Blue Bicycle Books

Join us at the bookstore, Mon., May 21, 5 pm  as Margaret Bradham Thornton will sign her new novel A Theory of Love (Ecco, hb., 288 pp., $28). 

About A Theory of Love: Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the west coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier who has come alone to surf. Living lives that never stop moving, from their first encounter in Bermeja to marriage in London and travels to such places as Saint-Tropez, Tangier, and Santa Clara, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other.

About the Author: Margaret Bradham Thornton is also the author of Charleston: A Novel, which has become a Blue Bicycle Books mainstay since its debut in 2014. She is the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in autobiography/memoir and the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship published in 2006, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She was born and raised in Charleston, is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Florida.

Join us Sun., May 20, 4 pm as Rachel Devlin will be here to discuss her new book A Girl Stands at the Door (Basic Books, hb., 384 pp., $20). Devlin will be in discussion with historian and activist Pamela Grundy.

In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today’s ongoing struggles for equality.

Rachel Devlin is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches course on women, gender, sexuality and childhood. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the American Academy of Learned Societies and a Fletcher Fellowship from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

Pamela Grundy is a North Carolina native and is a historian, author, and activist.  She currently lives in Charlotte, where she pursues a variety of writing, teaching, and museum projects. She also wrote the award-winning Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twentieth-Century North Carolina.

Join us Thurs., Apr. 26, 5 pm as Chris and Suzanne Stewart from the Glass Onion will be here to discuss their new cookbook.

If you were to ask a local in Charleston to name their favorite eatery for lunch, dinner, or brunch, chances are they will send you enthusiastically to the Glass Onion. Since opening in 2008, Glass Onion has consistently served up southern regional classics to a devoted following. Chef Chris Stewart, an Alabama native turned Lowcountry transplant, helms the kitchen and maintains strict standards for sourcing all-natural, local ingredients. His wife Suzanne Stewart cranks out delectable desserts such as bread pudding with whiskey sauce, buttermilk custard with lemon curd, boozy pecan pie, and vanilla-spiked rice pudding using heirloom Carolina Gold rice. Together the husband-and-wife team have created a relaxed, warm, unpretentious, delicious destination that locals swear by.

This cookbook celebrates Glass Onion’s tenth anniversary and features 75 recipes in full color, interspersed with photos of the area farms from whom they source. If you think of Southern food as heavy, salty, overcooked, or unhealthy, think again! Glass Onion demonstrates how to make classic Southern dishes using all-natural ingredients and unhurried techniques to produce the most flavor. So if you’re looking for that perfect biscuit drizzled with sinfully good sausage gravy, or a super fresh and unusual salad to bring to a summertime gathering, or how to wow your guests with crispy fried quail over slow-simmered Sea Island red peas, or how to make chicken and rice that your kids will fight over, this book is full of approachable ideas for your next meal.

Join us at the Charleston Library Society (164 King Street) on Tues., May 1, 6 pm as local author Cinelle Barnes will be joined in conversation with Jeanette Guinn, the Host of S.C. Public Radio Arts Daily, to discuss her incredible memoir, Monsoon Mansion (Little A, hb., 252 pp., $25).

To RSVP, please call 843-723-9912 or email [email protected]

Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother’s opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father’s self-made success, it was a girl’s storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother’s terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle’s fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined. Formerly a home worthy of magazines and lavish parties, Mansion Royale becomes a dangerous shell of the splendid palace it had once been.

Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a family’s rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it.

Cinelle Barnes is an essayist, memoirist, and educator with a BA in media studies in journalism from Hunter College and a master of fine arts in creative writing from Converse College. She is a fellow of the Kundiman Creative Nonfiction Intensive at Fordham University and the Voices of the Nations Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, a founding member of the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and a presenter-member for the Creative Writing Studies Organization. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Skirt, Hub City Press’s online anthology, and TAYO Literary Magazine, among others.

Join us Wed., Apr. 4, 5 pm as Malinda McCollum will be here to talk about her new short story collection The Surprising Place (UMass Press, pb., 224 pp., $20).

In The Surprising Place, people adrift in the American Midwest struggle to find their way with few signposts for guidance. A synchronized swimming coach pops pills during practice, a bagpiper cold-cocks a hawk, and an orphan puts her fist through a window, discovering in the engine noise of a jet passing overhead, the perfect witness to her inner pain. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories offer confrontation and consolation in equal measure.

Malinda McCollum’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review–which awarded her the Plimpton Prize–McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Epoch, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University. She grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and now lives with her family in Charleston, where she teaches writing at the College of Charleston.