Get Caught Reading a Banned Book!
Send us a photo of someone caught reading a banned book! We’d love to collect them to publish in a future post.
Store owner Colleen reading Gender Queer, currently the most challanged book in the United States.
Banned Books Week is October 1 – 7, 2023. The theme of this year’s event is “Let Freedom Read!” Banned Books Week started in 1982 in response to the growing number of books being challanged in libraries, schools, and bookstores. This event brings together the entire book community in support of the freedom of expression, ideas, and what some might consider to be unpopular perspectives. A list of the most challanged books of 2022 can be found on the American Library Association website.
Read small press book reviews, author interviews, and indie recommendations from our resident bibliophile Tom Bowden in his latest column i arrogantly recommend… Mr. Bowden is currently teaching English in Shanghai for the next several months and we hope to have an update on his travels for a future newsletter.
Our reading group selection for October is Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, a classic vampire tale that inspired Dracula, among other works. You can read more about Carmilla and our reading group here. Looking for more Halloween reads? Visit our Gothic, Horror and Weird Tales catalog.
Our repost this month is Strolling the Lit Necropolis, a lit adventure through the cemeteries of Paris, previously published in our July 2020 newsletter.
Our third annual Ray Johnson birthday celebration is in the planning stages and we will have a date with guests to be announced later this month.
Happy October reading!
– Cary, Colleen, and the Book Beat staff
UPCOMING EVENTS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5: COLLEEN GLEASON AND DIANNE FREEMAN AT HUNTINGTON WOODS LIBRARY
Thursday, October 5, from 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM, the Huntington Woods Library and Cultural Center will be hosting Michigan authors Colleen Cambridge and Dianne Freeman for an evening of historical mystery! Cambridge and Freeman will be signing their books, including their newest books Murder by Invitation Only and A Newlywed’s Guide to Fortune and Murder. Ask us about Cambridge and Freeman’s other titles in these mystery series available right now in the store! For more information, visit our post and the Huntington Woods Library website.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7: AUTHORS TO THE POINTE
Saturday, October 7 from 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM we will be joining the Grosse Pointe Public Library at The War Memorial (32 Lake Shore, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI 48236) for the annual Authors to the Pointe, including breakfast and featured authors Angeline Boulley (Warrior Girl Unearthed, Firekeeper’s Daughter) and Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land, All the Light We Cannot See) will be signing their books after their talks. Tickets for the event include breakfast and are on sale now at Authors to the Pointe! If you’d like a signed book, please give us a call at (248) 968-1190 and we’ll make arrangements.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15-16: DETROIT ART BOOK FAIR
Saturday 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM and Sunday 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM, October 15-16, the Detroit Art Book Fair will take place at Trinosophes (1464 Gratiot Ave, Detroit, MI 48207). Book Beat will have a table both days selling our wares! Founded in 2013, The Detroit Art Book Fair is an annual event that takes place at Trinosophes in Detroit’s Eastern Market neighborhood. Each year, the fair brings together dozens of independent publishers, artists, writers, and collectors to present their books, zines, and prints to the public. Book Beat will display a selection of new and rare artist books, artist facsimile sketchbooks, artist zines, original photographs, posters and ephemera.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 16: ANGELINE BOULLEY AT FARMINGTON COMMUNITY LIBRARY
Monday, October 16 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, New York Times bestselling author Angeline Boulley will be discussing her recent books, Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed. Following her talk, there will be a question and answer session and book signing. Registration is required for this event and space is limited, however it will also be live-streamed via Zoom which requires no registration. For more information and to register online, visit the Farmington Community Library website. If you’d like a signed book, please give us a call at (248) 968-1190.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17: HUDA FAHMY AT DEARBORN PUBLIC LIBRARY
Tuesday, October 17 from 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM, Huda Fahmy will present her new book Huda F Cares? at the main branch of the Dearborn Public Library, The Henry Ford Centennial Library. This event is open to the public for families with middle and high schoolers. Huda F Cares? is a humorous coming-of-age greaphic novel and was recently long-listed for the National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature. Please give us a call at (248) 968-1190 if you’d like to reserve a signed copy.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25: BOOK BEAT DISUSSION OF CARMILLA
The reading group selection for October is Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Our discussion will be held Wednesday, October 25 at 7:00 PM online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. Read more in our reading group selection for October post.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29: BEVERLY JENKINS AT BOOK BEAT
Sunday, October 29 from 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM, local romance novelist Beverly Jenkins will be visiting Book Beat for a book talk and signing in celebration of her newest novel A Christmas to Remember. Books will be available to purchase at the event, including her previous book To Catch a Raven and many other titles. If you have any questions or would like to reserve any of her titles, please call us at (248) 968-1190. This event is free and open to the public.
A Selection of our catalogs on Bookshop.org
SLEEPER ALERTS, RECENT & UPCOMING ARRIVALS
The Wolves of Eternity
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Penguin Press
From the internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a sprawling and deeply human novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves–and the limits of what we can understand about life itself.
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations–to one another, to nature, to the dead.
The Iliad
Homer; Emily Wilson (trans.)
W. W. Norton & Company
When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017—revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)—critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic—the most revered war poem of all time.
The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world—the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters—both human and divine.
The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.
Rouge
Mona Awad
Simon & Schuster
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Bustle, The Millions, LitHub, TOR, Good Housekeeping, Our Culture Mag, and more!
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate–and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror–and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry–as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
The Slip : The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
Prudence Peiffer
Harper
“Tenderly researched . . . . The Slip [is filled] with rich art-world anecdotes and respectful gossip . . . . If you wonder why art is migrating to the metaverse, Peiffer’s snapshot of this hinge decade in modern art history should be your first port of call.” —New York Times Book Review
“Things that burn bright and vanish are easily idealized, but in The Slip, the critic Prudence Peiffer opts for a tricky blend of mythmaking and myth-busting [and her] main point . . . is right: Coenties Slip had seedy glamour to spare, but for most of the fifties and sixties it didn’t feel like Manhattan . . . . The true hero is an environment, an atmosphere . . . . [the] book is free of the weightless isms that one usually sees in art histories . . . . Peiffer is a lively storyteller.” —The New Yorker
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I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
~ L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables