Blue Bicycle Books

Join us and Spartanburg-based bookshop and publisher Hub City on Thurs., July 9, 5 pm, for a virtual event with author Rachel Beanland to celebrate her debut novel, Florence Adler Swims Forever (Simon & Schuster, hb., 320 pp, $26).

Over the course of one summer that begins with a shocking tragedy, three generations of the Adler family grapple with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of family secrets in this stunning debut novel that’s perfect for fans of Manhattan Beach and The Dollhouse.

Rachel Beanland writes fiction and essays. Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Broad Street, among other places.

She has an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and holds bachelor’s degrees in art history and journalism from the University of South Carolina. Before turning to writing full-time, Rachel worked in public relations and nonprofit management.

To register for the event with or without a signed copy of the book, go here.

We are happy to announce we’re back open to the public, but with some health-minded caveats.

To keep both our employees and our customers safe, we’re taking all of the necessary precautions and enacting the following policies:

• Regular hours: 10 – 7: 30 Monday – Saturday and 1 – 6 Sunday.
• Store is capacity is 6, limited to two small groups at a time.
• All of our employees will be wearing masks.
• Please help us keep social distancing practices throughout the store.
• We’re accepting contactless payments — Venmo or chip cards.
• Our bathroom is for employee use only.

In addition to visiting us, here’s how you can support Charleston’s local bookstore since 1995:

1. Buy a gift certificate

2. Order a book. If you want it we will get it for you. Call 843-722-2666, email [email protected], or DM @bluebicyclebooks on instagram.

3. You can also order any book for direct shipment through bookshop.org/shop/bluebicyclebooks.

Bookshop is a a B-Corp that supports local bookstores. As long as you see our emblem in the top left, you can search for any book and the purchase will benefit Blue Bicycle Books

4. Find Inky Phoenix Book Club Picks and other signed books, summer camp registration, exclusive BBB merch, and select titles on our website store.

YALLWEST, the Santa Monica sister to YALLFest, will not be in the flesh in 2020, but has been resurrected as YALLSTAYHOME, a zoomapalooza–make that, yallapazooma–coming up Friday, April 24 – Sunday, April 26.

There will be virtual panels: “teanotes,” “PJ cosplay,” and “Creativity in the Time of Corona,” plus special events like Doodling with Marie Lu, TikTok Time with Soman Chainani, and Basement Woodshop Adventures with Veronica Roth.

And there will be signed books signed by BBB!

Here’s the deal:

1. Order them here.
2. Be super patient.
3. Your books arrive directly from our distributor!
4. For any SIGNED orders — your signed, limited edition YALLSTAYHOME bookplate (see above) will arrive in a separate envelope.

What could go wrong, amirite? (Again, see step 2.)

Join us Tues., Feb 25, 5 pm for Jane Kleeb, chair of the Democratic Party of Nebraska, as she talks about her new book Harvest the Vote (Ecco, hb, 224 pp., $26.99) before the SC Democratic debate.

The Democratic Party has lost an entire generation of rural voters. By focusing the majority of their message and resources on urban and coastal voters, Democrats have sacrificed entire regions of the country where there is more common ground and shared values than what appears on the surface.

In Harvest the Vote, Jane Kleeb brings us a lively and sweeping argument for why the Democrats shouldn’t turn away from rural America. As a party leader and longtime activist, Kleeb speaks from experience. She’s been fighting the national party for more resources and building a grassroots movement to flex the power of a voting bloc that has long been ignored and forgotten.

Jane Kleeb is an American political activist. She is the founder and president of Bold Alliance, Chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and a board member of Our Revolution and Matriarch PAC. She lives in Hastings, Nebraska with her husband Scott Kleeb and their three daughters.

Join us Thurs., Mar. 5, 5:30 pm as College of Charleston professor Dr. Adam H. Domby will be here to discuss his book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (UVA Press, hb., 272 pp., $30).

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war’s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery―as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies―were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history’s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of “black Confederates” was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as “loyal slaves.” The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

Adam H. Domby is Assistant Professor of History at the College of Charleston.