Dear Readers,
Welcome to the September edition of the Book Beat Newsletter.
On August 28, we celebrated 42 years of Book Beat! Thank you for your continued support and community throughout the years. We will have a raincheck anniversary party on Sunday, September 29 from 12-5 p.m. with details to follow soon.
Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15-October 15. The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September 18, respectively. Here at Book Beat, we have a a variety of books by and about Spanish-language authors and artists. The Book Beat staff recommends these titles by Hispanic authors:
The International Day of Peace (“Peace Day”) is observed around the world each year on September 21. Established in 1981 by unanimous United Nations resolution, Peace Day provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to Peace above all differences and to contribute to building a Culture of Peace. Find peace in a book!
Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. is a Detroit printer and the subject of a recent exhibition and a lavish and beautifully designed monograph Citizen Printer, newly published by Letterform Press of San Francisco. The book contains over 500 color illustrations of artist books, letter press posters, postcards, and advertisements divided into three subject categories of his greatest interests: Social Justice, Shared Wisdom, and Community. Signed copies are available at the store and online at the Book Beat gallery. He will also be visiting Beat Beat at our Anniversary Party on September 29. Book Beat co-owner Cary Loren met with Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. at his studio in Detroit to talk about Citizen Printer and his move from Alabama to Detroit just over ten years ago. Read the full interview here.
Banned Books Week is September 22–28. At the store we have a whole section of banned books! Come read and support the freedom to seek and express ideas, even those that seem unpopular or unorthodox. You can read more about Banned Books Week at the Library Association of America website.
Read small press book reviews, author interviews, and indie recommendations from our resident bibliophile Tom Bowden in his monthly column i arrogantly recommend…
Happy reading!
-Cary, Colleen, and the Book Beat staff
SEPTEMBER 19: BARBARA MCQUADE AT THE HUNTINGTON WOODS RECREATION CENTER
The Huntington Woods Peace Group is hosting Barbara McQuade, an American lawyer and former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, in celebration of her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.
This event will take place Thursday, September 19 at 6:30 p.m. at the Huntington Woods Recreation Center (26363 Scotia Rd, Huntington Woods, MI 48070). McQuade will discuss her new book, with a signing to follow.
This event is free and open to the public, with books for sale courtesy of Book Beat. Visit the Huntington Woods Peace Group for more information.
SEPTEMBER 22: DUNYA MIKHAIL
Join us Sunday, September 22 from 3-4 p.m. at Book Beat for a poetry reading and signing with Dunya Mikhail. This event celebrates the release of Mikhail’s newest poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay released September 3 from New Directions Press. Mikhail is an Iraqi-American poet, novelist, journalist, and teaches Arabic and poetry at Oakland University.
Copies of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, as well as some of her other titles, will be available at the event. This event is free and open to the public. Please email bookbeatorders@gmail.com or give us a call at 248-968-1190 for more information.
SEPTEMBER 25: BOOK BEAT READING GROUP
The Book Beat reading group selection for September is Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon.
We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, September 25 at 7:00 p.m.
The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and discussions are free and open to the public.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
SEPTEMBER 27: MONIQUE ASHER AND MERIAM METOUI
Join us Friday, September 27 from 6:30-8:00 p.m. to celebrate recent books by local authors Monique Asher and Meriam Metoui. Asher’s debut novel Don’t Eat the Pie is published September 24, and Metoui’s newest novel Portrait of a Shadow was published in July. There will be a talk by each author and Q&A, with a signing and refreshments to follow. This event is free and open to the public. Please email bookbeatorders@gmail.com or call us at 248-968-1190 for more information.
SEPTEMBER 28: SUB-ROSA READING GROUP
Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.
Our selection for this month is Being Here is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq.
We will meet Saturday, August 31 at 6:30 p.m. at the store. A reminder will be sent out the day before the meeting.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com.
Books are in stock and discounted 15%.
SEPTEMBER 29: BOOK BEAT ANNIVERSARY PARTY
Come celebrate Book Beat’s 42nd birthday from 12-5 p.m. on Sunday, September 29. We will be having a storewide sale and ice cream!
This event will also feature a host of authors and artist all afternoon, including Felicia George (1-2 p.m.), Paul Kennedy, Jr. (2-4 p.m.), Anne Carson (2-3 p.m.), Donald Levin, DeAnn Wiley (2-3 p.m.), Rachelle Baker (2-3 p.m.), Rick Lieder (2-3 p.m.), and Wong Herbert Yee (2-3 p.m.). Read more about each author here.
SLEEPER ALERTS, RECENT AND UPCOMING ARRIVALS
The Lights
Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate—in their unpredictability, in their intensities—the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.
“In the Lerner of The Lights, you have it all: love and empathy, newly emerged; a poet’s genius for metaphor; and, above all, the strategy of comedy.”—Cal Bedient, Lana Turner
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
Mammoth
Eva Baltasar
And Other Stories
The followup novel to International Booker-shortlisted Boulder is a story of queer motherhood and survival deep in the countryside
Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work—all in pursuit of life in the raw.
This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.
“The language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets—these morsels of intimacy—in a way that grips and sates.”—New York Times Book Review
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
Harper Perennial
From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity.
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
“Demon is a voice for the ages–akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield–only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner
Scribner
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by LitHub, The Millions, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, and Publishers Weekly.
From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and “one of the most gifted authors of her generation” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor.
“An immersive novel about an agent provocateur embedded within a group of environmental activists in south-western France, and slowly becoming mesmerized by the group elder’s theories about Neanderthals. It’s seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall.” –Mick Herron, The Guardian
The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk
Riverhead Books
The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.
September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone–or something–seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
“The Polish Nobel winner ladles up a deliciously creepy revenge tale in this satirical spin on Thomas Mann’s 100-year-old masterpiece The Magic Mountain.”—The Guardian
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 24
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