Blue Bicycle Books

Help us celebrate the release of novelist Mary Kay Andrews’ newest book Ladies’ Night Thurs., June 6, 5 – 7 pm, at Osteria la Bottiglia. In honor of her newest book, the restaurant has concocted a special Ladies’ Night cocktail, we’ll have the new book to sell, and Mary Kay will be on hand to sign.

About the book.  After her divorce, lifestyle blogger Grace moves back in with her mom and must attend court-mandated “divorce recovery” therapy sessions with four others who have suffered similar betrayals. The group moves their meetings to Grace’s mother’s run-down beach bar The Sandbox, dubbing their time together Ladies’ Night and finding closure in ways they never thought possible.

About the author. Mary Kay Andrews worked as a journalist for eleven years before switching over to mystery and fiction writing. Ladies’ Night is her tenth book under the pen name Mary Kay Andrews. She and her husband split their time between Atlanta and the cottage they are renovating on Tybee Island.

Though we here at Blue Bike appreciate the annual resurgence of summer road trip mix tapes, we also feel that the equally important summer road trip book mixes are often and unfairly overlooked. We plan to fix this. But please don’t read and drive.

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If you want to use your trip to read a classic book you’ll never read unless trapped in a car with it and nothing else: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Ulysses by James Joyce, $16.

If suddenly the landscape opens and inspires profundity: Bike Watching Journal, $14.95.

If you aren’t going anywhere but want to pretend you did and then tell people about it: On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner, $4.98.

If you want to find happiness, like literally: The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, $13.50.

If you forgot your SPF: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, $7.98.

If you liked the concept** of On the Road but hated the author and also the book: Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat Moon, $12.98.

If things are really going downhill and you’d like to feel less alone about the whole thing: Bad Trips: a Collection of Witing on the Perils of the Road ed. by Keith Fraser. $6.98.

If writing home to your maybe-lover: Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, $20.

If you want to take advantage of certain recently-relaxed laws in Colorado and Washington and get weird: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, $24.95.

If you are lost: Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon, $17.98

[**Okay, while one can appreciate Sara’s refusal to drink the Beat Kool-Aid — it’s not really the same concept. But there are cars in both books. — Ed.]

The Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open returns to Blue Bicycle Books Sat., June 1, 5 – 7 pm.

The festival’s longest-running event exclusively devoted to the craft of fiction, Piccolo Fiction invites four writers, both local and not, to write and present a 5 minute “short short” story. The reading is held in the lush courtyard of Blue Bicycle Books, and 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’s ‘Your Day’, and published in the Charleston City Paper. This is a free event with reception to follow.

The 2013 writers are:

Katie Crouch is the author of the bestselling novel Girls in Trucks, Men and Dogs, and the Magnolia League. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Observer, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. She lives in San Francisco.

John Warner is the author of the novel, The Funny Man, a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row book supplement, and editor at large of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is a visiting instructor at the College of Charleston.

Sara C. Thomason holds an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.  She was awarded second prize in the 2012 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest.  Currently she lives on Isle of Palms, where she is hard at work on a novel.

Cameron Jones grew up in Charleston and graduated from Clemson University with a degree in English. He has worked at Blue Bicycle Books since 2011 and will begin medical school this fall. This will be his second public reading this year as well as the second of his entire life.

YALLFest: Charleston’s Young Adult Book Festival will return Sat., Nov. 9, 2013, and organizers will release the 2013 line-up very soon. But in the meantime, Blue Bicycle Books is hosting a mini-YA festival to tide over fans.

Fri. May 3, 4 – 6 pm, New York Times Bestselling author Elin Hildenbrand will be signing her newest novel Summerland (Hachette, 416 pp, pb. $14.99).

Set on Nantucket, the novel opens with an island tradition and a fatal car accident. As the summer unfolds, so do secrets about the accident’s survivors and  their families: secrets kept and broken, oaths made and betrayed. Written along the same vein as local favorites Dorothea Benton Frank and Karen White, Summerland proves even amid tragedy, love can emerge.

Elin Hildenbrand lives on Nantucket with her husband and three children. This is her sixth novel set on the island.