I first came across Crown of Feathers back in October and let me tell you, it has been so difficult to wait for it to hit shelves! I read the book in one day, completely engrossed in the world building and characters. I am so thrilled I was able to interview the author, Nicki Pau Preto, about her gorgeous story of sisterhood, deception, and betrayal.
Brazos Bookstore was lucky enough to host Marlon James for his new fantasy epic, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Our buyer, Keaton (a staunch fan of the book, and of James in general), sat down with James to talk about the book, myth-making, identity, and colonialism.
Brazos Bookstore: I’m always interested in the impetus and research that goes into the composition of any novel--how history, culture and the real world influence its creation. Can you tell us a bit about what led you to write BL/RW?
Sara, Keaton, and Ülrika trekked to New Mexico for Winter Institute, a booksellers' conference in late January. It's run by the American Booksellers Association, a group over a century old that acts as a not-for-profit trade organization to help independent bookstores grow and succeed. It's a time to reconnect with the industry, other booksellers, and publishers. They sat down to chat about their experience at WI and its importance in the field.
Sara: A few weeks ago, Ülrika, Keaton and I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to go to Winter Institute.
I have known Houston author Lynne Kelly since her first middle grade novel, CHAINED debuted back in 2010, and I’m lucky to call her a friend. She is an amazing writer with books that are both funny and heartwarming and always memorable. She is also many other things, including a lover of animals and a sign-language interpreter, both of which led her to write her newest novel, SONG FOR A WHALE, which is getting both amazing buzz and phenomenal reviews. So it was my great honor and pleasure to get to interview her about SONG and the writing life and whales and more!
Free books for kids? Connecting authors with their readers? Sign us up! This past January, Texas Book Festival came to Houston for their fifth annual school literacy program in the area, Reading Rock Stars. 2019’s lineup featured ten of our most beloved kidlit authors: Roda Ahmed, Ana Aranda, Diane Gonzales Bertrand, Ame Dyckman, Vashti Harrison, Nicolás Kanellos, James Luna, Jessica Mendoza, Chitra Soundar, and Lila Quintero Weaver.
Maria Popova is the author, curator, and brain child behind the blog Brain Pickings: a cultural treasure trove of the thoughts, letters, and life’s work of some of history’s greatest thinkers. Most Brain Pickings articles have titles like “How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russel on What Makes a Fulfilling Life” and “Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair.” Spanning centuries, her articles delve into a person’s writing to find the fundamental truths that make them who they are.
SEA MONSTERS is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. It takes place in 1980's Mexico City, wherein a young woman named Luisa decides to go on an adventure. Instead of going to school, she takes a bus with a boy she barely knows to the Pacific Coast in search of a mysterious group of traveling Ukranian circus performers. Mark, Sara, and Katie sat down to chat about the book. Visit us on February 25, when we host a SEA MONSTERS happy hour at 6pm and an event with Chloe Aridjis at 7pm!
Brazos Bookstore is excited to partner with the Goethe-Institut's Houston pop-up for a year of cultural events in our city.
The Goethe Pop Up Houston presents LitHAUS, a monthly reading series for contemporary German literature. Each month’s selection will be accompanied by a talk or discussion around the work and its wider themes. Reading the work is encouraged but not required. Everyone is welcome to join in! Find more information about Goethe Pop Up Houston here.
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Published: New Directions - November 8th, 2016
Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers. Famous stars of the literary world, the circus, and the zoo, they happen to be polar bears who move human society. In part one, the matriarch, enjoying “the intimacy of being alone with my pen,” accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography in the Soviet Union. In part two, her daughter Tosca moves to East Germany and pioneers a thrilling circus act. And Tosca’s son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in part three and raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo.
It’s the evening before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde. The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman—he’s dead. And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells—the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking. Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football jerseys bump into one another. They all want to bring something to a close, on this night before the feast.
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Published: Fitzcarraldo Editions - May 8th, 2018
Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses Japan and Europe, memory and actuality, fox-possession myths and psychiatric mythmaking. The novel begins near the story’s end, in Dr. Shimamura’s retirement. A feverish invalid, he’s watched over by four women: his wife, his mother, his mother-in- law, and a nurse (originally one of his psychiatric patients). As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent—to his dismay—to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women of an epidemic of fox possession. He considers the assignment a joke, believing it’s all a hoax, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a beauty. He comes to believe not just in fox possession, but also that he in fact “cured” the young woman with a kiss, by breathing in the fox demon (the root of his lifelong fever). Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and (briefly) Freud himself.
Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years. With cool irony, Grjasnowa’s debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial—her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn’t equipped to deal with grief, and this all-too-normal shortcoming gives a particularly bittersweet quality to her adventures.
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Published: Transit Books - September 4th, 2018
A woman moves to a London suburb near the River Lea, without knowing quite why or for how long. Over a series of long, solitary walks she reminisces about the rivers she has encountered during her life, from the Rhine, her childhood river, to the Saint Lawrence, and a stream in Tel Aviv. Filled with poignancy and poetic observation, River is an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.
North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. . . .
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Published: New Vessel Press - September 9th, 2014
Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents’ home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up every day in a suit and tie to pass the time on a nearby bench. As Hiro and Tetsu cautiously open up to each other, they discover in their sadness a common bond. Regrets and disappointments, as well as hopes and dreams, come to the surface until both find the strength to somehow give a new start to their lives.
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Published: New Directions - September 26th, 2017
Go, Went, Gone tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns into compassion and an inner transformation as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.
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Published: Darf Publishers - October 18th, 2018
A child attacks Loribeth with an iron while she is sleeping. In retaliation Loribeth throws the iron onto the child from an upstairs window, packs the damaged body into a suitcase and sets off on her travels. Thus starts Steinbeck’s unusual, poetic novella about a young woman’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Loribeth and her suitcase begin an odyssey through nightmarish locations in search of her absent father. What ensues is a Freudian adult fairytale.
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Published: Europa Editions - April 26th, 2011
Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga. When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.
In improvising poetry, aka a live-action cento, aka fashioning a poetry jam band, I start with a makeshift canon. Like throwing a party, you put different poets, different styles at play with/in each other, and see if it takes off. Like throwing a party, I try to be well-rested and hydrated before I host. I spend time thinking of who to invite. I light a candle. I open the space up. I have party games ready in case it gets awkward. There is some noise, which starts out steady and comforting, before we trust each other enough to get real weird.
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Published: AK Press - April 18th, 2017
Other recommended texts include Sun Ra's This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra and CA Conrad's Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for Future Wilderness.
Elena Gonzales Melinger is a poet and writer. Her work has appeared in the Texas Review, Glass Mountain and Dangerous Constellations. She has performed most recently with Public Poetry and Poetry Fix. Her chapbook, Write What You Know, and zine, Light Skinned Tears, will be available at Brazos Bookstore on February 8th, 2019 for her event.
Justyce McAllister comes face to face with racial injustice and police brutality and tries to find answers by starting a journal to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. A brief, but powerful YA novel that will resonate with teens and adults alike as Justyce ponders King's teachings.
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Published: Vintage - March 14th, 1995
A quintessential depiction of the African American experience in the early/mid 20th century and a stunning literary achievement that gave voice to an entire community unseen by a racist society.
This is a favorite of ours because of the powerful positive image Wiley's magnificent portraits bestow on his subjects--contemporary black people posed in the regal aesthetic of classical Western art.
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Published: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR) - March 6th, 2018
Thrilling, gorgeous, and epic to the highest degree, Adeyemi's book is a world-building masterpiece. The land of Orïsha is deftly written, inspired by West-African culture and tradition. A NY Times Best Seller for over 34 weeks, CHILDREN is a landmark achievement for black fantasy authors.
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Published: Ballantine Books - October 30th, 2018
Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of the best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature.
Ruffin's WE CAST A SHADOW takes place in a near-future Southern city, in which an experimental medical procedure is gaining popularity -- and fast. Dr. Nzinga's clinic will make anyone whiter, narrow anyone's nose, and (in his words) make them more "beautiful." As Nigel, a biracial boy, gets darker and darker with each passing day, his father gets more terrified. This sharp, satirical book adds an amazing perspective to our real-life country, which is still dealing so deeply with systemic racism.
Join us on 2/2 for an event with Maurice Carlos Ruffin. We can't wait to host him!
