Blue Bicycle Books

Thurs., Aug. 1 — Fiona Davis, The Chelsea Girls

Thurs., Aug. 8 — Ladson Mills, Abandoned Shipmate

Tues., Aug. 13 — Tupelo Hassman, gods with a little g

Thurs., Aug. 29 — David Slucki, Sing This at My Funeral

Fri. Aug. 30 — Anthony Varallo, The Lines

Fri., Sept. 6 — Ken Woodley, The Road to Healing

Tues., Sept. 17 — Corrie Wang, City of Beasts

Tues., Sept. 17 — Jennifer Berry Hawes, Grace Will Lead Us Home

Thurs., Sept. 19 — Terry Hamlin, Building a Better Runner

Fri., Sept. 20 — Colin Egglesfield, The Agile Artist

Wed., Sept. 25 — Vincent Musi and Callie Shell at the Charleston Music Hall

Wed., Oct. 2 — Derrick White, Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Fri., Oct. 4 — Peter Zheutlin, The Dog Went Over the Mountain

Fri., Oct. 11 — Nathalie Dupree, Nathalie Dupree’s Favorite Stories and Recipes

Sat., Oct. 26 — Karen White, The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street

Tues., Oct. 29 — Cinelle Barnes, Malaya: Essays on Freedom

The Year of the Dogs Live with Vincent J. Musi

Special Guest Callie Shell presenting Hope, Never Fear: A Personal Portrait of the Obamas   

Charleston Music Hall (37 John Street)

Wed., Sept. 25, 7 pm

Get tickets HERE.

Charleston-based photographers Vincent Musi and Callie Shell speak about their life, work, and new books.

As a National Geographic photographer, traveling the world to photograph lions, tigers and bears was a regular day’s work for Vince.  All that changed when his son turned sixteen–he decided to try something different; to spend some quality time at home and open a hometown studio to photograph dogs.

The result is The Year of the Dogs, a book chronicling his work in the studio matched with witty ‘dogographies’ gleaned from his time spent with each subject.

From a Labrador that likes opera to a kleptomaniac miniature golden doodle, and a loveable one-eyed Jack Russell to a farting bulldog, Musi captures the unique character and personality of these everyday dogs with evocative images and a gently comic mash-up of his own life experiences that have captured the hearts of many on his wildly popular Instagram feed.

In 2004 Callie met a first-term Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama. The two struck up a friendship, and she began photographing him for Time Magazine. Her new book Hope, Never Fear presents a unique look behind the curtains following the journey from the Obama’s family home in Chicago to the most powerful house in our nation.

Join us Thurs., Aug. 29, 6 pm as David Slucki, a Jewish Studies professor at the College of Charleston, will be here to discuss his new memoir Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State Press, pb., 280 pp., $28).

Sing This at My Funeral tells the story of David’s father Charles and his grandfather Jakub, and the grave legacy that they each passed on. This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men.

In Sing This at My Funeral, tragedy follows the Slucki family across the globe: from Jakub’s early childhood in Warsaw, where he witnessed the death of his parents during World War I, to the loss of his family by the hand of the Nazis in April 1942 to his remarriage and relocation in Paris, where after years of bereavement he welcomes the birth of his third son before finally settling in Melbourne, Australia in 1950 in an attempt to get as far away from the ravages of war-torn Europe as he could. Charles (Shmulik in Yiddish) was named both after Jakub’s eldest son and his slain grandfather-a burden he carried through his life, which was one otherwise marked by optimism and adventure. The ghosts of these relatives were a constant in the Slucki home, a small cottage that became the lifeblood of a small community of Jewish immigrants. despite having been shaped by the ghosts of his father’s constantly hovering sorrow. This book interweaves the stories of these men with that of Slucki’s own upbringing, showing how traumatic family histories leave their mark for generations.

Blending the scholarly and literary, David grounds the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, this is a unique story and an innovative approach to writing both history and family narrative. Students, scholars, and general readers of memoirs will enjoy this deeply personal reflection on family and grief.

David Slucki is an assistant professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation.

Join us Tues., Aug. 13, 6 pm as we celebrate the release of Tupelo Hassman‘s new novel gods with a little g (FSG, hb., 368 pp., $27). We’re still working out the details, but this will be a proper party. There might be live music. There will probably even be a piñata.

The novel starts with Helen Dedleder, unsinkable and wrecked by grief, motherless and aimless and looking for connection, a girl with a gift she doesn’t want to use and a pack of friends who are all just helping each other get by. Watching over them all is Aunt Bev, an outcast like the kids, who runs the barely tolerated Psychic Encounter Shoppe and tries to keep Helen connected to her own psychic talents―a gift passed down from her mother.

Tensions are building, though, in every way. Threats against the Psychic Encounter Shoppe become serious actions. One of the kids gets in trouble, and then another. And Helen can see some things before they happen, but somehow can’t see the most important things happening right in front of her.

Tupelo Hassman’s gods with a little g bursts and splinters with flawed, lovable characters whose haphazard investigations into each others’s hearts will reshape your understanding of trust, how to build a family, and how to make a future you can see.

Tupelo’s debut novel, Girlchild, was the recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, Imaginary Oklahoma, The Independent, Portland Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award and the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, and is the first American to have won London’s Literary Death Match. She earned her MFA at Columbia University.

Tues., June 25, at 5 pm, historian and journalist Daniel Brook will be at Grace Church Cathedral (98 Wentworth St.) to give a talk about his fascinating new book The Accident of Color (W.W. Norton, hb., 336 pp., $28).

Grace Church and Mt. Zion AME host Okra Soup jointly in Hanahan Hall at Grace. Soup will be served and all are welcome. Five dollar donations are requested for dinner.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.

Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.

The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Daniel Brook’s writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. His last book, A History of Future Cities, was longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and selected as one of the ten “Favorite Books of 2013” by the Washington Post. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and educated at Yale, Brook lives in New Orleans.

Join us Tues., June 4, 6 pm as Captain Lee from Bravo’s hit reality show Below Deck will be here to talk about his new memoir Running Against the Tide (Gallery Books, hb., 256 pp., $26).

From the star of Bravo’s hit reality show Below Deck, comes Running Against the Tide, the “Stud of the Sea’s” first-ever memoir recounting his journey from landlocked Saginaw, Michigan to the high seas, where he has spent more than twenty-five years as a superyacht captain.

The cast members of Below Deck are known for their catfights, scheming, personal attacks, and long-held grudges, but what keeps viewers coming back week after week is resident hero Captain Lee, the only cast member to appear in all five seasons.

But you don’t have to be one of Below Deck’s 1.5 million weekly viewers to appreciate Captain Lee’s story, which offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the luxury yachting industry and one of Bravo’s biggest franchises. From having to reclaim his drunk captain’s lost papers in the Dominican Republic to unwittingly crewing a drug boat out of Turks and Caicos to navigating the outrageous demands of the super-rich in New York City, Captain Lee’s tales from the high seas run the gamut, proving time and time again why he’s a fan favorite: he’s occasionally profane, he’s often surprising, but he’s never dull and, for the first time, he’s here to tell all.