South of Superior-Midwest Connections

South of Superior 

When Madeline Stone walks away from Chicago and moves five hundred miles north to the coast of Lake Superior, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she isn’t prepared for how much her life will change. Charged with caring for an aging family friend, Madeline finds herself in the middle of beautiful nowhere with Gladys and Arbutus, two octogenarian sisters — one sharp and stubborn, the other sweeter than sunshine. As Madeline begins to experience the ways of the small, tight-knit town, she is drawn into the lives and dramas of its residents.

“I was captivated by Ms. Airgood’s setting and her characters, they’re pitch perfect. South of Superior is a wonderful debut novel.” –Lesley Kagan, author of Whistling in the Dark

“An inviting read that transports the reader to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a blink.” –Jessilynn, McLean and Eakin Booksellers

“A pleasantly paced story that takes place in the UP of Michigan where towns are small, winters long and hardships abound. Ellen Airgood has captured the beauty of the area, the isolation and cast of local characters.” –Barbara Siepker, The Cottage Book Shop

 

Ellen Airgood runs a diner in Grand Marais, Michigan. This is her first novel.

Beyond the Trees-Midwest Connections

Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests

 

Join nature writer Candice Gaukel Andrews as she traverses the natural and human history of some of the most pristine places in the Upper Midwest: Wisconsin’s state and national forests. Richly illustrated with color photographs by the author’s husband, John T. Andrews, and other professional photographers, Beyond the Trees is an intimate visual portrait of these stunning landscapes. Archival images, informative sidebars, locator maps, and contact information for Wisconsin state and federal forests round out this unique book.

Candice Gaukel Andrews is a former screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and now specializes in nature and travel writing. Her other books include Great Wisconsin Winter Weekends, The Minnesota Almanac, An Adventurous Nature: Tales form Natural Habitat Adventures, and Travel Wild Wisconsin.

Go the F**k to Sleep

GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP
by Adam Mansbach
illustrated by Ricardo Cortes

 

 

 

A gift book for parents that will have them laughing even as they cry.

“Perfectly timed, lightly applied touches of profanity are funny. Super funny. It’s especially the case when the profanity puts words to common feelings that we aren’t really allowed to own up to. Well, in that spirit comes this perfect little picture-book parody.”
–Booklist

“Total genius.”
–Jonathan Lethem, father of two, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“A children’s book for grown-ups! I really did laugh out loud–hilarious!”
–David Byrne, father of one, musician, artist

“This is the most honest children’s book ever written. And it’s f*cking hilarious.”
–A.J. Jacobs, father of three, author of The Year of Living Biblically

“I wish this book had been around during my daughter’s overly protracted sleep rituals! Finally, someone tells it like it really is. This is no-guilt funny and a godsend!”
–Cristina Garcia, mother of one, author of The Lady Matador’s Hotel

“Go the Fuck to Sleep is the secret anthem of tired parents everywhere. Adam Mansbach’s homage to the tropes of bedtime stories is pitch perfect, and Ricardo Cortes’s stunning illustrations will keep grown-ups and kids alike returning to these pages again and again!”
–Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life

*Click here to see what booksellers across America are saying aboutGo the Fuck to Sleep.

Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar–and unspoken–tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.

With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny–a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.

Adam Mansbach‘s novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He is the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.

Ricardo Cortes has illustrated books about marijuana, electricity, the Jamaican bobsled team, and Chinese food. His work has been featured in theNew York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, theVillage Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O’Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he is working on a book about the history of Coca-Cola and cocaine. To see more of his work, visit: Rmcortes.com.

My American Unhappiness-Midwest Connections

My American Unhappiness

From the former bookseller-author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, a charming, disturbing, and funny story of a more-than-slightly deluded young man’s quest to find a bride.  (One of the characters in the novel is in memory of former PW Rep of the Year Mark Gates, a dear friend of Dean’s.) Protagonist Zeke Pappas, the director of a humanities institute in Wisconsin, is conducting an epic survey of American unhappiness, a project he considers his life’s work. In his quest to chronicle what makes us all so unhappy, Zeke also focuses his energy on finding his own happiness — he wants to find the perfect mate so he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women’s magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some “prospects”: a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola because as Zeke says, “Why not aim high?”

Kirkus writes, My American Unhappiness “shimmers with mischief and offbeat charm. A dark entertainment infused by a bluesy yearning for a better America.” Library Journal writes, “Bakopoulos writes with great heart and a cold eye, and his limpid, ironic prose will appeal to those who like the early work of Martin Amis.”

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the award-winning debut novel Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, which was a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. The founding director of the Wisconsin Book Festival and a former bookseller at Canterbury Bookstore in WI, he is now a professor in the MFA Program for Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and a visiting profession of fiction at Grinnell. He lives in Ames, Iowa with his family.

Twin Cities-Midwest Connections

Twin Cities

The Twin Cities serve as geographical entry point for this exploration of how selfhood can be inescapably split over the course of a lifetime and exist in separate moments in time. Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for work that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and technical craft. What distinguishes her poetry from her contemporaries is her awareness of the complicated web into which the personal and the political, the familial and the feminist, are woven.  This awareness deeply informs her latest collection, a book that plunges into the depths of both grief and joy with subtle precision.

“Exploding with capacity and ambition, Carol Muske-Dukes’s new poems are the strongest yet from a poet whose work has long been essential reading.” –Jorie Graham

“[The voice] veers from intimacy to an almost invulnerable shoot-from-the-hip dazzle, and it makes TWIN CITIES urgent, high-energy, and all-the-way-alive.” –Mark Doty

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of seven books of poetry, four novels, and two collections of essays. She is professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2008. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles and New York City.