Blue Bicycle Books

About the book: The sun leaned for down bringing shade to the waterfront,” begins Michele Moore’s entrancing debut novel, hearkening back to an era when the legendary fishermen of Charleston’s Mosquito Fleet rowed miles offshore for their daily catch. With evocative dialect and remarkable prose, The Cigar Factory tells the story of two entwined families, both devoutly Catholic — the white McGonegals and the African American Ravenels — in Charleston during the world wars. Moore’s novel follows the parallel lives of family matriarchs working on segregated floors of the massive Charleston cigar factory, where white and black workers remain divided and misinformed about the duties and treatment each group receives.

Cassie McGonegal and her niece Brigid work upstairs in the factory, rolling cigars by hand. Meliah Amey Ravenel works in the basement, where she stems the tobacco. While both white and black workers suffer in the harsh working conditions of the factory and both endure the sexual harassment of the foremen, segregation keeps them from recognizing their common plight until the Tobacco Workers Strike of 1945. Through the experience of a brutal picket line, two women come to realize how much they stand to gain by joining forces, creating a powerful moment in labor history that gives rise to the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Moore’s extensive historical research included interviews with her own family members who worked at the cigar factory, adding a layer of nuance and authenticity to her empowering story of families and friendships forged through struggle, loss, and redemption. The Cigar Factory by Story River Books editor-at-large Pat Conroy.

About the Author: Michele Moore has served as a fellow in the English Department at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. She was a 2006 finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Literature. Her creative nonfiction has been broadcast on Georgia Public Radio and published in the Louisville Review and others.

Buy tickets online here. For special requests call 843.303.1113. Doors open at 11:30 am (please do not arrive before 11:30) and lunch is served promptly at noon. Limited seating provides an intimate experience with the author. 

Join us Thurs., Feb. 25, 6 pm at Blue Bicycle Books, 420 King St., downtown Charleston, as author and actress Amber Tamblyn reads from her poetry collection Dark Sparkler (Harper Perennial, pb., $18).

About the book: A lifelong performer from a Hollywood family, actress Amber Tamblyn (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Two and a Half Men) is also an established poet who has studied with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman and others.

As a working actress, she is also deeply fascinated—and intimately familiar—with the costs of fame and the demands placed on young women in movies and on television. An initially casual interest in the lives and disappointments of actresses before her time—tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this collection of poetic portraits of thirty actresses famous and obscure. Featuring subjects like Brittany Murphy, Marilyn Monroe, and Jane Mansfield—and paired with original artwork by David Lynch, Adrian Tomine, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and thought-provoking collection.

About the author: Amber Tamblyn recently wrapped up a successful stint on the hit CBS-TV series Two and a Half Men, and has been nominated for the Emmy, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit awards. She has published two previous books, Free Stallion (2005), which won the Borders Book Choice Award for Breakout Writing, and Bang Ditto (2009), an IndieNext bestseller. A contributor to the Poetry Foundation and Bust, Tamblyn’s work has been published in Interview, Cosmopolitan, the San Francisco Chronicle, Poets & Writers, Pank and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband, comedian David Cross.

“With a drummer’s approach to wording and a coroner’s attention to bodily detail, Amber Tamblyn’s tragicomic dead girl poems are a thoughtful, ghoulish kick.” —Sarah Vowell

“Ms. Tamblyn has a gift for words.” —Quentin Tarantino

Join us Thurs., Feb. 11, 5 – 7 pm, as College of Charleston professor Sheridan Hough discusses and signs copies of her most recent book, Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector (Oxford UP, hb., 208 pp, $40).

With a cover designed by local artist Duke Hagerty, her third book explores Kierkegaard’s conception of self and faith through the lens of a character proposed in Fear and Trembling. Hough embarks on a significant ‘existential/ phenomenological’ investigation into the abilities of the faithful life by analyzing Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence, each sphere revealing a specific kind of significance, and indeed a way of “being in the world.” Additionally, she touches on Kierkegaard’s reaching influence on existential philosophers including Heidegger and de Beauvoir.

A Bay Area native, Hough has been teaching at the College of Charleston since 1997.  In 2007 she became the first woman to reach the rank of full professor in the College’s Department of Philosophy. She and her husband now split their time between Charleston and Northern California.

Join us Tues., Dec. 29, 6 pm at Blue Bicycle Books, 420 King St., downtown Charleston, to celebrate the release of the ninth installment in the Pike Logan series: The Forgotten Soldier (Dutton, hb., $27) by Brad Taylor.

A retired Delta Force operator, Brad Taylor served in the U.S. Army for over 20 years, retiring as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. He has also served as the Asst. Professor of Military Science at The Citadel, and lives in Charleston with his family.

About the book: 

For years, the extralegal counterterrorist unit known as the Taskforce has worked in the shadows, anticipating and preventing attacks around the globe. Created to deal with a terrorist threat that shuns the civilized rule of law, it abandoned the same, operating outside of the US Constitution. Though wildly successful, it was rooted in a fear that the cure could be worse than the disease.

And now that fear has come home.

A Special Forces soldier is killed on an operation in Afghanistan, and complicit in the attack is a government official of an allied nation. While the US administration wants to forget the casualty, one Taskforce member will not. When he sets out to avenge his brother’s death, his actions threaten to not only expose the Taskforce’s activities, but also destroy a web of alliances against a greater evil. Pike Logan understands the desire, but also the danger. Brought in to eliminate the risk, he’s now forced to choose between his friend and the administration he’s sworn to protect, while unbeknownst to either of them, the soldier’s death is only the beginning….

Come meet Brad, have a beer (because Pike Logan doesn’t drink wine), and get a signed copy! 

Thurs., Dec. 3, 5 – 7 pm, George Singleton will sign copies of his newest collection of short stories, Calloustown (Dzanc Books, pb., $15.95).

Calloustown, the seventh collection from the master raconteur of southern short fiction, who’s been praised by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as the “unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story,” finds the author at the top of his game as he traces the unlikely inhabitants of the fictional Calloustown in all their humanity. Whether exploring family, religion, politics, or the true meaning of home, these stories range from deeply affecting to wildly absurd and back again in the blink of an eye.

George Singleton has published seven collections of stories, two novels, and a book of non-fiction. He was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2015. He holds the John C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College, and lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.