On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.

Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

The Promise of the Pelican, (Arcade, distributed by Simon & Schuster), is an intergenerational, multicultural South, literary crime novel set on the Alabama coast, with back stories in Amsterdam and Central America. An 82-year old retired defense attorney, Hank Weinberg, a child Holocaust survivor from Amsterdam, is summoned back into action to take up the cause of a young Honduran worker at a local resort hotel, accused of a murder. “The Promise of the Pelican” is not only a crime novel, but also a novel that’s Jewish, Southern, global, and attuned to issues of social justice.

Roy Hoffman is author of the new novel The Promise of the Pelican, a literary crime novel of today’s multicultural South, the novels Come Landfall, Chicken Dreaming Corn, praised by Harper Lee, and Almost Family, and the nonfiction Alabama Afternoons and Back Home. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall St. Journal, and he was a journalist and speechwriter in New York before returning south to reside in Fairhope, Ala., near his hometown, Mobile. A recipient of the Lillian Smith Award in fiction and Clarence Cason Award in nonfiction, Roy is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. On the web: www.royhoffmanwriter.com

Mallory McDuff teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, North Carolina. With her two daughters, she lives on campus in a 900-square-foot house with an expansive view of the Appalachian mountains. She is the author of four books, including Natural Saints: How People of Faith Are Working to Save God’s Earth. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Sojourners, and more.

Join us for a virtual evening with Mary Laura Philpott & Kimberly Williams-Paisley, hosted by Books & Books/Miami Book Fair + indie bookstore partners on Wednesday, April 20th at 8:00 PM ET. 

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Tickets are $27.00 each (plus applicable tax and shipping). Each ticket includes an unsigned hardcover copy of Mary Laura Philpott’s new book, Bomb Shelter and a link to access the live event.

Please make sure you submit the correct email address with your ticket purchase and that your email filters will allow messages from addresses @malaprops.com. The link required to attend will be emailed to you prior to the event.

NOTE: Books bundled with event tickets may be shipped ONLY to United States addresses. Books will not be shipped before publication date, April 12, 2022. Postal delivery times vary.

A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe. Then, in the dark of one quiet, pre-dawn morning, she woke abruptly to a terrible sound–and found her teenage son unconscious on the floor. In the aftermath of a crisis that darkened her signature sunny spirit, she wondered: If this happened, what else could happen? And how do any of us keep going when we can’t know for sure what’s coming next? Leave it to the writer whose critically acclaimed debut had us “laughing and crying on the same page” (NPR) to illuminate what it means to move through life with a soul made of equal parts anxiety and optimism (and while she’s at it, to ponder the mysteries of backyard turtles and the challenges of spatchcocking a turkey).

Hailed by The Washington Post as “Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin all rolled into one,” Philpott returns in her distinctive voice to explore our protective instincts, the ways we continue to grow up long after we’re grown, and the limits–both tragic and hilarious–of the human body and mind.

MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, author of the national bestseller I Miss You When I Blink, writes essays that examine the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. Her writing has been featured frequently by The New York Times and appears in such outlets as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Real Simple, and more. A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television for several years. Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.   

KIMBERLY WILLIAMS-PAISLEY is an actress, New York Times Best Selling author, Alzheimer’s advocate, and co-founder of non-profit, The Store, an organization in Nashville which aims to address food insecurity. Williams-Paisley’s memoir Where The Light Gets In: Losing My Mother Only to Find Her Again, chronicling her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, came out in 2016 and hit the New York Times Bestseller list. She is a global ambassador for CARE International, traveling to Haiti and Guatemala to follow U.S. funding for programs that support women and children.

Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Allison to dive into the wreck of the wily and wonderful world of science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and literary horror with a healthy mix of underappreciated classic and contemporary books. Meets the last Monday of every month at 7 pm on Zoom. Also meets on the second Monday of every month at 7 pm to discuss the film adaptations of the books we read.  Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading and contact the club host to join. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

Booklight Events from Sourcebooks presents two powerhouse thriller authors, Julie Clark and Carter Wilson, as they are in-conversation about their newest releases.

Julie Clark is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ones We Choose and The Last Flight, which was also a #1 international bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and a golden doodle with poor impulse control.

Carter Wilson is the USA Today and #1 Denver Post bestselling author of multiple critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a four-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novels have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado.

The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had.” As Americans celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, a question naturally arises: where did the idea for a national park originate? The answer starts with a look at pre-Yellowstone America. With nothing to put up against Europe’s cultural pearls–its cathedrals, castles, and museums–Americans came to realize that their plentitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. That insight guided the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as he organized his thoughts on how to manage the wilderness park centered on Yosemite Valley, a state-owned predecessor to the national park model of Yellowstone. Haunting those thoughts were the cluttered and carnival-like banks of Niagara Falls, which served as an oft-cited example of what should not happen to a spectacular natural phenomenon.

Olmsted saw city parks as vital to the pursuit of happiness and wanted them to be established for all to enjoy. When he wrote down his philosophy for managing Yosemite, a new and different kind of park, one that preserves a great natural site in the wilds, he had no idea that he was creating a visionary blueprint for national parks to come. Dennis Drabelle provides a history of the national park concept, adding to our understanding of American environmental thought and linking Olmsted with three of the country’s national treasures. Published in time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 2022, and the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted on April 26, 2022, The Power of Scenery tells the fascinating story of how the national park movement arose, evolved, and has spread around the world.

Dennis Drabelle is a writer and former attorney. During the 1970s he was an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of the Interior and counsel to the assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks. Drabelle was a contributing editor of the Washington Post Book World for more than thirty years. His books include Mile High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode and The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad. His articles on the environment and national parks have appeared in Outside, Smithsonian, Sierra, Wilderness, Backpacker, and many other magazines.

The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

In May 1996, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans were brutally murdered while backpacking in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, adjacent to the world-famous Appalachian Trail. The young women were skilled backcountry leaders and they had met–and fallen in love–the previous summer, while working at a world-renowned outdoor program for women. But despite an extensive joint investigation by the FBI, the Virginia police, and National Park Service experts, the case remained unsolved for years. In early 2002 and in response to mounting political pressure, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he would be seeking the death penalty against Darrell David Rice–already in prison for assaulting another woman–in the first capital case tried under new, post-9/11 federal hate crime legislation. But two years later, the Department of Justice quietly suspended its case against Rice, and the investigation has since grown cold. Did prosecutors have the right person?

Journalist Kathryn Miles was a professor at Lollie Winans’s wilderness college in Maine when the 2002 indictment was announced. On the 20th anniversary of the murder, she began looking into the lives of these adventurous women–whose loss continued to haunt all who had encountered them–along with the murder investigation and subsequent case against Rice. As she dives deeper into the case, winning the trust of the victims’ loved ones as well as investigators and gaining access to key documents, Miles becomes increasingly obsessed with the loss of the generous and free-spirited Lollie and Julie, who were just on the brink of adulthood, and at the same time she discovers evidence of cover-ups, incompetence, and crime-scene sloppiness that seemed part of a larger problem in America’s pursuit of justice in national parks. She also becomes convinced of Rice’s innocence, and zeroes in on a different likely suspect.

Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders is a riveting, eye-opening, and heartbreaking work, offering a braided narrative about two remarkable women who were murdered doing what they most loved, the forensics of this cold case, and the surprising pervasiveness and long shadows cast by violence against women in the backcountry.

Kathryn Miles is the author of five books . Her essays and articles have appeared in publications such as Audubon, Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Outside, Politico, and Time. A contributing editor at Down East magazine, Miles also serves as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council and as a faculty member in several MFA programs. Her website is www.kathrynmiles.net.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

A 2022 Katie Couric Media Must-Read New Book – A personal meditation on love in the shadow of white privilege and racism

Child is the story of Judy Goldman’s relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who worked for her family as a live-in maid and helped raise her–the unconscionable scaffolding on which the relationship was built and the deep love. It is also the story of Mattie’s child, who was left behind to be raised by someone else. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it was to be a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South, how a bond can evolve in and out of step with a changing world, and whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves. It is an incandescent book of small moments, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.

Judy Goldman is the award-winning author of seven books – three memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry. Her new memoir, Child, will be published May 2022. It was named a Katie Couric Media Must-Read Book for 2022.  Her recent memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, was named one of the best books of 2019 by Real Simple magazine and received a starred review from Library Journal.  Her work has appeared in USA Today, Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, Real Simple, LitHub, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband. They have two married children and four grandchildren.

Abigail DeWitt is the author of three novels: LILI (WW Norton), DOGS (Lorimer Press), and NEWS OF OUR LOVED ONES (forthcoming from Harper in 2018). Her short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Witness, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been cited in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, nominated for a Pushcart, and has received grants and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, the McColl Center for the Arts, and the Michener Society.

On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.

Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Romare Bearden (1911-1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden’s life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training, and rich knowledge of art history.

Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden’s family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden’s art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden’s place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

Glenda Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

The in-person event will include a book signing. If you are not attending in person and would like a signed and personalized copy, pre-order prior to May 12 and use the order comments field to tell us to whom the book should be signed.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. You can purchase online below or in the store. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth–all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another–and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Hernan Diaz‘s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of a book of essays, and his fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Whiting Award and the William Saroyan International Prize, he has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His second novel, Trust, is being translated into more than twenty languages.

The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Marcie Cohen Ferris gathers a constellation of leading journalists, farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs, scholars, and food activists–along with photographer Baxter Miller– to offer a deeply immersive portrait of North Carolina’s contemporary food landscape. Ranging from manifesto to elegy, Edible North Carolina’s essays, photographs, interviews, and recipes combine for a beautifully revealing journey across the lands and waters of a state that exemplifies the complexities of American food and identity. While North Carolina’s food heritage is grounded in core ingredients and the proximity of farm to table, this book reveals striking differences among food-centered cultures and businesses across the state. Documenting disparities among people’s access to food and farmland–and highlighting community and state efforts toward fundamental solutions– Edible North Carolina shows how culinary excellence, entrepreneurship, and the struggle for racial justice converge in shaping food equity, not only for North Carolinians, but for all Americans.

Starting with Vivian Howard, star of PBS’s A Chef’s Life, who wrote the foreword, the contributors include Shorlette Ammons, Karen Amspacher, Victoria Bouloubasis, Katy Clune, Gabe Cummings, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Sandra Gutierrez, Tom Hanchett, Michelle King, Cheetie Kumar, Courtney Lewis, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Ronni Lundy, Keia Mastrianni, April McGreger, Baxter Miller, Ricky Moore, Carla Norwood, Kathleen Purvis, Andrea Reusing, Bill Smith, Maia Surdam, and Andrea Weigl.

Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, is professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

KC Hysmith is a Texas-bred, North Carolina-based multi-hyphenate with an academic and professional background in food writing, food photography, recipe testing, and research. She is currently finishing her PhD in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.