We are over the moon to be hosting a special event with Amy Stewart because we love her Kopp Sisters historical series, and even more so because she actually owns a bookstore, with her husband—Eureka Books in California.
 

We're celebrating the paperback release of the third book in the series, Miss Kopps Midnight Confessions, and pre-celebrating the September 11 release of #4, Miss Kopp Just Wont Quit. And speaking of things that won't quit, we're celebrating the success of the first two books in the series, Girl Waits with Gun and Lady Cop Makes Trouble. So mostly, we're just celebrating!
 

So we have arranged a little soiree in the Post House Garden across the street (if it rains, just head upstairs to the second floor of The Shed). This is a ticketed evening event—$20.00 includes admission to Amy's talk, a paperback of your choice from the series (Girl Waits with Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, or Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions), and a cocktail specifically paired to your book choice. Amy, who feels "every book deserves a good drink", did weeks of historical research and made multiple trips to the liquor store to create a cocktail for every book in the series! A $30.00 ticket includes admission, a cocktail, and a pre-ordered copy of the forthcoming hardcover, Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit—available after the event for pickup on 9/11 or later. 
 

Suspense Magazine proclaims that “Stewart has another winner on her hands” with Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. Set against the backdrop of World War I and a high-stakes election and drawn from the true story of the Kopp sisters, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions is a spirited story that will delight fans of historical fiction and lighthearted detective fiction alike. Booklist calls it “perfect for book groups.”
 

Amy Stewart is the award-winning author of seven books, including her acclaimed fiction debut Girl Waits with Gun and the bestsellers The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants.

PURCHASE TICKETS ON EVENTBRITE HERE.
 

“Austin Smith’s Flyover Country is a book of vital and generative reckoning, one that finds both the intimate knowledge held in large landscapes and the larger knowledges found within intimate places and acts. Smith travels the paths of the actual, the emotional, and the imaginative with a physical sureness; his words carry mystery, memory, stories personal and communal. These pages carry, too, Smith’s sustaining, taproot awareness: that what we put into this world and what we draw from it matter.”—Jane Hirschfield, author of The Beauty

Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop.

In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.

Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.
 

Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Almanac (Princeton), and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other publications. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

Tessa Fontaine’s astonishing memoir of pushing past fear, The Electric Woman, follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery―through her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother.
 

Turns out, one lesson applies to living through illness, keeping the show on the road, letting go of the person you love most, and eating fire:
 

The trick is there is no trick. 
You eat fire by eating fire.
 

Two journeys―a daughter’s and a mother’s―bear witness to this lesson in The Electric Woman.
 

For three years Tessa Fontaine lived in a constant state of emergency as her mother battled stroke after stroke. But hospitals, wheelchairs, and loss of language couldn’t hold back such a woman; she and her husband would see Italy together, come what may. Thus Fontaine became free to follow her own piper, a literal giant inviting her to “come play” in the World of Wonders, America’s last traveling sideshow. How could she resist?
 

Transformed into an escape artist, a snake charmer, and a high-voltage Electra, Fontaine witnessed the marvels of carnival life: intense camaraderie and heartbreak, the guilty thrill of hard-earned cash exchanged for a peek into the impossible, and, most marvelous of all, the stories carnival folks tell about themselves. Through these, Fontaine trained her body to ignore fear and learned how to keep her heart open in the face of loss.
 

A story for anyone who has ever imagined running away with the circus, wanted to be someone else, or wanted a loved one to live forever, The Electric Woman is ultimately about death-defying acts of all kinds, especially that ever constant: good old-fashioned unconditional love.