Events

Outstanding…. Anna’s complex personality continues to elevate the series, and the ranger’s sojourn to New Orleans further energizes this always reliable series. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Barr develops the narrative carefully, never letting the eerie black-magic elements overshadow her solid and suspenseful plotting. A definite winner. --Booklist

New York Times best-selling New Orleans-based author Nevada Barr returns to Octavia Books for a reading performance and booksigning featuring her explosive new Anna Pigeon novel. BURN finds the resilient National Park Service ranger leaving the country’s wide open spaces to face danger in the back streets of New Orleans.

Recovering from her last adventure, Anna arrives in the Big Easy to stay with a friend and soon runs into trouble; the friend has a suspicious tenant who leaves a gruesome hint that Anna is the target of a hex. Searching for some answers in the markets of self-proclaimed witches, Anna uncovers hints of a criminal ring far more sinister than any voodoo curse.

In far away Seattle, a woman named Clare faces a nightmarish situation of her own. Narrowly escaping a house fire, she watches in horror as firemen pull what appear to be the bodies of her children from the wreckage. But moments before the fire, her house had been empty. Finding herself under suspicion for starting the blaze, she flees the Northwest in disguise, desperate to discover what has happened to her family.

Clare’s search intertwines with Anna’s own confrontation, and both find themselves heading into a terrifying underworld of cruelty and exploitation. BURN is a powerful novel of caring, determined people refusing to bend in the face of utter viciousness.

Nevada Barr writes with a cool steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man.

-New York Times

You are invited to a presentation and booksigning with David M. Burley for his new book, LOSING GROUND: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana. This book explores how residents of our changing coastline reconcile sense of place with the Gulf's encroachment.

Joining Burley for this event will be Thomas Darder, Chief of the Houma Nation Native American tribe, who co-wrote the Afterword.

What is it like to lose your front
porch to the ocean? To watch saltwater
destroy your favorite fishing holes?
To see playgrounds and churches
subside and succumb to brackish and
rising water? The residents of coastal Louisiana know. For them
hurricanes
are but exclamation points in an incessant loss of coastal land
now estimated to occur at a rate of at least twenty-four square miles
per year.

In Losing Ground, coastal Louisianans communicate the
significance
of place and environment. During interviews taken just before the 2005
hurricanes, they send out a plea to alleviate the damage. They speak
with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of losing not just property and
familiar surroundings, but their identity as well.

People along Louisiana's southeastern coast hold a deep
attachment to
place, and this shows in the urgency of the narratives David M. Burley
collects here. The meanings that residents attribute to coastal land
loss
reflect a tenuous and uprooted sense of self. The process of coastal
land
loss and all of its social components, from the familial to the
political,
impacts these residents' concepts of history and the future. Burley
updates many of his subjects' narratives to reveal what has happened in
the wake of the back-to-back disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

To reserve a signed copy, please call Octavia Books during store
hours at 504-899-READ (7323)

Join the Octavia Science Fiction Books Book Club for a discussion of Hugo Award-nominated novel BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts

The Science Fiction Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday each month and
is open to interested readers. Please feel welcome to join us!

Join the Octavia Books Book Club for a discussion of The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell.

The Octavia Book Book Club meets on the 3rd Saturday each month and is
open to book lovers. Please know that you are welcome to join us!

Join us as the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Summer Reading Ice Cream Truck rolls into town and pulls up to Octavia Books on Saturday August 21, 2010. Starting at 12:00 noon, come get a free frozen treat to celebrate the upcoming publication of DIARY OF A WIMPY KID BOOK 5: The Ugly Truth, which is on sale Tuesday November 9, 2010. Other free goodies will be handed out

PLEASE NOTE: JEFF KINNEY WILL NOT BE MAKING AN APPEARANCE OR SIGNING BOOKS AT THIS EVENT. However, you may pre-order Book 5 from us now or at the event; and other Wimpy Kid books will be for sale at the event as well.

Please join us for a presentation and signing with Loyola University Environmental Law Professor Rob Verchick celebrating the release of his timely new book, FACING CATASTROPHE: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World.

As Hurricane Katrina vividly revealed, disaster policy in the United
States is broken and needs reform. What can we learn from past
disasters—storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and
wildfires—about preparing for and responding to future catastrophes? How
can these lessons be applied in a future threatened by climate change?

In this bold contribution to environmental law, Robert Verchick argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to
three simple commands: Go Green, Be Fair, and Keep Safe. “Going green”
means minimizing exposure to hazards by preserving natural buffers and
integrating those buffers into artificial systems like levees or
seawalls. “Being fair” means looking after public health, safety, and
the environment without increasing personal and social vulnerabilities.
“Keeping safe” means a more cautionary approach when confronting
disaster risks.

Verchick argues that government must assume a stronger regulatory role
in managing natural infrastructure, distributional fairness, and public
risk. He proposes changes to the federal statutes governing
environmental impact assessments, wetlands development, air emissions,
and flood control, among others. Making a strong case for more
transparent governmental decision-making, Verchick offers a new vision
of disaster law for the next generation.

Robert R. M. Verchick is Gauthier–St. Martin Professor of Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans. Since writing FACING CATASTROPHE, he serves as Deputy Associate Administrator in EPA's Office of Policy, Economic, and Innovation

Please join us for a book signing with photographer John Woodin featuring his amazing book CITY OF MEMORY: New Orleans Before and After Katrina.

One year before Hurricane Katrina flooded his childhood home, photographer John Woodin returned to the city that shaped his life. Led by intuition and fading memories, Woodin wandered the neighborhoods of his youth and photographed the architecture of the working poor, documenting the conflict between order and chaos, the effects of poverty and neglect, and the incongruous beauty of decay.

The day after the search for Katrina’s victims was abandoned, Woodin returned to the same locations he had photographed the year before. Most of the visual
landmarks he had relied on were altered or missing, and the neighborhood where he grew up was barely recognizable. Pairing photos of pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Woodin creates a document of the changes resulting from that natural disaster.

City of Memory is a vitally important
contribution to post-Katrina literature, but more universally it is a
poignant essay about both perceptible and imperceptible change.
—Sandy Sorlien, author of Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road

Dauphine Street 2004, 2005, 2008

John Woodin was born in New Orleans
and lived in Gentilly for twenty-five years. He has
been a working commercial and fine-art photographer for more than twenty
years. Woodin currently teaches photography at the University of the
Arts in Philadelphia.   He continues to photograph his original New Orleans subjects and neighborhoods,
keeping the story current

Come to celebrate the kickoff for the Sixth Annual One Book
One New Orleans campaign for literacy and community. "A Night with Louis", will be held at the McKenna
Museum of African American Art, 2003 Carondelet St., 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Many spectacular New Orleans eateries will be showcased, including:

• Jacques-Imo’s
• Muriel’s
• Dooky Chase
• Mother’s
• Leidenheimer Breads
• Angelo Brocato’s
• Kupcake Factory

...And more!

The book selection for this year is Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, the 1954 Louis Armstrong memoir.

During a five-week reading period beginning at this kickoff
event, you and everyone in the New Orleans area are encouraged
to share a common experience of reading the same book at the same time.
The challenge is to get people from throughout our community -- of every background and age  -- to come together to celebrate one book and its
impact on our city.

Octavia Books will have Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (and other related books) available at the kickoff for you to purchase!  We will donate a portion of sales at the event to the One Book One New Orleans program.

The New Orleans Public Library will be on-site to sign
individuals up for library cards and the Literacy Alliance of Greater
New Orleans will also be present. 

Please bring a copy of your
favorite book to include in a session with Dear New Orleans
photographer. If you like, all books may be donated to the New Orleans
Public Library!

Join us for a when celebrated graphic storyteller Josh Neufeld returns to Octavia Books to sign the paper back release of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.

Now in paperback, The New York Times
best-selling graphic nonfiction masterpiece depicting the lives of
seven New Orleanians before, during, and just after Hurricane Katrina.
 
Best
American Comics, 2010
Mother Jones Top Books of 2009
Daily Beast
Recommends
New York Best Comics of 2009, Runner Up
MTV.com Best
Nonfiction Comic of 2009
San Francisco Chronicle “Best in Comics”

A.D.:
New Orleans After the Deluge is a masterful portrait of a city
under siege. Cartoonist Josh Neufeld depicts seven extraordinary true
stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane
Katrina.

Here we meet Denise, a counselor and social worker, and
a sixth-generation New Orleanian; “The Doctor,” a proud fixture of the
French Quarter; Abbas and Darnell, two friends who face the storm from
Abbas’ s family-run market; Kwame, a pastor's son just entering his
senior year of high school; and the young couple Leo and Michelle, who
both grew up in the city. Each is forced to confront the same wrenching
decision–whether to stay or to flee.

As beautiful as it is
poignant, A.D. presents a city in chaos and shines a bright,
profoundly human light on the tragedies and triumphs that took place
within it.

Shortly after Hurricane
Katrina hit, JOSH NEUFELD spent three weeks as an American Red
Cross volunteer in Biloxi, Mississippi. He is a longtime artist for
Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, and his art has been exhibited
in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. He lives in
Brooklyn, New York.

Neufeld's images of New Orleans and New Orleanians are powerful and
immediate . . . It's that kind of painstaking detail that makes "A.D."
such a moving book -- real people, real stories, told with sympathy and
smarts, giving it an immediate place among the Katrina classics.
Neufeld's comic style–larger than life at times, but always human in
scale–is perfect for these stories of survival and endurance.
–The
Times Picayune   

Come to a block party to celebrate ONE BLOCK: A New Orleans Neiborhood Rebuilds (Photographs by Dave Anderson, Essay by Chris Rose) with the folks who lived through it and made it all happen on 500 Block of Caffin Street in Holy Cross in the  Lower Nine. 

There will be performances by Rebirth Brass Band and Little Freddie King, a photography exhibition by One Block residents and local artists Chaundra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, and special guests.  And of course, there will be a booksigning and Octavia Books will have copies of ONE BLOCK at the event available for purchse.     

One Block: A New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilds (Aperture, August 2010), photographs by Dave Anderson, essay by Chris Rose, is a powerful portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans as seen through the prism of a single city block whose residents are attempting to rebuild their homes. Using portraiture and still lifes, Anderson explores the very nature of community while testing its resilience. The block party, which takes place on the block where Anderson made the photographs, will mark the fifth anniversary of Katrina and celebrate the resiliency of this block and community. 

Anderson’s compassionate treatment of the neighborhood’s difficult circumstances has drawn comparisons to the work of Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration-funded photographers. Seventy years later, between the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina and the current housing crisis, the stability and permanence of the American home is once again in jeopardy. 

One Block reflects Anderson’s affection for New Orleans and his fascination with the power of human resilience – both individually and collectively.

Join the Octavia Science Fiction Books Book Club for a discussion of The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

The Science Fiction Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday each month and
is open to interested readers. Please feel welcome to join us!

Join us for a and signing with novelist Eugene Marten featuring his new book FIREWORK.

And for lagnaippe, mucician Ryan Scully from Rough 7/Morning 40's will play acoustic, local writer Michael Patrick Welch will give a short reading and will  sign his recent NEW ORLEANS: The Underground Guide; and musician Mike IX Williams will read from his book of poetry, CANCER AS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY.

Firework is the story of a man who, though ill-equipped to help
himself, attempts to help someone else, and the beautifully rendered,
perhaps necessary catastrophe that results. Unequaled in intensity, it
is also an exhilarating expression of the noble, all-too human impulse
to become more than what we seem to be.

Click here to read the recent review from The New York Observer.

Eugene Marten is the author of many celebrated, gritty
books including WASTE, IN THE BLIND, and his newest novel FIREWORK. He lives in New York City.  

Michael Patrick Welch has published three books: the music and art
guidebook NEW ORLEANS: The Underground Guide, the cult
favorite New Orleans novel THE DONKEY SHOW and the diary COMMONPLACE.  His journalist has been published in Newsweek, Spin, Filter, and many Village Voice publications. In his spare time he fronts the veteran local psych-rock band, The White Bitch.

Mike IX Williams has fronted New Orleans' world-famous sludge/doom metal
EyeHateGod for over 20 years. In one of his first ever bookstore
appearances, he will read from his book of poetry, CANCER AS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY: Affirmation of World's End.

Mustian has written an extraordinary novel dealing with some of the most difficult issues of the twentieth century, issues that profoundly threaten this new century as well. This is a harrowing and truly important novel by a splendid American writer.”

—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A
Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Please join us for a special evening with novelist Mark Mustian as he reads from and signs his new novel, THE GENDARME.
To those around him, Emmet Conn is a 92 year old man on the verge of senility. A World War I veteran, he’s been affected by memory loss since being injured in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he’s beset by visions—frightening and realistic, he’s convinced they are memories of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten. 

In Emmett’s dreams he’s a gendarme, escorting Armenian women and children from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. She becomes the love of his life. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begin to break down, he sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie, and beg her forgiveness.

Alternating between Turkey at the dawn of the 20th century and America in the 1990s, The Gendarme shows how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, how love can transcend nationalities and politics, and how the human spirit fights to survive in the face of hopelessness. It is a transcendent novel.

Join the Octavia Book Club for a discussion of The Missing by Tim Gautraux. 

The Octavia Books Book Club meets on the 3nd Saturday morning of each month (except December) and
is open to interested readers. Please feel welcome to join us!

One of our finest poets on memory, loss,
and recovery in the wake of Katrina

Please join us for a special evening with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey when she comes to Octavia Books to read from and sign BEYOND KATRINA.

Beyond Katrina is Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of
the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.

Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s
extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she
worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane,
Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation:
The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with
southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision,
capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving
her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors,
Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic
dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland
development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast
whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of
American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey
illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her
brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent
incarceration.

Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to
understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of
lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published
as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond
Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that
incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving
meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

Listen to NPR's Fresh Air interview with Natash Trethewey by Terry Gross

Natasha Trethewey and her brother Joe stand in front of Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, Miss., circa 1999.

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic
Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which
she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She holds the Phillis Wheatley
Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.

Please join us for a special evening with Andrei Codrescu celebrating the release of his new book, The Poetry Lesson, with a signing and reading. 

Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech
birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young
Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you
blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from
bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a
New York minute to get it.
--The Poetry Lesson

The
Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative
writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one
with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an
endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise.
Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The
Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional,
brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange
classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the
eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to
Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a
list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV)
and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding,
mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary
"Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming
of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the
lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century
students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to
telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at
McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining
portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

Andrei
Codrescu is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR
commentator. He edits the online journal Exquisite Corpse and taught
literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University for
twenty-five years before retiring in 2009 as the MacCurdy Distinguished
Professor of English. His recent work includes The Posthuman Dada
Guide (Princeton) and Jealous Witness: Poems.

Jewell Parker Rhodes has written a powerful novel about family and survival in the face of tragedy and has created in her twelve-year-old narrator Lanesha, a true heroine. [She] shows a kind of bravery and big-heartedness that is a gift she passes along to her friend, her community and the readers of this luminous book.

―Walter Mosley

An absolutely exquisite children's debut by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Jewell's vivid writing brings the setting to life, in a story that is both timely and unforgettable.

―Patricia Reilly Giff

Join us when award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes returns to Octavia Books to read and sign NINTH WARD, a New Orleans-set novel which we highly recommend for young readers ages 10 and up.

NINTH WARD has just been become the pick for Al's Book Club by The Today Show's Al Roker (see ‘Ninth Ward’ tells tale of spirit-seer in New
Orleans, Al’s Book Club pick is about a young girl with a
special gift.)

Twelve-year-old Lanesha lives in a tight-knit community in New Orleans'
Ninth Ward. She doesn't have a fancy house like her uptown family or
lots of friends like the other kids on her street. But what she does
have is Mama Ya-Ya, her fiercely loving caretaker, wise in the ways of
the world and able to predict the future. So when Mama Ya-Ya's visions
show a powerful hurricane--Katrina--fast approaching, it's up to Lanesha
to call upon the hope and strength Mama Ya-Ya has given her to help
them both survive the storm.

Ninth Ward is a deeply
emotional story about transformation and a celebration of resilience,
friendship, and family--as only love can define it.

Jewell Parker Rhodes' books, including Voodoo Dreams and Douglass' Women, have
won awards such as the American Book Award and the Black Caucus of the
American Library Award for Literary Excellence. Jewell is the Artistic
Director for Global Engagement and the Piper Endowed Chair of the
Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State
University. With NINTH WARD she makes a stunning debut int children's fiction, demonstrating the her writing transcends ages.

What we have on our hands here is a genuine comedic talent.

–Douglas Brinkley, from the foreword

Please join us for a reading performance and booksigning with New Orleans Levee columnist Bud Faust in celebration of the release of GREAT MOMENTS IN NEW ORLEANS HISTORY, VOL. 2.

Bud Faust is a humorist and playwright from New Orleans. He is the author of Great Moments in New Orleans History (Volume 1) and has had several plays produced in and around the city, including one (Gettin’ Dirty with Guy Camaro) performed as part of the New Orleans Improv Festival and another (To Hell and Back, Somewhat) being a winner in Le Chat Noir’s 7th Annual New Play Festival. Beautiful Bastards, his critically acclaimed play about the founding of New Orleans, was likened by The Times-Picayune to “what it must have been like watching the Marx Brothers segue from vaudeville to Broadway comedies.”

Children will enjoy the story and be encouraged to have delicious fun in the kitchen.

–Holly Clegg, spokesperson for the Louisiana Sweet Potato
Commission and author of the Trim & Terrific cookbook series

A charming tale, cooked up with Southern sass. Made to be read aloud and savored.

–Bruce Hale, author of Snoring Beauty and the Chet Gecko series

Another winner from a talented writer and storyteller.

–Robert D. San Souci, author of The Talking Eggs

Join award-winning author & storyteller Dianne de Las Casas and illustrator Marita Gentry for the launch of The
Gigantic Sweet Potato. Live illustration will accompany interactive
storytelling. Celebrate with us and help Dianne & Marita unearth their newest and sweetest
book yet! Tons of fun for everyone!

When Ma Farmer gets a hankering
for some sweet potato pie, she decides to plant a sweet potato in her
garden. But when it comes time to harvest, the sweet potato has grown to
be so enormous that it is stuck! So Ma grabs Pa, but the sweet potato
still won’t budge. Soon Bessie Cow, Ralphie Dog, and Kitty Cat join in
to help; that sweet potato sure is stubborn. When itty-bitty Lily Mouse
offers to help, everyone soon learns that a small and mighty effort can
yield GIGANTIC rewards.

This sweet adaptation of the Russian folktale “The Giant Turnip” features vibrant watercolor illustrations to accompany the singsong text. Ma Farmer’s secret (and kid-friendly) recipe for sweet potato pie and sweet potato fun facts complete the book.

A WATERSHED ACCOUNT OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP IN AMERICAN HISTORY 

Please join us for a presentation and book signing with esteemed historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg who joined forces to reveal the crucial partnership of two extraordinary founders, creating a superb
dual biography that is a thrilling and unprecedented account of early
America.

The third and fourth presidents have
long been considered proper and noble gentlemen, with Thomas Jefferson’s
genius overshadowing James Madison’s judgment and common sense. But,
in this revelatory book, both leaders are seen as men of their times,
ruthless and hardboiled operatives in a gritty world of primal politics
where they struggled for supremacy more than fifty years. 

Contrary to received wisdom, James
Madison was not dull and empty of emotion, and Thomas Jefferson was
even more contentious than tradition tells us. Madison lost his temper
at the Constitutional Convention, and for most of the years leading
to his presidency, the eloquent Jefferson was actually the less consequential
political actor in this famous partnership. Together, “Tall Tommy
and Little Jemmy,” as one unsympathetic contemporary dubbed the odd
couple, fought as political pugilists, leaving their mark first on Revolutionary
Virginia and then America.  

In our histories, the elder figure,
Jefferson, looms larger. Yet Madison is privileged in the title because,
as Burstein and Isenberg reveal, he was the senior partner at key moments
in the formation of the two-party system. It was Madison who did most
to initiate the presidency of George Washington while Jefferson was
in France in the role of diplomat. So often described as shy, the Madison
of this book is quite assertive. Yet he regularly escapes bad press,
while Jefferson’s daring pen gets him assailed by a nearly constant
barrage of partisan attacks. 

In Madison and Jefferson we see the
two as privileged young men in a land marked by tribal identities rather
than a united national personality. They were raised to always ask first:
“How will this play in Virginia?” Burstein and Isenberg powerfully
capture Madison’s secret canny role in Jefferson’s career, acting
in effect as a campaign manager. In riveting detail, the authors chart
the courses of two very different presidencies: Jefferson’s driven
by force of personality, Madison’s sustained by a militancy history
has been reluctant to ascribe to him.  

The aggressive expansionism of the
third and fourth presidents has been underplayed. After the Louisiana
Purchase more than doubled U.S. territory, the pair contrived to purchase
Cuba and, for years, looked for ways to conquer Canada. What they said
in private and wrote anonymously was often more influential than what
they signed their names to. 

Supported by a wealth of original sources—newspapers,
letters, diaries, pamphlets—Madison and Jefferson is a stunning new
look at a remarkable duo who arguably did more than all the others in
their generation to set the course for American political development.
It untangles a rich legacy, explaining how history made Jefferson into
a national icon, leaving Madison a relative unknown. It tells nasty
truths about the conduct of politics when America was young and reintroduces
us to colorful personalities, once famous and now obscure, who influenced
and were influenced by the two Revolutionary actors around whom the
story turns. As an intense narrative of high stakes competition, Madison
and Jefferson exposes the beating heart of a rowdy republic in its first
fifty years, while giving more than a few clues to why we are a politically
divided nation today. 

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are Manship Professor of History and professor of history, respectfully, at Louisiana State University.  Burstein is the author of six books on early America, including The Passions of Andrew Jackson and Jefferson’s Secrets.  Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr and Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America.

Please join us for an afternoon of fun with children's book author Jan Bozarth who is coming to Octavia Books for an interactive presentative, reading and booksigning sign of Zally's Book, the latest in her Fairy Godmother Academy series -- highly recommended for girls ages 8-12.

For girls who are fans of Harry Potter and have outgrown the Disney
Fairies series and the American Girl books, the Fairy Godmother Academy
is the perfect series—fantasy books filled with magic and adventure but
grounded by contemporary girls and issues.

The series boasts an
amazing Web site that allows girls to enter the world they visit in the
books. There they can do activities both on- and offline, vote for
things they'd like to see in the books, and connect with other Fairy
Godmother Academy fans.

Zally Guevara always knows where she's
going. She has a passion for maps of all kinds and can't wait to pack
her suitcase and explore the world. But Zally doesn't have to wait to
get her wish. With the help of a cup of magical cocoa from her
grandmother, she travels to a place that only girls training to become
fairy godmothers can get to—the enchanted dreamland of Aventurine, a
place that has no map.

In Aventurine, Zally is given her quest:
to save a fairy queen who has lost her will to live. Zally's companions
are a young fairy with a broken wing, and a stallion prince. The trio's
journey proves to be even more challenging than they could have imagined
as they meet monsters and get lost in a ruined fairy city. All the
while, Zally is making a map of Aventurine and discovering that she has a
talent, passed down from generations of women in her family:
understanding the thoughts of animals. But will this be enough to save
the fairy queen and ensure that Zally can continue her fairy-godmother
training? 

 Jan Bozarth

writer, producer, musician, mom, girl, friend,
sailor,dreamer, tap dancer, dog lover, time traveler, rock hound,
flower essence user, addicted to love, ballet dancer, poetess, carrot
cake baker, spirit rider

Jan Bozarth was raised in an international family in Texas in the
sixties, the daughter of a Cuban mother and a Welsh father. She danced
in a ballet company at eleven, started a dream journal at thirteen,
joined a surf club at sixteen, studied flower essences at eighteen, and
went on to study music, art, and poetry in college. As a girl, she
dreamed of a life that would weave these different interests together.
Her dream came true when she grew up and had a big family and a music
and writing career. Jan is now a grandmother and writes stories and
songs for young people. She often works with her own grown-up children,
who are musicians and artists in Austin, Texas. (Sometimes Jan is even
the fairy godmother who encourages them to believe in their dreams!) Jan
credits her own mother, Dora, with handing down her wisdom: Dream big
and never give up.

Join the Octavia Science Fiction Books Book Club for a discussion of The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe

The Science Fiction Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday each month and
is open to interested readers. Please feel welcome to join us!

Join us for a talk and booksigning by Kristin Hersh, founder of the cult rock bank Throwing Muses. as shares her outrageous tale of growing up much faster than planned, in this intensely personal and moving account of the pivotal year of 1985.

Kristin Hersh has released more than twenty albums over the course of her career which have sold more than one million copies worldwide. She records solo, as well as with her bands Throwing Muses and 50 FOOT WAVE. She lives in New England and New Orleans.

Join the Octavia Book Club for a discussion of Joshua Ferris' THEN WE CAME TO THE END

The Octavia Books Book Club meets on the 3nd Saturday morning of each month (except December) and
is open to interested readers. Please feel welcome to join us!

Please join in celebrating our 10th Anniversary.

Join us for an afternoon signing with Scott Westerfeld who is visiting Octavia Books to read from and sign BEHEMOTH , thes is the sequel to the wildly popular LEVIATHAN (and the 2 second book in what will ultimately be a triology).

At the end of book 1, heroes Alek and Deryn were on the air ship Leviathan, heading towards Constantinople to deliver a secret package. Of course, there’s much much more to remember. Alek is the would be-heir to the Austrian throne, only World War I has thrown him in hiding from everyone, including Deryn. Deryn is hiding a secret of her own. She’s a girl passing as a guy in the British air service.

As their assignment heats up, so does the growing tension in their friendship….or is it romance…..? A secret mission lands Deryn in some serious danger…and leads both of them to reevaluate their precarious situations in the world.

Scott Westerfeld most recent novels are Leviathan and Behemoth, the first two books in a new trilogy. His other novels include the Uglies series, the Midnighters trilogy, The Last Days, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and the sequel to Peeps. Scott was born in Texas, and alternates summers between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.