All Categories - FOGGY PINE BOOKS

September 2020

9/1/2020

Hi all, Mary here! I have a sad announcement about the book club so I thought it better if I did it myself. This was the first book club I started at the store & our first meeting was in a tiny, less-than 400 sq ft space. We had wine & talked about The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The book club grew & became one of our most popular offerings. We expanded & added new book clubs, new folks decided to join us, and we even had authors come speak to us a few times! However, since the pandemic began, attendance at our virtual meetings has dwindled until, for the last few months, no one came at all.

We understand that things are crazy right now and, for many, spending another hour on a screen at the end of a day spent on screens isn't very enticing. We also understand that the virtual format isn't as much fun for some as meeting in person at the bookstore with drinks & snacks. Whatever your reasons are for no longer attending our book club or for not attending in the first place, please know that we don't hold it against you!

However, planning for an event takes prep time. I spend the month reading the book, developing discussion questions, creating these blog posts, and developing social media images & copy for marketing. It's a lot of work. I don't mind doing it, of course, if that means that the event goes well & we get to have a lovely discussion about that month's book. But, with folks not attending, I am going to have to put this book club on temporary hold.

I am spread very thin right now & spending time on an event that doesn't bring in any readers doesn't seem like the best use of my time. I hope y'all understand & know that we wouldn't do this unless it was necessary. I need to spend more time on things that offer a return on energy spent, in some way or another.

This doesn't mean that the Foggy Pine Book Club is canceled! We will be returning to our usual format when we are able to meet in person again. Of course, we have no idea when that will be but we expect that we will have no new meetings for the rest of 2020. We will post here & on our social media accounts when the book club is gearing up to start again. In the meantime, if you were hoping to join a book club, you can check out the Fantasy & Sci-Fi Book Club.

Thank you, everyone, for your continued support of the bookstore. Without you, we wouldn't be here & we are forever grateful that you've allowed us a space in your hearts.

August 2020

8/22/2020

A Song Below Water is Bethany C. Morrow's second novel. Her first published work MEM, another work of speculative fiction, addressed the ideas of cloning, memory, and trauma. Morrow is the editor of the anthology Take the Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance, which was released in 2019. It "aims to provide marginalized teens visibility and validation in stories of everyday resistance."

Here's the summary for A Song Below Water: In a society determined to keep her under lock and key, Tavia must hide her siren powers.

Meanwhile, Effie is fighting her own family struggles, pitted against literal demons from her past. Together, these best friends must navigate through the perils of high school’s junior year.

But everything changes in the aftermath of a siren murder trial that rocks the nation, and Tavia accidentally lets out her magical voice at the worst possible moment.

Soon, nothing in Portland, Oregon, seems safe. To save themselves from drowning, it’s only Tavia and Effie’s unbreakable sisterhood that proves to be the strongest magic of all.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of August. You can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside! This title is also available as an audiobook through our partner, Libro.fm.

Reviews & Interviews
"Q&A: Bethany C. Morrow" -- The Nerd Daily
"Black Voices, Power, and Activism" -- The Young Folks
"Interview with Bethany C. Morrow" -- Pine Reads Review
"Raise Your Voice: A Song Below Water" -- TOR.com
"A Song Below Water" -- Kirkus
"Voice As Resistance" -- Chicago Review of Books

We'll meet online via Google Meet on August 29th at 7:30pm. Come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.

July 2020

7/8/2020

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (or, according to many sources, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. The world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend Gretel Kercheval —a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, it is a true feast for the reader.

Oyeyemi's novel White Is For Witching was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognized in Venus Zine's "25 under 25" list. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list and Boy, Snow, Bird was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2014. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours won the PEN Open Book Award: for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2016.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of July. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside!

Buy Here:
Hardcover
Paperback
Audiobook

Reviews & Interviews
Gingerbread Is A Delightfully Spicy Family Fable -- NPR
Helen Oyeyemi Dishes Up Magic in Her New Novel, Gingerbread -- NY Times
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi – a modern fairytale -- The Guardian
Helen Oyeyemi says Gingerbread is not about Hansel and Gretel -- VOX
Helen Oyeyemi on Gingerbread, Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood -- Longreads
Helen Oyeyemi Wants to Bewitch You -- The Millions

We're remaining online for our book club meetings and this one is scheduled for Saturday, July 25th at 7:30pm. You can join using this link and discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & find more information here. Read on!

June 2020

6/1/2020

Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic.

Murasaki Shikibu, born in 978, was a member of Japan’s Fujiwara clan, which ruled behind the scenes during the Heian Period by providing the brides and courtesans of all the emperors. Lady Murasaki’s rare literary talent, particularly her skill as a poet, secured her a place in the court of Empress Akiko. After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world’s first novel Genji Monogatari, the tale of the shining Prince Genji.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of June. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside or in-store (just be sure to schedule an appointment)!

Buy Here:

Paperback
Audiobook

Reviews

"The Sensualist: What Makes The Tale of Genji So Seductive" -- The New Yorker
"The Tale of Genji: The Work of a Brilliant Widow 1,000 Years Ago" -- The Washington Post
"The Tale of Genji and the Art It Inspired" -- The NY Times

We'll meet via Google Meetings on June 27th at 7:30pm. Simply click on this link and we will see you there! Please come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.

May 2020

5/6/2020

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison. She’s released eighteen years later and finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian mountains, she goes searching for someone she left behind, but on the way, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother. Together, they try to make a fresh start, but is that even possible in a town that refuses to change? Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a run for another life.

Mesha Maren is an Assistant Professor at Duke University and serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia. Her short stories and essays can be read in The Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Lincoln Memorial University. Sugar Run is her debut novel.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of May. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside! This riveting story is also available as an audiobook through our partner Libro.fm.

Buy Here:

Hardcover
Paperback
Audiobook

Reviews & Interviews:

"After 18 Years in Prison, A Woman Tries to Find Her Way Home" -- The NY Times
"Sugar Run: A Novel" -- Washington Independent Review of Books
"Hopes and Hopes and Hopes: On Mesha Maren's 'Sugar Run'" -- LA Review of Books
"Mesha Maren: How I Write" -- The Writer
"With 'Sugar Run', Mesha Maren crafts a gritty noir novel like you've never read" --Entertainment Weekly
"A New Novel Makes the "Sugar Run" Out of Jail and Back to West Virginia"-- NPR

We'll meet online via Zoom on May 30th at 7:30 pm. You can follow the link here to join in or get more information from our Facebook page. We want to know what you thought about the book, even if you didn't finish it and we can't wait to "see" you there. Read on!

April 2020

4/18/2020

By Katharine Brown

Celeste Ng is a highly acclaimed writer with dozens of awards under her belt. Her first book, Everything I Never Told You, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award, the 2014 the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the 2015 ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was not only an instant NY Times bestseller but won the 2017 Goodreads Readers' Choice Award and was named the 2017 Best Book of the Year by NPR, Guardian, Washington Post and many more.

Little Fires Everywhere is a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of April. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside! This riveting story is also available as an audiobook, narrated by the author herself, through our partner Libro.fm.

Reviews & Interviews

"On 'Little Fires Everywhere'" -- The Kenyon Review
"In a Quiet Ohio Town, Who Started the Fire, and Why?" -- The NY Times Book Review
"Little Fires Everywhere" -- Kirkus Review
"It's a Novel About Race, and Class, and Priviledge" -- The Guardian
Celeste Ng Says "Little Fires Everywhere" Is a Challenge To "Well-Intentioned" White Ladies" -- BuzzFeed Reader
"A Mother And Daughter Upset Suburban Status Quo In 'Little Fires Everywhere'" -- NPR

We'll meet online via Zoom on April 25th at 7:30 pm. You can follow the link here to join in or get more information from our Facebook page. We want to know what you thought about the book, even if you didn't finish it and we can't wait to "see" you there. Read on!

March 2020

2/29/2020

Pat Baker has written several well received novels including Union Street, Blow Your House Down, The Century's Daughter, The Man Who Wasn't There, Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road, and Another World. She has won numerous awards (the Fawcett Society Book Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Booker Prize for Fiction) and has had several of them adapted for stage and screen.

In The Silence of the Girls, Barker takes on the story of the Iliad and re-imagines it as we’ve never seen it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp—concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead—as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion. Brilliantly written, filled with moments of terror and beauty, The Silence of the Girls gives voice to an extraordinary woman—and makes an ancient story new again.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of March. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up in store!

Buy Here

Reviews & Interviews

Hardcover
Paperback
Audiobook

"The Silence of the Girls, A Feminist Odyssey" -- The Guardian
"Giving Voice to Homer's Women" -- The NY TIMES
"The Silence of Classical Literature's Women" -- The Atlantic
"The Waterstones Interview: Pat Barker on The Silence of the Girls" -- Waterstones

We'll meet at Foggy Pine Books on March 28th at 7:30pm. There will be free wine and snacks for book club members to share. Bring a friend and come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.

February 2020

1/29/2020

Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.

Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

My Sister the Serial Killer is Oyinkan Braithwaite's first novel. It has been nominated for the 2019 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the 2019 Women's Prize. My Sister the Serial Killer was the winner of the 2018 LA Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and also won the 2019 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of February. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up in store!

Buy Here:
Paperback
Hardcover
Audiobook

Reviews & Interviews:
"In This Novel, One Sister Is a Nurse. The Other Is a Murderer" -- NY Times
"A Morbidly Funny Slashfest" -- The Guardian
"Sister Act: On "My Sister the Serial Killer" -- LA Review of Books
"Interview with Oyinkan Braithwaite" -- Dead Darlings
"Author Interview: My Sister the Serial Killer" -- NPR
"On Violence, Beauty, and Poetry" -- LitHub

We'll meet at Foggy Pine Books on February 29th at 7:30pm. There will be free wine and snacks for book club members to share. Bring a friend and come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.

January 2020

12/27/2019

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, the Lannan Literarty Award, and a Guggenheim. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of January. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up in store!

Buy Here!

Hardcover
Paperback
Digital Audiobook

Reviews & Interviews

"Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities"-- Publishers Weekly
"Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities"--Kirkus Review
"Thirteen Years On, Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark Offers a Vision for Defiance, Not Dispair, in the Age of Trump"--Paste
"Rebecca Solnit on What Makes Her Hopeful"-- Democracy Now
"Rebecca Solnit: The Essay is Powerful Again" -- The Guardian
"Interview with Rebecca Solnit"-- Terrain.org

We'll meet at Foggy Pine Books on January 25th at 7:30pm. There will be free wine and snacks for book club members to share. Bring a friend and come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.

December 2019

11/13/2019

Where has the year gone?! It's hard to believe it's December already but these cold snowy nights are perfect for cuddling up with a warm blanket and a fairy tale retelling. Enter Bird, Snow, Boy by Helen Oyeyemi. Recipient of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Granta Best of Young British Novelist recipient, Oyeyemi specializes in stories rooted in myth and fairy-tales which take the reader on dark and delightful adventures through unorthodox, freewheeling plots.

In Boy, Snow, Bird Oyeyemi serves us a brilliant recasting of the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of December. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up in store!

Buy Now!

Paperback
Digital Audiobooks

Reviews & Interviews

"Helen Oyeyemi" -- BookPage
"'Boy, Snow, Bird' Takes A Closer Look Into The Fairy Tale Mirror" -- NPR
"'Boy, Snow, Bird' Author on Fairy Tales and Feminists With Flawless Prose" -- Flavorwire
"White Lies" -- The New York Times
"Boy, Snow, Bird" -- Kirkus Review
"Snow Whitman" -- Slate

We'll meet at Foggy Pine Books on December 21st at 7:30pm. There will be free wine and snacks for book club members to share. Bring a friend and come discuss the book with us, even if you weren't able to completely finish it or if you didn't like it. You can see the Facebook event & RSVP here.