Below are the tour dates – check and see if she’s coming to a city near you, and be sure to pick up your own copy of Silver Sparrow!

You can buy Silver Sparrow at IndieBound independent bookstores, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Going Away Megan

An epic told through Algonquin jackets and poorly-executed Photoshop

Today is our beloved publicist and dear friend Megan Fishmann’s last day at Algonquin. She will soon be moving…

…to San Francisco with her soon-to-be husband. (She, unfortunately was not…

Also, it was not…

…but that’s beside the point and also a good deal of reaching on our part.)

We’ll all miss your dedication, spirit, the fact that you bring peanut butter and rice cakes for lunch every day (a noise quite like…)

and the use of your office as the designated room for nervous breakdowns (and your general ability to deal with our very frequent nervous breakdowns.)

So, here’s to you, Megan. A brilliant publicist, master Tweeter, great friend and pretty much

Get used to seeing your face on book jackets. We’ll be expecting autographed copies when you have your first.

Tayari Jones talks here about what led her to write Silver Sparrow, her compelling novel that is resonating with readers far and wide, from NPR to Ann Patchett. Brand new in paperback, Silver Sparrow makes for wonderful conversation. Share it with your book club, share it with your family–and join Tayari and Judy Blume for their Algonquin Book Club webcast on June 19.

You can buy Silver Sparrow at IndieBound independent bookstores, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

What was your inspiration for Silver Sparrow?

I have always been intrigued by the idea of “half” sisters. I have two sisters with whom I share a father, but we each have different mothers. They were born before my father met my mother, and they grew up in another state and led completely separate lives from me and from each other. When I was a little girl, with only brothers, I used to fantasize about having two big sisters far away who would love me, dress me up, listen to me talk, et cetera.

The link between my own personal obsession and this fictional story was inspired quite accidentally. While enjoying a night out with a bunch of friends, we were discussing one of the many cases you hear about—a man dies and the other grieving widow shows up with her stair-step kids. One of my girlfriends looked up from her margarita and said, “You know, he had to have some help from the inside. You cannot get local bigamy off the ground unless one of the women is willing to work with you.” It was all I could do to keep from running out of the bar to get home and start writing.

The first line, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” jumped into my head, as clearly as though someone had spoken into my ear.

When you use the expression half sister, why do you put the word half in quotation marks?

I was giving a reading, and during the Q&A I mentioned my “half sisters.” My nephew in the audience said, “Don’t say ‘half,’ Auntie. That’s an ugly word. There are no half people.” I always thought of it as just a description, and I didn’t think it was offensive, because it’s reflexive. But it hurt him to hear me describe his mother in that way. So now I use the word very self-consciously, if at all. I should probably say “my sister with whom I share a father.” It’s a mouthful, but I would rather say that than hurt him again.

Why did you tell this story through the perspective of the two daughters, Dana and Chaurisse? Was one of the girls easier to access than the other?

The story felt incomplete without both girls’ perspectives or without their mothers’. I began the book from Dana’s point of view, but her view in limited. I needed a voice from the other side of the wall. I am glad that I used Chaurisse’s voice also, because as I wrote her, I came to love her as much as I love Dana. I found the girls equally easy and equally difficult to access. I think it’s because I identify so completely with both of them. Like Chaurisse, I have a close relationship with my father. I had such fun writing their scenes together, and in order to do it, I was able to tap into my own inner girl and think of life before I understood my parents as people with layers and complications. It means so much to a girl to have her father’s attention. A father makes you feel special in a way that no other person can really duplicate.

At the same time, I am a daughter in a family that really values boy children. My childhood was a happy one: two parents, two brothers, caring and affection all around. Still, I lived in the space where many girls find themselves—loved, but not celebrated in the same way as a brother. I borrowed an actual room from my own childhood for Silver Sparrow. When Dana and Ronalda go into the basement and the whole place is set up to show how much Ronalda’s dad “loves being a black man,” this is straight from my parents’ house. A picture of my brother was on the wall between Malcolm X and W. E. B. DuBois. It was clear they had very high hopes for him! So I could understand Dana in her insider/outsider role.

What roles do social class and privilege play in the novel?

Social class has always been an issue that interests me. I think Silver Sparrow complicates the question a little bit. Dana has many bourgeois affectations, but she and her mother are not as financially secure as Chaurisse and her mother. So much of class is about performance. Dana and her mother have upwardly mobile aspirations and do everything they can to transcend social class, but, of course, money limits their options. Chaurisse enjoys great privilege, but she doesn’t know it, and I think this is often the case. People don’t go around thinking how lucky they are that their dad claims them. She thinks of herself as just average. She has no idea that the life she enjoys is on someone else’s back. Her moral litmus test is what she will do once she discovers the truth.

You delve into the idea of titles, that calling someone a “wife” doesn’t really explain “the full complexity of her position” and that it “matters what you called things.” Why is a title—and the firm boundaries that come with it—so important?

Actually, I think Silver Sparrow makes you wonder if titles are all that important after all. Clearly titles give people access to social standing. Laverne is the “wife,” and that gives her public approval. But I feel that Gwen is his wife, too. And no matter what James chooses to say, Dana is his “daughter.” When I started writing the book, I didn’t understand how deep these sorts of familial relationships could be, regardless of what we choose to call them.

How did you come to the title Silver Sparrow?

This was really an eleventh-hour title. This book went through half a dozen titles before I settled on Silver Sparrow. The reference is to the gospel classic “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” When I was a girl, I took great comfort in the idea that God is taking care of everything and everyone, even a tiny sparrow. (This was especially important because I grew up in Atlanta during a very dangerous time.) The characters refer to the song, and it occurred to me that although Chaurisse thinks of Dana as her “silver girl,” in many ways Dana is the tiniest sparrow in the story. She is flawed, of course, and sometimes she acts out, but she is also “the least of these.”

You use the girls’ voices to tell the stories of their parents, relating events that happened before they were even born. Why did you choose this unusual technique?

Again, I don’t have a hard “why.” It felt quite natural. I think we all tell stories about things we could not have possibly witnessed. When stories are handed down, we feel that we have the authority to tell them. We take what we were told and let our imaginations fill in the details. I often joke that our parents’ courtship story is our first encounter with propaganda. I know that I, for one, can recite the fairy tale of how my parents met—at an NAACP meeting in 1962—as if I had been right there, hiding in my mother’s A-frame purse.

Like your previous two books, Silver Sparrow is set in Atlanta in the 1980s. Why did you pick Atlanta for the setting, and what role does landscape play in shaping your narrative?

Sometimes I wonder if my imagination just lives in Atlanta. When the story comes to me, the characters tend to be hanging out in all my old stomping grounds. Atlanta has been such a gift to my work. The “new” and urban South is ever changing, but we still wear our history on our sleeves. This is what makes Southern literature so rich, so ultraspecific and universal at the same time.

What do you hope readers will take away from Silver Sparrow?

I hope that readers will come away from the book with a sort of tolerance for people who find themselves in complicated and messy situations. When I started writing this novel, I didn’t really have empathy for Gwen, and I had nothing but sympathy for Laverne. But by the time I finished, I sort of understood the way people get trapped and try to make the best out of bad situations.

Both women love their daughters with a bottomless devotion. As Dana would say, “You can’t help but respect something like that.” After visiting many bookstores and book clubs, what surprised you most about readers’ reactions to the book? What questions were you asked most often?

This is a hard question because different readers asked different questions. One thing that surprised me was how the conversation often started off with readers saying which of the girls they liked best. Some even divided themselves into Team Dana and Team Chaurisse. But by the end of the conversation, everyone seemed to understand that there are no real winners or losers in this story. We all ended up being open to all the characters, even James, who causes so much pain to everyone.

Even though every audience is unique, there are some questions that come up over and over. Most people want to know how much of my real life is in the story. It seems that if you write a memoir, people want to catch you telling a lie, and when you write a novel people want to catch you telling the truth. It’s a hard question to answer. Some of the story is taken from my real life, but all of the story is taken from my real heart. I have experienced every emotion that I put onto these pages.

As you traveled and promoted the book, you were approached by many readers who themselves were “silver sparrows.” Did you expect that? Was it primarily a female phenomenon, or did you encounter male silver sparrows, too?

 The first person to use the term was a man. He sent me an e-mail that said, “I guess I am a Silver Sparrow. I just never had a name for it.” Secret children are much more prevalent than we know.

When I was on NPR, I was stunned at how many callers from all over the country had silver sparrow stories to tell. I wrote Silver Sparrow because I was working out my feelings about my own little family, but, as often is the case with stories—my story wasn’t my story alone. It belongs to everyone.

Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex is a book lover’s dream: Not only is it a book about a book, it’s a page-turning thriller. History dishes up some pretty compelling tales, and Friedman uncovered a spellbinder. “I expected to write a heartening story about the rescue of this book,” Friedman writes, “but instead found myself like a person who innocently opens a cupboard and finds himself buried under a pile of forgotten things.”

It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book.

About the book

This true-life detective story unveils the journey of a sacred text—the tenth-century annotated bible known as the Aleppo Codex—from its hiding place in a Syrian synagogue to the newly founded state of Israel. Based on Friedman’s independent research, documents kept secret for fifty years, and personal interviews with key players, the book proposes a new theory of what happened when the codex left Aleppo, Syria, in the late 1940s and eventually surfaced in Jerusalem, mysteriously incomplete.

Known as the Crown, the codex provides vital keys to reading biblical texts. By recounting its history, Friedman explores the once vibrant Jewish communities in Islamic lands and follows the thread into the present, uncovering difficult truths about how the manuscript was taken to Israel and how its most important pages went missing. Along the way, he raises critical questions about who owns historical treasures and the role of myth and legend in the creation of a nation.

Click here to listen to Matti Friedman’s podcast on Tablet.

Praise for Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex

“The Aleppo Codex could be read as a thriller. It could also be read as a history of the Jewish people, or as a meditation on history and myth. This great book comes closer to containing everything than any book I’ve read in a long, long time.”—Jonathan Safran Foer

“[Friedman] opened a treasure box of history, mystery, conspiracy, and convolutions that would do any biblical thriller proud . . . Friedman has done a remarkable job—finding sources and digging through archives—of getting the Crown’s fascinating story out of the shadows and into the light. In the process, he’s become the latest in the long line of the Crown’s protectors.”—Booklist, starred review

“Friedman gives a masterful account of a major religious document . . . [he] delivers an atmospheric, tense story about the destruction of a sacred relic, raising inevitable questions about who owns a people’s historical treasures.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sharply etched . . . A carefully paced narrative of purloined Judaica.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Friedman’s account of how the Codex was taken from Syria in the 1940s, later to resurface in Jerusalem, although no longer complete, is full of betrayals, controversy and surprises — and raises larger questions about the ownership and preservation of historical treasures.” —Jewish Week

“The Aleppo Codex builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller.” – Salon

“Thrilling . . . a real-life National Treasure that reads like fantastical fiction.”—CultureMob

“Matti Friedman is a stunningly talented writer, a once-in-a-generation discovery. The Aleppo Codex has enough betrayals, conspiracies, surprise plot twists, sacred flimflam men, and well-dressed contraband dealers for the best of thrillers — but every bit of it is meticulously researched fact. Cancel your appointments, bury your cell phone — you won’t want to be interrupted – and read this book.”—Gershom Gorenberg, Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect and author of The Accidental Empire

“A beautifully woven tale of epic proportions about a sacred book and its all-too-human custodians. I did not put it down until I had finished it at the crack of dawn. Absolutely riveting!”—Oren Harman, author of The Price of Altruism

Read an excerpt from The Aleppo Codex

Our Southern Roots

While the geographic scope of Algonquin has certainly expanded in the last thirty years, we take great pride in the Southern literary talent that became the cornerstone of our house. From May 14 to May 27, you can purchase seven Algonquin classics for only $1.99 each. So stir up a pitcher of mint julep, settle into that porch swing, and enjoy our Southern storytellers.

Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.” So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kay Gibbons’ unforgettable debut novel, one that received high praise from both Eudora Welty and Walker Percy.

Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy

In a corner of the rural South blistering with hatred and petty meanness, Nathan and Roy must hide their love for each other from friends, church, and family. But that comes easily to Nathan, who is used to keeping secrets. A stunningly brave work of first love—between two adolescent boys who sustain each other in a world of domestic disintegration.

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp

Everything happens the summers Sugar Mecklin turns ten, eleven, and twelve, around the same time his father tells him that “the Delta is filled up with death.” And death does turn up all over the place, but Sugar is an optimist, and magic might prove once and for all to be real. This dark, hilarious, and affecting work is proof that Nordan is one of the South’s very finest writers.

Dori Sander’s Clover

Clover is a ten-year old black girl from a small town in South Carolina whose life changes forever when her father dies and she is forced to forge a new relationship with the white stepmother she hardly knows. A beautiful, trenchant story of family lost and found, Clover is a unique and heartfelt reading experience for all ages.

Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader

Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it—straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early seventies, her carefully normal life explodes, and she comes completely undone.

Lary Brown’s Joe

Nearing fifty, Joe Ransom won’t slow down, not in his pickup, not with a gun and certainly not with women. But all the fast living in Mississippi won’t quell the hunger Joe can’t name. At fifteen, Gary Jones is already slipping through the cracks. Part of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, he’s desperate for a way out. He finds it in Joe. Together they’ll follow a twisting map to redemption—or ruin.

Clyde Edgerton’s Raney

The story of the first two years, two months, and two days of a modern southern marriage. Raney is a Free Will Baptist. Charles is an Episcopalian. Raney’s views—on sex, race relations, child rearing—are, um, conservative. Charles’s are a little more liberal. Can this marriage be saved?

Here at Algonquin we never get bored of giving books as gifts. I like to think that those of us who have grown to be such devoted book lovers inherited this passion from our parents. For Mother’s Day this year, I urge all of you to run to your local bookstore and pick up at least 2 copies of Katie Workman’s THE MOM 100 COOKBOOK. You need to get one for your mom, but you also need one for yourself, and maybe even another for any new moms that you might know!

The recipes are perfect for weeknights, without relying on processed ingredients or short cuts that take away from the overall flavor of the dish, and filled with clever work-arounds to please everyone in the family. Making Mom breakfast in bed? I highly recommend the pancakes!

The only gift that I love to give more than a book is something handmade. This year, I have my eye on these adorable e-reader covers, made out of deconstructed old books. Check out this great tutorial from Instructables! Books and something handmade together? Nothing would make me happier.

If you’re the sort that can’t stomach tearing apart a hardcover to make an e-reader case, or perhaps don’t believe me when I promise you that if you start right now you can definitely knit your mother a pair of fingerless gloves in time for brunch on Sunday, then you can’t go wrong with an Algonquin paperback. Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow is just out in paperback this week. As Essence magazine said “If your mom is a fan of emotionally charged morality tales (and whose mom isn’t?), she’s going to devour Tayari Jones’s third novel, Silver Sparrow in a single sitting.”

For new moms, nothing could be more perfect than Mei-Ling Hopgood’s How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, And Other Adventures in Parenting, which Booklist named “A Best Bet for New Parents”. When Mei-Ling Hopgood had her first child, she embarked on a journey to learn how other cultures approach the challenges all parents face: bedtimes, potty training, feeding, playtimes, and more. It’s an exciting and interesting read, and you’ll love reading how Hopgood tested her discoveries on her toddler, Sofia, with some enlightening results. Check out the Algonquin Book Club Catalog for more great book club picks to find something that your mom is sure to love!

Enjoy, and Happy Mother’s Day!

Applying the Nature Principle: 20 Ways to Create a Restorative Home and Garden

Want to improve your family’s mental and physical health, and increase their creativity and learning abilities? Start at home. Whether you’re building a new house or retrofitting your existing home and garden, here are a few tips for applying the Nature Principle:

Indoors 

1. Bring the outside in. Create “living walls” of ficus, hibiscus, orchids, and other plants; or an indoor vertical vegetable garden with a drip-irrigation system. Such walls can reduce indoor air pollutants.

2. Record nature sounds and fill your house with them.

3. Use nature-based furniture and decorations such as a dresser made of reclaimed wood, or floors or rugs made of sustainable bamboo or bamboo fabric.

4. Use trees, live or dead, as decoration in high-ceilinged living rooms.

5. Use lights that adjust throughout the day via sensors at the windows.

6. Combine solar panels with skylights. Install them over water gardens and other living features.

7. To protect wildlife, add bird-warning elements to windows.

Outdoors

8. With your family, plant an organic vegetable garden and include fruit trees.

9. Install a beehive, or raise chickens or ducks for eggs. Some cities are loosening regulations to encourage yard farming.

10. Create nature-rich calming places to sit, read, think and converse.

11. Reduce your lawn. Replace it with bird-attracting plants, trees and bushes. (Lawns are now the largest irrigated crop in the United States.)

12. Plant a butterfly garden; help bring back butterfly migration routes.

13. Space-restricted urbanites can use dwarf tree varieties and mini-gardens to transform small balconies and windowsills.

14. Install a chlorine-free natural swimming pond cleaned by regeneration zones: aquatic plants, rocks, loose gravel, and friendly bacteria that act as water filters.

When building a new home

15. Design natural landscapes to look good from the curb and also from inside the home.

16. Place the house in sync with the sun’s movements, so that sleeping and waking are in accord with available light; place large windows on the south-facing wall for passive solar heating, but also for a view of nature.

17. Design for natural airflow with appropriately placed windows and high ceiling fans for natural ventilation.

18. If site and regulations allow, build your home with cordwood masonry (lumber set in earthen mortar), cement mixed with recycled-paper pulp, aerated concrete or straw-bale walls. Homes built with these materials can be so energy efficient that they need no air-conditioning – and you’ll receive the health benefits of fresh air.

19. Install a super-insulated green roof that can last 80 years (compared with the 40-year average for conventional roofs) and at the same time create wildlife habitat – which may improve your mental health.

20. Whenever possible, use local materials to reflect the natural history of the region. Sustainability aside, this may deepen your sense of regional and personal identity.

Richard Louv is the author of “THE NATURE PRINCIPLE: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age,” now available in paperback. He is Chairman Emeritus of The Children and Nature Network and 2012 spokesperson for the CLIF Kid Backyard Game of the Year. For more information on his books, go to www.richardlouv.com. For a free online Field Guide to the New Nature Movement, see http://richardlouv.com/books/nature-principle/field-guide/.

O Magazine’s

Slate’s Best Books of 2011 list

Library Journal’s Top Ten Best Books of 2011 list

Atlanta Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 list

June 2011 Indie Next Pick

National Women’s Book Association Great Group Read for 2011

As you pack your beach towels and sunscreen and prepare your summer reading list, don’t forget to snag a copy of Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow for your vacation getaway. It offers the thrills and drama you look for in a good summer book, fueled by a family’s secrets and dysfunctional relationships, but at the same time Jones goes beyond the standard summer reading fare with prose that is incredibly intimate and poignant.

About the book

With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives.

At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.

Praise for Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow:

“In Silver Sparrow—an amazing novel about a man with two families, one hidden and one public—Jones does something breathtaking and difficult: She renders a unique family dynamic with such precision and sensitivity that it becomes universal. It is amazing to watch, time and time again in this book, how Jones reveals the ways in which family both creates and destroys our identity. Jones’ previous novels are fantastic, but this book feels like a masterpiece.” – Kevin Wilson in Salon.com feature on writers’ favorite books of 2011

“It’s an amazing, amazing read.”—Jennifer Weiner on NBC’s “The Today Show”

“A soaring, uplifting take on secret sisters from up-and-comer Tayari Jones.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

“This is a complicated, heartbreaking and very rich story about how secret sisters find each other but lose as much as they gain in the process.” – Michele Norris on NPR’s “All Things Considered”

“Tayari Jones has taken Atlantafor her literary terroir, and like many of our finest novelists, she gives readers a sense of place in a deeply observed way. But more than that, Jones has created in her main characters tour guides of that region: honest, hurt, observant and compelling young women whose voices cannot be ignored… Impossible to put down until you find out how these sisters will discover their own versions of family.”—Los Angeles Times

“Award winner Tayari Jones weaves a tale of Black bigamy and two families in the fascinating fiction of Silver Sparrow.”—Ebony

“Populating this absorbing novel is a vivid cast of characters, each with his own story… Jones writes dialogue that is realistic and sparkling, with an intuitive sense of how much to reveal and when. Occasionally, she inserts a spot-on Southern bon mot that might have been handed down from one generation to another: ‘With wives, it only matters who gets there first. . . . Wives can afford to let themselves go. Concubines must be vigilant.’”—Washington Post

“Tayari Jones’s immensely pleasurable new novel pulls off a minor miracle… Subtly exploring the power of labels… Jones crafts an affecting tale about things, big and small, we forfeit to forge a family. There are no winners in this empathetic and provocative story, only survivors.”—MORE

“Charting a vast emotional unknown is Tayari Jones’s compelling third novel, Silver Sparrow, in which a teenage girl’s coming of age in 1980s Atlanta is shadowed by her dawning understanding of a corrosive secret – her father’s second family.” – Vogue

“Tayari Jones is fast defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester…” —The Village Voice

Read an excerpt from Silver Sparrow

Name:

Bookstore: The Book Table

Title: Co-owner

Brief Bio: Jason began selling books in 1991, moving from one Chicago independent bookstore to another. In 2003, he and his wife, Rachel Weaver, opened The Book Table in Downtown Oak Park, IL.

What books recently rocked my world: Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, Ted Heller’s Pocket Kings and Adam Levin’s Hot Pink. 

Best damn event(s) we’ve hosted: We had Chris Ware and Charles Burns together for an evening at Frank Lloyd Wright’s modern masterpiece, Unity Temple. Whenever you can bring two icons together for an evening with several hundred dedicated fans, you know you’re doing something right.

Most entertaining author(s) we’ve hosted: I once sold books at a benefit for The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights where the featured speaker was Luis Urrea. Like a lot of benefits, there were lots of other speakers and right before Urrea went on there was the cutest performance by the Pilsen/Little Village Children’s Choir. They could not have been more adorable and I’d never seen Urrea speak, so I was terrified that there was no way that he could possibly follow them. As he was being introduced, he walked by my table, looked at me and said, “All right, let’s sell some books.” Then he took the stage and just killed/maimed/destroyed. He did a talk that had people laughing so hard they were falling out of their chairs and then right after that he had people crying from heartbreaking stories.

Strangest question a customer has ever asked: Well, just a week ago a customer said, “I already have books on Norway, do you have any books on the country of Norwegian?”

Why our store kicks ass: Because every day our store shows that indies can indeed compete on price. Because when we opened our store a block and a half away from a chain store, everybody told us we were crazy, but we’re still here and they’re not. Because words like “community” and phrases like “a sense of place” may have turned into Madison Avenue buzz words, but we prove every day that they can indeed be real.

What makes our neighborhood and customers awesome: Take a very urban suburb, add the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, drop in Frank Lloyd Wright’s first prairie style home and studio and add another 24 Wright homes for good measure, populate the Village with a (mostly) progressive citizenry known for promoting racial diversity in the 60′s and GLBQT issues for decades and you get a community that has embraced us since day one and uses our store to discuss and debate (often loudly and with wild gesticulations) literature, art, film and politics as much as my wife and I do.

I promise you won’t find this at any other store: We have a photograph of Henry Tabor that looks over our art section. Henry was a giant in the industry. He worked for Kroch’s and Brentano’s for 40 years and ran their art department at their flagship Downtown store until he was forced out in 1993 (one of the many disastrous moves in the chain’s final years that culminated in their bankruptcy in 1995). You can watch older Chicagoans do a double take all the time when they see the photograph and it often leads to the sharing of great stories about the history of bookselling in Chicago.

Why I do what I do: I don’t even understand the question. What else could I possibly be qualified to do?

If I weren’t selling books I’d be: Giving them away for free because the only two events that would end my career would be either winning the lottery or after the Revolution when the Council of People’s Commissars hopefully still lets me hang out around books.

Books that changed my life: Malcolm Bradbury’s My Strange Quest for Mensonge for showing me that sometimes fiction is the best medium for explaining complicated subjects and The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barkworth (a pseudonym for Arthur Freeman) which is the greatest bibliomystery ever written and showed me that just because I was a bookseller didn’t mean that I needed to give up a life of solving crime.

Top three authors, living or dead, I’d invite to my dinner party: Emma Goldman and Leon Trotsky with Ayn Rand in the middle to be used as a metaphorical (or literal) punching bag

Top three songs on the soundtrack to my life: “My Favorite Mutiny” by the Coup, “Old Chunk of Coal” by Billy Joel Shaver, but sung by Johnny Cash, and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs

My last meal request: Whatever would be the most fun for medical students to find when they dissect my body.

Check out more of the great reviews below, as well as a first chapter excerpt.

About the book

Before she met Il-sun in an orphanage, Gi was a hollow husk of a girl, broken from growing up in one of North Korea’s forced-labor camps. A mathematical genius, she has learned to cope with pain by retreating into a realm of numbers and calculations, an escape from both the past and present. Gi becomes enamored of the brash and radiant Il-sun, a friend she describes as “all woman and springtime.” But Il-sun’s pursuit of a better life imperils both girls when her suitor spirits them across the Demilitarized Zone and sells them as sex workers, first in South Korea and then in the United States.

For Gi and Il-sun, forced into the underworld of human trafficking, their captivity outside North Korea is far crueler than the tight control of their “Dear Leader.” Tenderhearted Gi, just on the verge of womanhood, is consigned to a fate that threatens not only her body but her mind. How she and Il-sun endure, how they find a path to healing, is what drives this absorbing and exquisite novel—from an exciting young Algonquin discovery—to its perfectly imagined conclusion.

Praise for All Woman and Springtime

“[A] terrifying and masterfully realized debut . . . One of its most impressive achievements is the rendering of main character Gi, who is brought powerfully and beautifully to life . . . Jones depicts both the innocence of his protagonist and the pathologies and violence of the South Korean underworld with great skill and emotional power. VERDICT Impossible to put down, this work is important reading for anyone who cares about the power of literature to engage the world and speak its often frightening truths.” —Library Journal

“A compelling psychological tour of life inside the socially and politically restrictive borders of North Korea via the poignant stories of two young girls on the cusp of womanhood . . . This tale of female friendship is distinguished by its illuminating glimpse into the arcane intricacies of both an ancient and a modern culture. Guaranteed to appeal to fans of Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) and the novels of Lisa See.”—Booklist

“Dramatic . . . [A] well-paced story.”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the most absorbing, chilling, beautifully written, and important novels I’ve read in many years.”
—Alice Walker

“All Woman and Springtime is a lovely novel brimming with heartache and hope in equal measure. Jones has a gift for empathy as well as a keen sense of justice. This book will open your eyes, break your heart, and then mend it again.” —Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow