Elliot Ackerman NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Military Times • Vogue • Bloomberg Haris Abadi, a wayward Arab American with a conflicted past, has finally found his purpose: he will cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive regime. But before he… April 2 @ 8:00 pm Books & Books in Coral Gables

Johnny Smith - Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle Monday April 2, 2018 7:00 PM Atlanta writer Johnny Smith brings us the tale of Mickey Mantle's 1956 season.

Jonathan Weisman - (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump Monday April 2, 2018 7:30 p.m. Atlanta native and New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman visits Congregation Bet Haverim to discuss and sign copies...

Rhiannon Navin - Only Child Fans of Room and Jodi Picoult will enjoy this heartbreaking debut novel about healing and family, narrated by a six-year-old boy who has survived a school shooting, but whose older brother did not. Rhiannon Navin joins us to share the harrowing tale of Only Child. “Only Child triumphs. Zach, at only 6 years old, understands more about the human heart than the broken adults around him. His hope and optimism as he sets out to execute his plan will have every reader cheering him on, and believing in happy endings even in the face of such tragedy. . . . Navin manages to make Zach’s voice heartbreakingly believable.”—Ann Hood, The Washington Post Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 7:00pm Event address: North Hills 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road Raleigh, NC 27609

Taylor Brown with GODS OF HOWL MOUNTAIN The third novel by the acclaimed author of The River of Kings and Fallen Land. Set in the high country of 1950s North Carolina, Gods of Howl Mountain is a dark and compelling novel of family secrets, whiskey-running, vengeance, and love. Maybelline Docherty, “Granny May,” is a folk healer with a dark past. She concocts potions and cures for the people of the mountains—her powers rumored to rival those of a wood witch—while watching over her grandson, Rory Docherty, who has returned from the Korean War with a wooden leg and nightmares of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Rory runs bootleg whiskey in a high-powered car to roadhouses, brothels, and private clients in the mill town at the foot of the mountains—a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car racing. Granny May must help her grandson battle rival runners and federal revenue agents, snake-handling pastors, and the mystery of his own haunted past: namely, the real story behind his mother’s long confinement in a mental hospital, during which she has remained completely silent. With gritty and atmospheric prose, Taylor Brown brings to life a perilous mountain and the family who rules it, tying together past and present in one captivating narrative. About the Author Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. His fiction has appeared in more than twenty publications, he is the recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction, and was a finalist in both the Machigonne Fiction Contest and the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. He is the author of Fallen Land (2016) and The River of Kings (2017); Gods of Howl Mountain is his third novel. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 5:00pm Event address: 129 Courthouse Square Oxford, MS 38655

TEACH-IN: ELISABETH ROSENTHAL presents AN AMERICAN SICKNESS: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart. Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm Event address: 55 Haywood Street Asheville, NC 28801

A Sky Full of Stars by Linda Williams Jackson New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2018). Hardcover. Signed. With racial tensions rising, Rose Lee Carter must find her place in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in this sequel to Midnight Without a Moon. After the murder of Emmett Till, thirteen-year-old Rose is struggling with her decision to stay in Mississippi. Torn between the opinions of Shorty, a boy who wants to meet violence with violence, and Hallelujah, her best friend who believes in the power of peaceful protests, Rose is scared of the mounting racial tension and is starting to lose hope...

LGBTQ BOOK CLUB Join host Alex Ruiz for a discussion of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 7:00pm Event address: 55 Haywood Street

Parnassus Classics Club - A Lost Lady Please join moderator Kathy Schultenover for a discussion of Willa Cather’s book, A Lost Lady. Parnassus Book Club meetings are free and open to anyone. Buy the book, read the book and join the discussion. Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 10:00am Event address: Parnassus Books 3900 Hillsboro Pike Suite 14 Nashville, TN 37215

A book club for lovers of the classics! The theme for February, March, and April is Dante’s Mountain. We’ll be reading The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (specifically the translation by John Ciardi) over the course of the three months. February – Inferno, March – Purgatorio, & April – Paradisio. Since we’re not requiring participants to buy the books through Joe’s Place, there will be a $7 charge per meeting to help cover admin costs. We do have copies available for sale in the store. If you choose to purchase your book through us the admin fee will be waived for those three months. *Space is limited to 15 people on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Trans and Friends Event date: Monday, April 2, 2018 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm This is a youth focused group for trans*people, people questioning their own gender, and aspiring allies. We provide a facilitated space to discuss gender, relevant resources, and activism around social issues. Whether silently or aloud, please come ready to consider your own gender in a transient world. This is a project of the Feminist Outlawz. This event is co-sponsored by Charis Circle's Strong Families, Whole Children Program.There is no suggested donation for youth participants of this program but adults and allies may make a donation in support of this program by clicking here. Event address: 1189 Euclid Ave. NE

With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. From “Starfish and Coffee”: And that’s how you feel after tumbling like sea stars on the ocean floor over each other. A night where it doesn’t matter which are arms or which are legs or what radiates and how— only your centers stuck together. "Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder." —Roxane Gay “Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush... poems. Aphorisms...from another dimension.” —The New York Times “With unparalleled ease, she’s able to weave each intriguing detail into a nuanced, thought-provoking poem that also reads like a startling modern-day fable.” —The Poetry Foundation “How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!” —Terrance Hayes About the Author Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 5:00pm Event address: 129 Courthouse Square Oxford, MS 38655

Elaine Orr - Swimming Between Worlds (Signing Line Ticket event) in conversation w/ Diane Chamberlain Author of A Different Sun, the memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, and two scholarly works, Elaine Orr grew up in Nigeria and is now a professor of English at NC State University. Swimming Between Worlds, her forthcoming novel set in Winston-Salem, explores the relationship between three young people – 2 white, 1 black; 2 men, 1 woman - as their lives entwine during the American Civil Rights movement. We are excited to welcome the critically acclaimed author to share her new novel. Receive a signing line ticket and reserve your seat with a QRB purchase of Swimming Between Worlds. Elaine Orr will be introduced and in conversation with Diane Chamberlain. “A smart and tender tale. I was left with admiration for Orr’s exquisite prose along with an awareness of one simple truth: sometimes it takes living in another culture to better understand your own. A beautiful book.”—Diane Chamberlain, bestselling author of The Silent Sister Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 7:00pm

VICTORIA PRICE presents THE WAY OF BEING LOST: A Road Trip to My Truest Self After a tumultuous period of crisis, Victoria Price rebuilt her life by embracing a daily practice of joy, healing childhood wounds and reconnecting to the example set by her father Vincent, the famed actor. Her journey involved stepping away from externalities and into her father's legacy -- his love for people and compassion for others, his generosity of spirit and simple kindnesses, his enthusiasm for new experiences, and his love of life. Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 6:00pm Event address: 55 Haywood Street

A brutal murder draws nobleman Sebastian St. Cyr into the tangled web of the British royal court in this gripping historical mystery from the national bestselling author of Where the Dead Lie. London, 1814. As a cruel winter holds the city in its icy grip, the bloody body of a beautiful young musician is found half-buried in a snowdrift. Jane Ambrose's ties to Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent and heir presumptive to the throne, panic the palace, which moves quickly to shut down any investigation into the death of the talented pianist. But Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, and his wife Hero refuse to allow Jane's murderer to escape justice. This book is available in hardcover ($26.00). C. S. Harris discusses and signs her book, Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #13). If you are unable to attend, you must call the book shop to order signed books. Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Rachel Breunlin - FIRE IN THE HOLE: The Spirit Work of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors Please join us for an evening celebrating FIRE IN THE HOLE, the new book from The Neighborhood Story Project, edited by Rachel Breunlin. During Mardi Gras, spectators wait for the approach of the Mardi Gras Indians, a sublime spectacle of dancing, chanting, and gorgeous hand-sewn costumes. But rarely are they shown the human stories behind this unique New Orleans tradition. Told through a collective oral history, FIRE IN THE HOLE: The Spirit Work of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors weaves together the voices of costumers, anthropologists, and photographers to offer the previously undocumented stories of crafting costumes, tribe formations, and political engagement that has been so important to generations of New Orleanians. Accompanying these stories are over 200 color photographs, which capture the intimate, candid, and ecstatic moments of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors. Rachel Breunlin is the co-director of the Neighborhood Story Project, a collaborative ethnography organization whose mission is "Our Stories Told by Us." She also teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans where she shares her research interests in collaborative methods, the intersection of creative writing and ethnography, public culture, education, and the African Diaspora. Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 6:00pm Event address: Octavia Books - 513 Octavia Street - New Orleans, LA 70115

Minrose Gwin - Promise In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart--one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager--fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel "Gwin's gift shines in the complexity of her characters and their fraught relationships with each other, their capacity for courage and hope, coupled with their passion for justice." -- Jonis Agee, bestselling author of The River Wife A few minutes after 9 p.m. on Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a massive funnel cloud flashing a giant fireball and roaring like a runaway train careened into the thriving cotton-mill town of Tupelo, Mississippi, killing more than 200 people, not counting an unknown number of black citizens, one-third of Tupelo's population, who were not included in the official casualty figures. When the tornado hits, Dovey, a local laundress, is flung by the terrifying winds into a nearby lake. Bruised and nearly drowned, she makes her way across Tupelo to find her small family--her hardworking husband, Virgil, her clever sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Dreama, and Promise, Dreama's beautiful light-skinned three-month-old son. Slowly navigating the broken streets of Tupelo, Dovey stops at the house of the despised McNabb family. Inside, she discovers that the tornado has spared no one, including Jo, the McNabbs' dutiful teenage daughter, who has suffered a terrible head wound. When Jo later discovers a baby in the wreckage, she is certain that she's found her baby brother, Tommy, and vows to protect him. During the harrowing hours and days of the chaos that follows, Jo and Dovey will struggle to navigate a landscape of disaster and to battle both the demons and the history that link and haunt them. Drawing on historical events, Minrose Gwin beautifully imagines natural and human destruction in the deep South of the 1930s through the experiences of two remarkable women whose lives are indelibly connected by forces beyond their control. A story of loss, hope, despair, grit, courage, and race, Promise reminds us of the transformative power and promise that come from confronting our most troubled relations with one another. Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 5:00pm

Kristy Woodson Harvey Signing Tuesday, April 3, 2018 5:00 PM 7:00 PM

Great Books Reading Group: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Great Books Reading Group: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Tue 4/3 10am - 12pm Presented by Carolina Public Humanities featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Lit Yearning to revisit some of your favorite classics? Join UNC faculty discussion leaders for a robust discussion of classic texts, ancient to modern. To be sure we are literally on the same page, every participant will receive a copy of the book before the first session. TUITION: $35 & includes a copy of the book. Due to the nature of the reading groups, refunds cannot be offered. Register online or call 919.962.1544. Carolina Public Humanities will send you a copy of the book and details regarding the event approximately three to four weeks before the first meeting (or as soon as you register if less than three weeks before). Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 10:00am to 12:00pm Event address: 752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Chapel Hill, NC 27514

CURRENT EVENTS BOOK CLUB Event date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 7:00pm Event address: 55 Haywood Street