Kate Bernheimer will be at Off Square Books to sign and read her new book, The Girl Inside the Castle Inside the Museum.

The princess-like girl of the title is lonely within her idyllic, sequestered world until she is visited by children, either in dreams or in reality. Her solution is to address readers directly and ask for a picture to hang in her solitary castle to "keep her company in a magical world." Written by an eloquent fairy-tale writer-scholar and illustrated by a much-honored picture-book artist, this defies easy definition. Clearly "the museum" represents the metaphorical archive where fairy-tale collections regrettably gather dust, and this enigmatic tale is a plea for children to enter their immutable worlds within worlds, lest the tales be isolated and lost forever. The text is grandly supported by Ceccoli's chimerically beautiful paintings rendered in acrylic, which depict the girl's phantasmagorical world. A bit of a mystical allegory, but also an invitation too good to decline for the fairy-tale lovers among us. 

Howard Bahr signs Pelican Road. 

From the acclaimed author of The Judas Field, a beautiful and haunting portrait of the men who served on the great American railroads.

It’s Christmas Eve, 1940. Along an isolated stretch of railway between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, two locomotives travel toward one another through the dark winter landscape. A.P. Dunn, engineer aboard the 4512 southbound freight, reminisces about the last trip he made through the snow. And though he can remember every detail about that voyage in 1923, what he can’t recall are the events of a few hours ago — where he ate breakfast, how he got the gash on his forehead, or what he did to make his crew treat him so strangely.

On the northbound Silver Star, a luxury passenger train packed with returning college students and gift-bearing families, brakeman Artemus Kane has his own memories to contend with: French trenches and German snipers, a failed marriage, and a too-short layover spent with Anna, the brilliant and lonely woman he has just left behind in the Crescent City.

In Pelican Road, Howard Bahr returns to his greatest theme — the tragic nobility of those attempting to overcome difficult situations through love, honor, and sacrifice — and shows that on the railway, catastrophe is never more than a distracted moment away.

You had better not be anywhere other than Off Square Books when Richard Bausch stops by to sign and read from his latest novel, Peace. 

An abrupt and chilling act of violence opens Bauch's 11th novel, marking the beginning of a bleak but compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare. Cpl. Robert Marson is trudging up an Italian hillside, leading two of his men on an uncertain mission through the unrelenting winter of 1944. The soldiers are haunted by the cold-blooded murder by their sergeant, Glick, of a woman on the Italian roadside, and highly suspicious of the Italian farmer they have enlisted to act as a guide in their scouting mission. Snipers loom along their path, and the immediate fear of death seeps into each tantalizing memory of home. Equivocation between the absurdity of an unreported murder and the inevitability of killing as a means of survival drives the troops' despairing, profanity-laced banter as the meaninglessness of their mission becomes clear. The peace of the title is glimpsed only fleetingly, throwing into relief the stark, indiscriminate nature of war. Bausch's compassion for Marson and his men is evident, but his story is unforgiving; the tightly paced final scenes offer no clarity of purpose in a dark war story of unyielding sorrow.

Randall Norris & Jean-Philippe Cypres will be here to talk about Highway 61: Heart of the Delta.

 Check out this new book with a foreword by Morgan Freeman. 

Ellen Gilchrist signs A Dangerous Age.  

The women in the Hand family are no strangers to controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family's Southern heritage, one that stretches back through several generations. For Louise Hand, it means coping with the possible loss of the young man she has improbably fallen in love with, especially now that he has vowed revenge for the injuries suffered by his twin brother in Iraq.

Winifred Hand's loss came before the war began, when her fiancé flew to New York for an early morning meeting at the World Trade enter on 9/11. Now just as she is starting to experience life again, the war once more threatens to take away what happiness she has found.

And for Olivia Hand, the strong-willed independent editor of Tulsa, Oklahoma's preeminent newspaper, the war is a subject for editorials, a far-off conflict that she can write about with both passion and detachment—until her newly wedded husband gets called up for service.

All three are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love. But each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Haunting and elegantly crafted, it is a wonderfully human story about the centuries-old struggle of women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war, by a writer the Washington Post says "should be declared a national cultural treasure."

Gifted cook and storyteller Martha Hall Foose, executive chef of the Viking Cooking School and co-founder of Bottletree Bakery, invites you into her kitchen to share recipes that bring alive the landscape, people, and traditions that make Southern cuisine an American favorite.

Martha will be signing her new cookbook Screen Doors and Sweat Tea.  

Tony Horwitz signs A Voyage Long and Strange.

The bestselling author of Blue Latitudes and Confederates in the Attic takes us on a thrilling and eye-opening voyage to pre-Mayflower America

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he's mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus's sail in 1492 to Jamestown's founding in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs—these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.

Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek—from Florida's Fountain of Youth to Plymouth's sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges—Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.
 

Rick Bragg will be signing The Prince of Frogtown.

In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson.

He learns, right from the start, that a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog who chases a car and wins. He discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, unsuited to fathering this boy in particular, a boy who does not know how to throw a punch and doesn’t need to; a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect; in short, a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was, and who longs for a relationship with Rick that Rick hasn’t the first inkling of how to embark on. With the weight of this new boy tugging at his clothes, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son, and himself.

The Prince of Frogtown documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick’s youth, to Jacksonville’s one-hundred-year-old mill, the town’s blight and salvation; and to a troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow, Rick’s father, a man bound to bring harm even to those he truly loves. And the book documents the unexpected corollary to it, the marvelous journey of Rick’s later life: a journey into fatherhood, and toward a child for whom he comes to feel a devotion that staggers him. With candor, insight, tremendous humor, and the remarkable gift for descriptive storytelling on which he made his name, Rick Bragg delivers a brilliant and moving rumination on the livesof boys and men, a poignant reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.

Chris Myers Asch signs The Senator and the Sharecropper.

The epic struggle for black equality in the twentieth century, told through the deeply intertwined life histories of the staunch segregationist and his sharecropper nemesis.

The Senator and the Sharecropper is the story of two larger-than-life personalities from one humble corner of the Mississippi Delta: the senator, James O. Eastland, a fabulously wealthy cotton planter and one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. Senate, and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up desperately poor a few miles from Eastland's plantation. During Eastland's long tenure as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ruthlessly and effectively bottled up civil rights legislation on Capitol Hill. From Hamer's lowly origins, she emerged as a spiritual leader of the civil rights movement that eventually toppled Eastland—a woman who "shook the foundations of the nation," in the words of Andrew Young.

The Senator and the Sharecropper tells how these two pivotal figures came to confront one another on the national political stage at the height of the civil rights struggle. Their intertwined histories—set against a backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture—offer a powerful window onto the unraveling of Jim Crow during the upheavals of the 1960s and, in our own time, the persistence of profound inequality in the post-civil rights era.

Nicholas Dawidoff signs The Crowd Sounds Happy.

From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere--and how baseball helps him find his place in America.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball--the inner game as it has never been described before.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.

Robert St. John signs his new grilling book, New South Grilling.

In New South Grilling, Robert St. John brings all the flavor and fun that made his Deep South books such a success--but this time, his recipes are accompanied by beautiful, lush, full-color photos that will have every backyard BBQ fan running to fire up the grill.

New South Grilling pairs flawless technique and easy-to-follow instructions with witty, flavorful food combinations. From fun party food to luscious burgers to elegant seafood to the perfect cocktails to wash it all down, it offers everything home cooks need to dazzle friends and family all summer long.

Including such luscious recipes as
Grilled Oysters Rockefeller
Dr Pepper-Glazed Ham
Key Lime Grilled Shrimp with Pecan-spiked Rice
Zydeco Chicken
Andouille-Stuffed Prime Rib
Ginger Soy Salmon
Grilled Peach Shortcake with Peach Ice Cream
Gold Margaritas with Cointreau
Seersucker cocktails
Not-Your-Grandmother’s Mint Julep

And with Robert’s own guaranteed no-stick marinades that make grilling even seafood a breeze, this incredible cookbook will transform your grilling and your everyday cooking, year-round.