Monday, September 18, 2017

Congratulations are in order..

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 Congratulations to two Durham authors (and friends of The Regulator), Nancy MacLean and Tim Tyson, who both made the "long-list" for this year's National Book Award in nonfiction. 
There are just ten books on the long-list, so the fact that two of the books were written by Durham authors is pretty special. As is the fact that both of these books had SRO events at The Regulator. So big, major, super, over-the-top congrats to Nancy and Tim! May you both win!
 
 
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B Tyson 
 
Tom Recommends
I've been reading a great new paperback, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, edited by John Freeman. 
 
Tales of Two Americas is a collection of short pieces, mostly non-fiction, Two Americas written by an incredible line-up of 36 contemporary American authors, including folks like Sandra Cisneros, Richard Russo, Julia Alvarez, Anthony Doerr and Ann Patchett.  
 
The book is eloquent testimony to the power of storytelling to engage, humanize, create empathy, and deepen our understanding. You can read these pieces in any order-straight through, or start with your favorite authors, or start with authors you don't know. However you read it, I guarantee you'll emerge from your reading looking at the world with a fresh pair of eyes.
 
 Upcoming Events
AN EVENING OF SPECULATIVE FICTION & FANTASY with BECCA GOMEZ FARRELL, MUR LAFFERTY &  JAMES MAXEY
Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 7PM
North Carolina proved fertile ground for nurturing Rebecca Gomez Farrell's first book, the epic fantasy Wings Unseen. To celebrate its release, Gomez Farrell returns to the Triangle and will be joined by local authors Mur Lafferty and James Maxey to read from their works. From dragons to invisible flesh-eaters to murder mysteries in space, this trio offers a little bit of everything sci-fi and fantasy.

Rebecca Gomez Farrell is an associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her debut fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, is being published by Meerkat Press and she will have new short stories in the Dark Luminous Wings and Through A Scanner Farkly anthologies this fall. A former Carpe Durham contributor, Becca's food and drink blog, the Gourmez.com, has garnered multiple accolades and influences every tasty bite of her fictional world building. Becca lives in Oakland, CA, with her tech wizard husband and two trickster cats.

James Maxey's mother warned him if he read too many comic books, they would warp his mind. Readers interested in sampling Maxey's odd ramblings might enjoy his science-fantasy Bitterwood series, the secondary world fantasy of his Dragon Apocalypse novels, his superhero novels Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn, or the steam-punk visions of Bad Wizard. In 2015, James was selected as the Piedmont Laureate. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina with his lovely and patient wife Cheryl and too many cats.

Mur Lafferty is a pioneer in podcasting and an exciting new voice in urban fantasy. Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, her Ditch Diggers program is a Hugo finalist for the 2017 Best Fancast Award and The Shambling Guides 1 & 2, her urban fantasy novels from Orbit Books, have both won the Manly Wade Wellman Award. She started the I Should Be Writing podcast in 2005, making it one of the longest-running writing podcasts in existence. and co-founded Pseudopod, an Escape Pod spin-off presenting "the best in audio horror." In 2015, she was inducted into the Podcaster Hall of Fame for her solo work, and the shows she's hosted and/or created for Tor.com, Lulu, and Angry Robot Books. 
 
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 20, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
Amy Godfrey loves telling stories. With 10 years of experience as a Children's Librarian, Amy Godfrey is known for her energetic musical story times and is bringing that fun to The Regulator every Wednesday!
 
NONFICTION AUTHORS ASSOCIATION (NFAA)
Wednesday, September 20, 6:15PM -- 7:45PM
 
MICHAEL HARDT
Thursday, September 21, 7:00PM
Join us for a talk and book signing at The Regulator with Michael Hardt, author of Assembly, co-written with Antonio Negri. Assembly draws from ideas developed in Hardt and Negri's well-known Empire trilogy and lays out how contemporary social movements can better harness power to effect lasting change. They challenge the assumption that social movements should return to the leader-driven movements of the past and instead advocate for more democratic, multitude-driven decision making.
 
Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), as well as Declaration (2012) and Assembly (2017).
 
JOHN STADDON
Monday, September 25, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes John Staddon, author of The Englishman: Memoirs of a Psychobiologist, for a reading and book signing.
Staddon's memoir traces his unusual path to becoming an academic and scientist -- from WWII London, to colonial Africa, and finally, to America, where he followed a slightly erratic graduate-school trajectory that ended up in a Harvard basement. The main part of The Englishman is about science; how biology transformed Staddon's worldview; Darwin; the evolving cybernetic revolution; and the experimental methods of influential and opinionated behaviorist B. F. Skinner. Staddon endeavors to make the scientific portion of his memoir as simple and nontechnical as possible, although a couple of graphs have intruded.
 
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, and Professor of Biology and Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Duke University. He is a Faculty Affiliate at the John Locke Foundation and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York (UK). He has published more than 200 research papers and six books.
 
BRYANT SIMON
Tuesday, September 26, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Bryant Simon, author of The Hamlet Fire: A Hamlet Fire Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, for a reading and book signing.
 
Simon uses a long-forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm. For decades the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1980s, it had become a post-industrial backwater, a magnet for businesses looking for cheap labor with little or almost no official Hamlet newspaper oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Foods. This factory that had never been inspected caught fire and 25 workers-mostly single mothers, many of whom were black-perished behind locked doors. 80 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to the survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and riveting social autopsy of this place and time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.
 
Bryant Simon is a professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Boardwalk of Dreams, Everything but the Coffee, and The Hamlet Fire (The New Press). His work and commentary have been featured in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Philadelphia.
 
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 27, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
 
HOLLIS ROBBINS
Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 PM
The co-editor of the new Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers will discuss this highly praised anthology, which offers an extraordinary range of voices of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from 49 writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women's suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women and includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed.
 
An extraordinary historical record." -The New York Times Book Review
 
Hollis Robbins is Chair of the Humanities Department at Peabody Institute and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was recently named 2017-2018 Delta Delta Delta Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park
 
DAREN WANG
Thursday, September 28, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Daren Wang, the Executive Director of the Decatur Book Festival, for a reading and book signing of his first novel, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires. Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain) calls Wang's debut, "a distinctive clear-eyed perspective on a fresh corner of the Civil War."

Rooted in the history of the only secessionist town north of the Mason Dixon Line, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires tells a story of redemption amidst a war that tore families and the country apart. Mary Willis has always been an outcast, an abolitionist in a town of bounty hunters and anti-Union farmers. When escaped slave Joe Bell collapses in her father's barn, Mary is determined to help him cross to freedom in nearby Canada. But the wounded fugitive is haunted by his vengeful owner, who relentlessly hunts him up and down the country, and his sister, still trapped as a slave in the South. As the countryside is riled by the drumbeat of civil war, rebels and soldiers from both sides bring intrigue and violence of the brutal war to the town and the farm, and threaten to destroy all that Mary loves.

Daren Wang is the Executive Director of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the country. Before launching the festival, he had a twenty-year career in public radio, both national and local, with a particular focus on books and authors. Wang has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Paste magazine, and Five Points magazine, among others. The Hidden Light of Northern Fires is his first novel.
 
  
Shop Independent Durham
Tom Campbell
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth St.
Durham, NC 27705
(919) 286-2700
http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

New books, good books, and diamond-studded events!

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 Herein you will find: New books out this week, our Regulator Bestsellers, some sparkling, diamond-studded upcoming events, and a bit of bragging.
Let's just get the bragging out of the way up front here. The Regulator is honored to be one (of 19) of "The South's Best Bookstores" in a recent article in Southern Living magazine. http://www.southernliving.com/travel/2016-souths-best-bookstores#regulator-bookshop-image 
 
And then yesterday we heard from one of our young adult customers, who had recently returned, unimpressed, from a visit to the world-famous Strand Book Store ("18 Miles of Books") in Manhattan. The Regulator was "much better" than the Strand, in this young lady's opinion, because we select just the best books to go on our shelves and then display them in a way that is easy to browse. Do we have great customers here, or what?
 
Speaking of great customers, in response to one of our facebook posts titled "New research links reading books with longer life" one of our customers commented that her friend "Amy G.. will never die," to which said Amy G... herself responded with an emphatic "I will bury you all!"
 
Read on! Boats against the current...
Notable New Books and Regulator Bestsellers
Notable New Books Out This Week include: 
And just out in paperback are:
 
And here are some of our recent Regulator Bestsellers:
 Upcoming Events: of teeth, diamonds, strange growths, Durham's African-American history, and more!
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 6, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
Amy Godfrey loves telling stories. With 10 years of experience as a Children's Librarian, Amy Godfrey is known for her energetic musical story times and is bringing that fun to The Regulator every Wednesday!

MARY OTTO
Wednesday, Sept. 6, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes veteran Washington Post journalist Mary Otto for a discussion and signing of her new book, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America
-- a view from inside America's mouth-and what our teeth reveal about inequality today
 
"Show me your teeth," the great naturalist Georges Cuvier is credited with saying, "and I will tell you who you are." Veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America's mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society. Teeth takes readers on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health. Paradigm-shifting, Teeth exposes for the first time the extent and meaning of our oral health crisis-and will spark an urgent conversation about why our teeth matter.

Mary Otto  is the oral health topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists. She began writing about oral health at the Washington Post, where she worked for eight years covering social issues including health care and poverty.
 
BARAK RICHMAN
Thursday, September 7, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Duke Professor of Law Barak Richman, author of Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange. Richman uses the colorful case study of the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the 47th St diamond district in midtown Manhattan - surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated financial institutions - continue to thrive. Stateless Commerce draws on rare insider interviews to explain why personal exchange succeeds, even as most global trade succumbs to the forces of modernization, and what it reveals about the limitations of the modern state in governing the economy.
Barak D. Richman is Edgar P. and Elizabeth C. Bartlett Professor of Law and Business Administration atDuke University School of Law
 
JENNY ZERVAKIS   
Friday, September 8, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Jenny Zervakis, author of The Complete Strange Growths, 1991-1997, for a reading and book signing.
Jenny Zervakis was part of a wave of underground, do-it-yourself cartoonists who came of age during the Zine Revolution of the 1990s. At a time when most "alternative comics" were loud, abrasive, and sarcastic, Jenny's autobiographical zine, Strange Growths, was considered groundbreaking for its quietude and focus on the quotidian. Her stories are poetic and allusive, delving into the heart of the human experience.  The Complete Strange Growths, 1991-1997 gathers the first thirteen issues in their entirety, plus a selection of rare comics from anthologies, and a new interview with Jenny, conducted by Robert Clough.
"Book of the year." - Comics Workshop
"Book of the year." -  The Cartoon Utopia

ANDRE VANN
Saturday, September 9, 3:00PM -- Please note time
The Regulator welcomes Andre Vann, author of Images of America: African Americans of Durham County for a reading and book signing.
Durham --once called the "Chicago of the South" and the "Capital of the Black Bourgeoisie -- has long been home to African Americans who have played a vital role in the growth and development of the region. Vann's African Americans of Durham County is a rich pictorial history of residents and institutions who helped shape this Tar Heel county's economic, political, educational, social and religious landscapes from the 1880s to the present.
Andre D. Vann is an author, historian, and university archivist. A longtime resident of Durham, Vann is archives coordinator at North Carolina Central University.

APS Cat Adoption Event
Sunday, September 10, 2:00PM
Durham Animal Protection Society holds a monthly cat adoption event at the Regulator. Come visit our furry friends from 2:00 - 3:30. Note the time and date.
 
BENJAMIN RACHLIN
Tuesday, September 12, 7:00 PM
The Regulator welcomes Benjamin Rachlin, author of Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption Ghost for a reading and book signing. During the last two decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform.
  
"An absorbing true-crime saga . . . [Ghost of An Innocent Man] combines a gripping legal drama with a penetrating exposé of the shoddy investigative and trial standards nationwide . . . His narrative offers a moving evocation of faith under duress." -Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2017
  
Benjamin Rachlin grew up in New Hampshire. He studied English at Bowdoin, where he won the Sinkinson Prize, and writing at the UNC-Wilmington, where he won Schwartz and Brauer fellowships. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the New York Times Magazine, TIME, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives near Boston.
 
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 13, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
 
M DRESSLER
Wednesday, September 13, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes M Dressler, author of The Last to See Me, a spellbinding American ghost story a haunting narrative about a young woman's fight for a life of her own-long after her life is over, for a supernatural reading and book signing.
  
Emma Rose Finnis was born and died in the California town she now haunts. She was once a lowly chambermaid and worse, a Finnis. When a determined ghost hunter arrives with instructions to remove her once and for all, Emma Rose refuses to be hounded from her haunt, the stately Lambry Mansion. She's earned her place and she'll keep it-even if it means waging a war on the living. After all, she's got nothing left to lose. The same might not be said for those who still enjoy the luxury of a breath . . .
  
M Dressler's stories and nonfiction have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Literary Hub, among others. Her honors include the Fulbright Fellowship and the Paisano Fellowship in literature, as well as writing residencies at Hedgebrook and the Carson McCullers Center. She is a professor and current writer-in-residence at Guilford College. She lives in Greensboro and in Moab, Utah.
 
NANCY WERKING POLING
Thursday, September 14, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Nancy Poling, author of Before It Was Legal: A Black-White Marriage (1945-1987). 
In 1986 Nancy interviewed Daniel and Anna Winters, the subjects of Before It Was Legal. It is not a happily-ever-after story but an honest portrayal of the love and hurt that any two people, not just a bi-racial couple, can encounter in an intimate relationship. It is the story of an independent white woman, a talented black man, and the times in which this remarkable couple lived.
Nancy Werking Poling's motivation to write comes from a concern for women's struggles and triumphs. Their experiences have inspired her published works: Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman, a collection of short stories imagining male biblical heroes as women; Out of the Pumpkin Shell, a novel about women's friendship and family secrets; and a book she edited, Victim to Survivor: Women Recovering From Clergy Sexual Abuse. She and her husband live in the mountains of western North Carolina.
 
MINDFUL PARENTING: From Chaos to Calm
With Sumi Loundon Kim
Sunday, September 17, 3:00PM
The Regulator invites you to a Mindful Parenting workshop with Sumi Loundon Kim, author of Sitting Together: A Family-Centered Curriculum on Mindfulness, Meditation, and Buddhist Resources.
Many of us parents strive to be more patient, stop yelling, spend more time with our kids, be less distracted and stressed out, model kindness and wise choices - only to find it incredibly hard to change our habits. Mindfulness -- becoming attuned both to what's happening inside us and to what's happening around us -- is a highly effective skill applicable to all aspects of our lives. This workshop introduces several essential mindfulness practices that can help us grow as parents. We'll also talk about mindfulness practices for our children. Beginners and all are welcome!
  
Note: this workshop is for adult caregivers (parents, grandparents, teachers, etc.): older children can come but younger ones will probably enjoy being elsewhere.
  
Sumi Loundon Kim is a Buddhist chaplain at Duke University and minister to the Buddhist Families of Durham. She is editor of the anthologies Blue Jean Buddha and The Buddha's Apprentices, from Wisdom Publications. Her book Sitting Together: A Family-Centered Curriculum on Mindfulness, Meditation, and Buddhist Resources, is a three-volume set that provides children's lesson plans, an activity book, and an adult study guide for parents and teachers. Sumi lives with her husband and two children in Durham.
  
Shop Independent Durham
Tom Campbell
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth St.
Durham, NC 27705
(919) 286-2700
http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/