The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Map to the Stars (Penguin 2017). His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge / Maggot Brain, will be published by Third Man Books in 2021. His new collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World will be published by Penguin in July 2021 and his first graphic novel Last On His Feet is forthcoming from Liveright in 2022.
 

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022.
 

José Olivarez is a writer from Calumet City, IL.

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The author of the “emotional, hilarious, and thought-provoking” (People) novel The Bucket List returns with a witty and heartfelt romantic comedy featuring a wedding planner, her unexpected business partner, and their coworkers in a series of linked love stories—perfect for fans of Christina Lauren and Casey McQuiston.

 

For the past twenty years, Liv and Eliot Goldenhorn have run In Love in New York, Brooklyn’s beloved wedding-planning business. When Eliot dies unexpectedly, he even more unexpectedly leaves half of the business to his younger, blonder girlfriend, Savannah. Liv and Savannah are not a match made in heaven, to say the least. But what starts as a personal and professional nightmare transforms into something even savvy, cynical Liv Goldenhorn couldn’t begin to imagine.

It Had to Be You cleverly unites Liv, Savannah, and couples as diverse and unique as New York City itself, in a joyous Love-Actually-style braided narrative. The result is a smart, modern love story that truly speaks to our times. Second chances, secret romance, and steamy soul mates are front and center in this sexy, tender, and utterly charming rom-com.

 

Georgia Clark wrote the novels It Had to Be You, The Regulars, The Bucket List, and others. She is the host and founder of the popular storytelling night, Generation Women. A native Australian, she lives in Brooklyn with her hot wife and a fridge full of cheese. Find out more at GeorgiaClark.com. Photo credit: Lindsay Ratowsky.

 

Elin Hilderbrand is a mother of three, an avid runner, reader, and traveler, and the author of twenty-three novels. She grew up outside Philadelphia, and has lived on Nantucket for more than twenty years.

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About People We Meet on Vacation:

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.
 

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.
 

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.
 

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
 

Emily Henry writes stories about love and family for both teens and adults. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.

 

About A Special Place for Women:

For years, rumors have swirled about an exclusive, women-only social club where the elite tastemakers of NYC meet. People in the know whisper all sorts of claims: Membership dues cost $1,000 a month. Last time Rihanna was in town, she stopped by and got her aura read. The women even handpicked the city’s first female mayor. But no one knows for sure.

That is, until journalist Jillian Beckley decides she’s going to break into the club. With her career in freefall, Jillian needs a juicy scoop, and she has a personal interest in bringing these women down. But the deeper she gets into this new world—where billionaire “girlbosses” mingle with the astrology-obsessed—the more Jillian learns that bad things happen to those who dare to question the club’s motives or giggle at its outlandish rituals.
 

The select group of women who populate the club may be far more powerful than she ever imagined.
 

And far more dangerous too.
 

Laura Hankin is the author of Happy & You Know It. She has written for publications like McSweeney's and HuffPost, while her musical comedy has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. She splits her time between NYC, where she has performed off-Broadway, and Washington D.C., where she once fell off a treadmill twice in one day.

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The beloved Top Chef star revolutionizes healthy eating in this groundbreaking cookbook—the ultimate guide to cooking globally inspired dishes free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains that are so delicious you won’t notice the difference.

 

When award-winning, trendsetting chef Gregory Gourdet got sober, he took stock of his life and his pantry, concentrating his energy on getting himself healthy by cooking food that was both full of nutrients and full of flavor. Now, he shares these extraordinary dishes with everyone.

 

Everyone’s Table features 200 mouth-watering, decadently flavorful recipes carefully designed to focus on superfoods—ingredients with the highest nutrient-density, the best fats, and the most minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants—that will delight and inspire home cooks. Gourdet’s dishes are inspired his deep affection for global ingredients and techniques--from his Haitian upbringing to his French culinary education, from his deep affection from the cuisines of Asia as well as those of North and West Africa. His unique culinary odyssey informs this one-of-a-kind cookbook, which features dynamic vegetable-forward dishes and savory meaty stews, umami-packed sauces and easy ferments, and endless clever ways to make both year-round and seasonal ingredients shine.

 

Destined to be an everyday kitchen essential, featuring 180 sumptuous color photographs, Everyone’s Table will change forever the way we think about, approach, and enjoy healthy eating.

 

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, New York, Gregory Gourdet is the child of Haitian immigrants. A self-proclaimed health freak and avid runner, Gourdet views food as a source of nourishment as much as one of pleasure. After graduating from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, he became chef de cuisine for Jean-Georges Vongerichten, under whom he trained for almost seven years. In 2008, Gourdet arrived in Portland, OR. He led the pan-Asian kitchen at Departure for a decade, running one of the busiest restaurants in the state. His annual trips around the world connected him with the flavors and ingredients he loves so much. He is a James Beard Award nominee and a two-time Top Chef finalist as well as an All Star and Guest Judge. He has been named Chef of the Year by Eater and one of the Fittest Chefs in America by Men’s Health. His wood-fired Haitian restaurant Kann will open in Portland, OR, in 2022. Photo credit: Eva Kosmas Flores.

 

Gail Simmons is a trained culinary expert, food writer, and dynamic television personality. Since the show’s inception in 2006, she has lent her expertise as a permanent judge on BRAVO’s Emmy and James Beard Award-winning series Top Chef, now in its 18th successful season. She is also the host of its newest spin-off, Top Chef Amateurs, set to premiere in 2021, as well as the host of Iron Chef Canada. She was previously head critic on Top Chef Masters and host of Top Chef Just Desserts, Bravo’s pastry-focused spinoff of the Top Chef franchise. From 2004 to 2019, Gail served as special projects director at FOOD & WINE.

 

In February 2012, she published her first book, Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater. Her first cookbook, Bringing It Home: Favorite Recipes from a Life of Adventurous Eating, was released in October 2017. Nominated for an IACP award for best general cookbook, it features recipes inspired by Gail’s world travels—all made with accessible ingredients and with smart, simple techniques for successful family meals and easy entertaining.

 

Gail is a weekly contributor to Dr. Oz’s The Dish on Oz and frequently appears on daytime television shows such as TODAY on NBC, Rachael Ray and The Talk, and was named the #1 Reality TV Judge in America by The New York Post.

 

Gail is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Babson College, co-founder of Bumble Pie Productions, and sits on the board of several organizations and advocates for many philanthropic endeavors, including City Harvest and Hot Bread Kitchen. She currently lives in New York City with her husband, Jeremy and their two children, Dahlia and Kole.

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Each book comes with a book-tour exclusive Soulmate Equation-themed art print by Liz Parkes!

 

Single mom Jess Davis is a data and statistics wizard, but no amount of number crunching can convince her to step back into the dating world. Raised by her grandparents—who now help raise her seven-year-old daughter, Juno—Jess has been left behind too often to feel comfortable letting anyone in. After all, her father’s never been around, her hard-partying mother disappeared when she was six, and her ex decided he wasn’t “father material” before Juno was even born. Jess holds her loved ones close, but working constantly to stay afloat is hard...and lonely.

But then Jess hears about GeneticAlly, a buzzy new DNA-based matchmaking company that’s predicted to change dating forever. Finding a soulmate through DNA? The reliability of numbers: This Jess understands.
 

At least she thought she did, until her test shows an unheard-of 98% compatibility with another subject in the database: GeneticAlly’s founder, Dr. River Peña. This is one number she can’t wrap her head around, because she already knows Dr. Peña. The stuck-up, stubborn man is without a doubt not her soulmate. But GeneticAlly has a proposition: Get to know him and we’ll pay you. Jess—who is barely making ends meet—is in no position to turn it down, despite her skepticism about the project and her dislike for River. As the pair are dragged from one event to the next as the “Diamond” pairing that could make GeneticAlly a mint in stock prices, Jess begins to realize that there might be more to the scientist—and the science behind a soulmate—than she thought.

 

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA TODAY, and #1 internationally bestselling authors of the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, The Unhoneymooners, Twice in a Blue Moon, The Honey-Don’t List, In a Holidaze and many more. Find them online at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com, @ChristinaLauren on Instagram, or @ChristinaLauren on Twitter.
 

Xio Axelrod is a USA Today bestselling author of award-winning contemporary romance, romantic fiction, and what she likes to call strange, twisted tales. Xio grew up in the music industry and began recording at a young age. When she isn't writing stories, she can be found in the studio, writing songs, or performing on international stages (under a different, not-so-secret name). She lives in Philadelphia with one full-time husband and several part-time cats. She occasionally writes erotica under the name Xio Nin. Find her at www.xioaxelrod.com.
 

A life-long romance reader, Sarah MacLean wrote her first romance novel on a dare, and never looked back. She is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of romances translated into more than twenty-five languages, a romance columnist and the co-host of the weekly romance novel podcast, Fated Mates. A graduate of Smith College & Harvard University, she lives in New York City.
 

Rachel Epstein is the associate editor at Marie Claire, where she covers culture, lifestyle, and politics. She also manages the site's virtual book club, #ReadWithMC, and edits the daily shopping coverage. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @rachelepstein_.