Blue Bicycle Books

Join us Thurs., Mar. 21, 5:30 pm as Jennie Holton Fant will be here to discuss Sojourns in Charleston: South Carolina 1865-1947 (University of South Carolina Press, hb., 384 pp., $35).

Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as they encounter it.

Sojourns in Charleston begins after the Civil War, when northern journalists flocked south to report on the “city of desolation” and ruin, continues through Reconstruction, and then moves into the era when national magazine writers began to promote the region as a paradise. From there twentieth-century accounts document a wide range of topics, from the living conditions of African Americans to the creation of cultural institutions that supported preservation and tourism. The most recognizable of the writers include author Owen Wister, novelist William Dean Howells, artist Norman Rockwell, Boston poet Amy Lowell, novelist and Zionist leader Ludwig Lewisohn, poet May Sarton, novelist Glenway Wescott on British author Somerset Maugham in the lowcountry, and French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Their varied viewpoints help weave a beautiful tapestry of narratives that reveal the fascinating and evocative history that make Charleston the captivating city it is today.

Jennie Holton Fant is a writer, editor, and librarian who lived in Charleston before working for a decade at Duke University Libraries. She is the editor of The Travelers’ Charleston: Accounts of Charleston and the Lowcountry, South Carolina, 1666-1861.

Join us Sat., Mar. 30, 6:30 pm as acclaimed storyteller George Singleton will read from his new collection Staff Picks (LSU Press, pb., 216 pp., $22.50).

It’s Father’s Day 1972 and a young boy’s dad takes him to visit a string of unimpressive ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother; the unconventional detective work of a koan-speaking, Kung Fu–loving uncle solves a case of arson during a pancake breakfast; and a former geology professor, recovering from addiction, finds himself sharing a taxicab with specters from a Jim Crow–era lynching. Set in and around the fictional town of Steepleburg, South Carolina, the loosely tied stories in George Singleton’s Staff Picks place sympathetic, oddball characters in absurd, borderline surreal situations that slowly reveal the angst of southern history with humor and bite.

In the tradition of Donald Barthelme, T. C. Boyle, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, Singleton creates lingering, darkly comedic tales by drawing from those places where familiarity and alienation coexist. A remarkable and distinct effort from an acclaimed chronicler of the South, Staff Picks reaffirms Singleton’s gift for crafting short story collections that both deliver individual gems and shine as a whole.

George Singleton is the author of two novels and eight collections of short fiction. He is a former Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. George grew up in Greenwood, South Carolina and currently lives in Spartanburg, where he teaches fiction at Wofford College. His stories have appeared in magazines like The Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, the Oxford American, and One Story, just to name a few.

Join us Sat., Mar. 2, 3 pm as Megan Griswold will be here to talk about The Book of Help (Rodale Books, hb., 348 pp., $26).

The Book of Help traces one woman’s life-long quest for love, connection, and peace of mind. A heartbreakingly vulnerable and tragically funny memoir-in-remedies, Megan Griswold’s narrative spans four decades and six continents–from the glaciers of Patagonia and the psycho-tropics of Brazil, to academia, the Ivy League, and the study of Eastern medicine.

Megan was born into a family who enthusiastically embraced the offerings of New Age California culture–at seven she asked Santa for her first mantra and by twelve she was taking weekend workshops on personal growth. But later, when her newly-wedded husband calls in the middle of the night to say he’s landed in jail, Megan must accept that her many certificates, degrees and licenses had not been the finish line she’d once imagined them to be, but instead the preliminary training for what would prove to be the wildest, most growth-insisting journey of her life.

Megan went to Barnard College, received an MA from Yale, and went on to earn a licentiate degree from the Institute of Taoist Education and Acupuncture. She has trained and received certifications as a doula, shiatsu practitioner, yoga instructor, personal trainer, and in wilderness medicine, among others. She has worked as a mountain instructor, a Classical Five Element acupuncturist, a freelance reporter, an NPR All Things Considered commentator and an off-the grid interior designer. She resides (mostly) in a yurt in Kelly, Wyoming.

Join us Fri., Feb. 15, 5 pm as Adam Parker  and Cleveland Sellers Jr. will be here to discuss the book Outside Agitator (Hub City Press, pb., 240 pp., $18).

In 1968 state troopers gunned down black students protesting the segregation of a South Carolina bowling alley, killing three and injuring 28. The Orangeburg Massacre was one of the most violent moments of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and only one person served prison time in its aftermath: a young black man by the name of Cleveland Sellers Jr. Many years later, the state would recognize that Sellers was a scapegoat in that college campus tragedy and would issue a full pardon.

Outside Agitator is the story of a Sellers’ early activism: organizing a lunch counter sit-in as a 15-year-old in the tiny South Carolina town of Denmark, registering voters in Alabama and Mississippi, refusing the Vietnam War draft, serving as national program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and working alongside 1960s civil rights icons Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown and Malcolm X. It’s also the story of his lifelong struggle to overcome the Orangeburg incident and his slow crawl to justice. Adam Parker’s incisive biography is about a proud black man who refuses to be defeated, whose tumultuous life story personifies America’s continuing civil rights struggle.

Adam Parker earned degrees in music, then spent a decade in the business world before going back to school to earn a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. He taught journalism as an adjunct professor at the College of Charleston and soon landed a job at The Post and Courier. At the newspaper, he worked as a copy editor, metro editor, general assignment reporter, restaurant critic and religion reporter, arts writer and more. A long-time student of the civil rights movement and race in America, he has written extensively about the African-American experience. Outside Agitator is his first book.

Join us Sat., Feb. 2, 5 pm as Mickey Dubrow will be here to discuss his new novel American Judas (SFK Press, pb., 344 pp., $17).

American Judas is a dystopian tale about a young couple’s life after opportunistic U.S. politicians abolish the wall of separation between Church and State. Seth and Maggie Ginsberg do their best to navigate an oppressive theocracy where fundamental Christianity is the only legal religion, and abortion, homosexuality, and adultery are outlawed. When a co-worker outs Seth as a Jew, Seth escapes to Mexico, while Maggie is sent to a Savior Camp. American Judas mixes political satire, suspense, and family drama.

Mickey Dubrow is passionate about telling stories with fresh, entertaining perspectives. He wants readers to feel excitement, sympathy, amusement, joy, and maybe even a little anxiety when they read his novels. In American Judas, he explores, among other possibilities, lost faith in America and what this might mean for the freedoms we cherish so much. As a freelance writer and producer for television, Mickey’s clients include CNN, Cartoon Network Marketing, and SRA/McGraw Hill.