Blue Bicycle Books

Join us Thurs., July 13, 12 pm for lunch at High Cotton (199 East Bay St.), as Patti Callahan Henry discusses and signs her new book The Bookshop at Water’s End (Berkley, pb., 288 pp., $16). Tickets are $31 for the three-course luncheon and talk, or $45 including a signed copy of the book.

Get tickets here.

About the book: Bonny Blankenship’s most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Amid the sand dunes and oak trees draped with Spanish moss, they swam and wished for happy-ever-afters, then escaped to the local bookshop to read and whisper in the glorious cool silence. Until the night that changed everything, the night that Lainey’s mother disappeared.

Now, in her early fifties, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor, and her marriage crumbles around her. With her troubled teenage daughter, Piper, in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children. During lazy summer days and magical nights, they reunite with bookshop owner Mimi, who is tangled with the past and its mysteries. As the three women cling to a fragile peace, buried secrets and long ago loves return like the tide.

About the author: Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels include The Idea of Love, The Stories We Tell, And Then I Found You, Coming Up for Air, The Perfect Love Song, Driftwood Summer, The Art of Keeping Secrets, Between the Tides, When Light Breaks, Where the River Runs and Losing the Moon. Short-listed for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and nominated multiple times for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for Fiction, Patti is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs and women’s groups.

Piccolo Fiction presented by Blue Bicycle Books, Sat., June 3, 5 pm, Charleston Music Hall, 37 John St. Free and open to the public.

The festival’s longest-running event exclusively devoted to fiction, Piccolo Fiction invites local authors to write and share original  short stories. This year’s reading will be in the historic Charleston Music Hall, and, following recent tradition, each story will begin with the words “I ducked into the alley…”

Since 2000, Piccolo Fiction has featured dozens of S.C. writers, with stories broadcast by S.C. Public Radio and published in the Charleston City Paper.

Featured authors:

Julia Elliott’s writing has appeared on Granta.com, in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times, and other publications. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and Best American Short Stories. Her debut story collec­tion, The Wilds, was chosen by Kirkus, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her first novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, arrived in October 2015.

Cinelle Barnes writes memoirs and personal essays on trauma, growing up in Manila, Philippines, and being a mother and immigrant in America. In 2014, she was nominated for the AWP Journal Intro Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She has an MFA from Converse College and teaches writing workshops throughout the year, including Poses and Prose, a yoga + writing workshop. Her debut memoir, Monsoon Mansion, will be released by Little A publishing in Spring 2018.

Benjamin Brandenburg is a former Columbia University graduate student and current bookstore clerk living in Charleston. His stories are sometimes published online, most recently at Hobart and Monkeybicycle.

Born in Raleigh, N.C., Aaron Wood and his wife moved to Charleston in 2013 to escape the winters of Appalachia. His fiction has been published in Charleston City Paper. A sous chef for a local caterer, when he’s not working on a collection of short stories, he spends time with his wife and dog or fishing the local waters.

Join us Sat., June 10, 5 pm as celebrated food writer Kat Kinsman and James Beard Award winner Barbara Lynch discuss their new books Out of Line (Atria Books, hb., 240 pp., $26) and Hi, Anxiety (Dey Street Books, hb., 240 pp., $26).  Angel Postell of Home Team PR will also be joining them.

Out of Line describes Lynch’s remarkable process of self-invention, including her encounters with colorful characters of the food world, and vividly evokes the magic of creation in the kitchen. Through her story, Lynch explores how the past—both what we strive to escape from and what we remain true to—can strengthen and expand who we are.

In Hi, Anxiety, beloved food writer, editor, and commentator Kat Kinsman expands on the high profile pieces she wrote for CNN.com about depression, and its wicked cousin, anxiety. As Kat found when she started to write about her struggles, she is not alone in feeling like the simple act of leaving the house can be crippling. And though periodic medication, counseling, a successful career and a happy marriage have brought her relief, the illness remains.

Barbara Lynch has won multiple James Beard Awards, including Outstanding Restaurateur (only the second woman to win), an Amelia Earhart award for success as a woman in a male-dominated field, and the Relais & Château designation of Grand Chef (one of only six in North America). She is the owner of Barbara Lynch Gruppo, which encompasses seven celebrated restaurants, including No. 9 Park, B&G Oysters, Drink, Sportello, and Menton. In 2017, she was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Kat Kinsman is senior food and drinks editor at Time Inc.’s Extra Crispy and former editor at large and editor in chief of Tasting Table. She is a frequent public speaker on the topics of food and mental health, and addresses their connection on her website Chefs with Issues. She is a former writer and editor for CNN.com, where she was nominated for the James Beard Broadcast Award in the TV Segment category and won the 2011 EPPY Best Food Website for CNN’s Eatocracy. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and various animals.

Join us Thurs., June 22, 5 pm as New York Times reporter Gina Kolata discusses her new book Mercies in Disguise (St. Martin’s, hb., 272 pp., $26).

In Mercies in Disguise, Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution―not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma―fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process.

A work of narrative nonfiction, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It’s a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman―Amanda Baxley―who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family’s destiny.

Gina Kolata is a senior medical writer for the New York Times and the author of nine books and editor of three. She has won numerous prizes and was a Pulitzer finalist twice.

Join us Thurs., June 8, 12 pm for lunch at High Cotton (199 East Bay St.), as Lisa Wingate discusses and signs her new book Before We Were Yours (Ballantine Books, hb., 352 pp., $26). Tickets are $31 for the three-course luncheon and talk, or $57 including a signed copy of the book.

Get tickets here.

Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals–in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country–Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

Lisa Wingate is a former journalist, an inspirational speaker, and the bestselling author of more than twenty novels. Her work has won or been nominated for many awards, including the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Carol Award, the Christy Award, and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award. Wingate lives in the Ouachita Mountains of southwest Arkansas.