"The Next Full Moon" is as magical as a moonbeam on a mid-summer's eve. When you've finished this enchanting story, you'll close your eyes and fly.
-Kathi Appelt, author of THE UNDERNEATH and KEEPER

Please join us for a reading and signing with author Carolyn Turgeon featuring her new middle-grades novel, THE NEXT FULL MOON. 

This thoroughly compelling, gorgeously told tale begins as the weather turns warm enough to swim in the local lake. Ava is on the brink of her twelfth birthday, and her crush, Jeff, is most definitely taking notice of her. Everything is going beautifully. Until Ava starts to grow feathers—all over her shoulders, arms, and back. Horrified, mortified, and clad in a turtleneck, she hides out in her bedroom, missing her dead mother and worrying about the summer, and the rest of her freakish life...

Carolyn Turgeon has a gift for imagining magical worlds. In Ava’s case, this otherworldly place belongs to the Swan Maidens, one of whom is Ava’s mother. Ava goes back and forth between middle school and this magical realm, taking the reader along for an exhilarating, extraordinary ride.

Please join us for an evening with Rich Cohen who will present and sign his new book, THE FISH THAT ATE THE WHALE: The Life and Times of America's Banana King.

The banana king is Samuel Zemurray, a little know antihero, the son of a Jewish Russian farmer.  He started with nothing but a pile of rotten bananas, overthrew two governments in Central America, created the basic CIA template, bested and took over United Fruit, and went to war with Huey Long. As puts it, if Zemurray had owned a football team, they would’ve won all the time. Zemurray’s rise began at the docks of New Orleans.

“Along the way, he aided the creation of Israel; funded many of Tulane University’s buildings; and had a hand in the rise of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Cohen claims Zemurray was to New Orleans what Rockefeller was to New York, but the better comparison may be to Robert Moses, who bulldozed both land and people to build many of New York’s roads, parks, and bridges. The reader gets to decide not only whether the ends were worth the means, but whether the means were worth the ends,” Publishers Weekly. And Cohen tells it all with his customary humor and engaging style.

“If this book were simply the tale of a charismatic and eccentric banana mogul, that would have been enough for me—especially with the masterful Rich Cohen as narrator. But it’s not. It is also the story of capitalism, psychology, immigration, public relations, colonialism, food, O. Henry’s shady past, and the meaning of excellence. I love this book.”
—A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

“What a story and what a storyteller! You'll never see a banana—and, for that matter, America—the same way.”
—Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

“This is a rollicking but brilliantly researched book about one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century. I grew up in New Orleans enthralled by the tales of Sam Zemurray, the banana peddler who built United Fruit. This book recounts, with delightful verve, his military and diplomatic maneuvers in Central America and his colorful life and business practices.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone and the author of seven books, including Israel Is Real, Tough Jews and the widely acclaimed memoir Sweet and Low. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and Best American Essays.  He lives in Connecticut with his wife, three sons and dog.

Please join us a reading & signing with Michael Parker for the launch of the paperback his rave-reviewed novel, THE WATERY PART ON THE WORLD.

Michael Parker’s vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en route to New York by ship to meet her father, Aaron Burr, disappears off the coast of North Carolina. It ends a hundred and fifty years later, when the last three inhabitants of a remote island—two elderly white women and the black man who takes care of them—are forced to leave their beloved spot of land. Parker tells an enduring story about what we’ll sacrifice for love, and what we won’t. 

“Imaginative yet plausible reconstruction... Parker’s prose, vivid with local color, is the strongest aspect of this novel... The Watery Part of the World is expert at conveying a sense of people and place.”—New York Times Book Review

“Parker slices open each isolated life with humor and gentleness, and the familiar battles with loss and loneliness he chronicles make even this remotest of locations feel close to home.”—People, 4-star review

“A lush feat of historical speculation...The Watery Part of the World — that evocative title comes from Moby-Dick — is an emotionally acute tale about a brilliant woman of privilege who must suddenly use her wits to avoid dismemberment, rape and starvation...Disparate parts — pirates and aristocrats in one century; elderly ladies and their handyman in another — sound like a jarring mix, especially in a relatively brief novel. But Parker has managed to stir them together in a vivid tale about the tenacity of habit and the odd relationships that form in very small, difficult places.”—Washington Post

“A remarkable story... The entire novel has a blue-green, underwater feel, a timeless forgetfulness.”—Los Angeles Times

Michael Parker, author of six previous books of fiction, winner of the Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and an NEA fellowship, is a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.