Join us on Friday, November 20th, as Gustie grad Kevin Kling returns to St. Peter to share his holiday stories. He will be chatting and signing his new book,  Holiday Inn, at the St. Peter Public Library from 4-5pm, then will make a free public presentation at Bjorling Recital Hall at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Kling, a playwright, author, and storyteller, is well known for his humor and insight, often shared with a wide audience through stories told on National Public Radio. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Kling has an enviable gift for storytelling, a sense of humor rooted equally in pain and whimsy… and an uncanny ability to transform intensely personal memories, especially those of family life, into something instantly recognizable and, at the same time, strangely exalted.”

This special holiday treat is brought to you by St. Peter Reads and the Friends of the St. Peter Public Library.

If you want to get a head start on reading the book, they can be borrowed at Community & Family Education, St. Peter Herald, St. Peter Public Library, St. Peter Food Co-op,  and Whiskey River Emporium or can be purchased at the Arts Center of Saint Peter, Book Mark at Gustavus, Community & Family Education, Nutter Clothing, River Rock Coffee, St. Peter Public Library, Swedish Kontur, Treaty Site History Center, or Waldo’s Coffee Co.

We have lots of events planned to share the experience of Enrique’s Journey. We hope some of them will fit on your calendar.

• Tuesday, Sept. 22: Book discussion facilitated by Gustavus Academic Librarian Barbara Fister. 6:30 p.m. at the St. Peter Food Co-op

• Wednesday, Sept. 23: Latin American cuisine class with Sonia Ramirez. 6 p.m. at the St. Peter Food Co-op

• Saturday, Sept. 26: Screening of the movie Sin Nombre. 2 p.m. at the Treaty Site History Center. (Movie rated R in Spanish with English sub-titles)

• Monday, Sept. 28: Meet the author and book signing. 3-4 p.m. at the St. Peter Public Library

• Monday, Sept. 28: Public lecture by Sonia Nazario. 7 p.m. in Gustavus’ Alumni Hall, located in the O.J. Johnson Student Union

• Tuesday, Sept. 29: Panel discussion on immigration and related issues. 7 p.m. in room 300 at the St. Peter Community Center

You may also want to stop by the Jackson Student Union at Gustavus some day soon to view the amazing photos hanging in the hallway. These pictures were taken by Don Barletti of the Los Angeles Times who covered Enrique’s story with Sonia Nazario. They are truly amazing and add a whole extra dimension to the book.  You can preview some of them here.

And if you have an interest in immigration issues, Alisa Rosenthal of the Gustavus Political Science Department will lead a discussion of immigrants’ rights and the U.S. Constitution on September 17th at 3:30 in the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library.

We’ll be joining the Gustavus community in reading Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario. This is the true story of a teenager who made the dangerous journey from Honduras through Mexico and across the border to find his mother, who had gone to the U.S. to find work to support her family. It is a gripping story that illuminates the human costs of desperation born of extreme poverty and the emotional toll on families separated by economic hardship.

Sonia Nazario is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the L.A. Times. She will be speaking about Enrique’s Journey at Gustavus on September 28th at 7pm in Alumni Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Read the original L.A. Times story about Enrique and the other children who cross the border in search of their parents.

Listen to a Fresh Air interview with the author.

See some astonishing photos of the journey by Don Bartletti, who also won a Pulitzer for his work on this story, here and here.

St. Peter welcomed William Kent Krueger on February 10th – and he generously spent a lot of time with us. After visiting a high school class, he stopped by the college, where he spoke to a nice crowd and read a part of his new book, Red Knife. After that, on to the public library to sign books for fans and then a light supper with Bob and Kay Moline and a number of St. Peter Reads friends. Finally, he gave a great talk to a great turnout at Trinity Lutheran church about his writing process, how he got kicked out of Stanford (though he never quite got around to the details) and how his itch to write is all Hemingway’s fault. The importance of story in our lives was a theme throughout his talk.

After signing more books and chatting with readers, we finally let him head for his home in St. Paul. If you haven’t read his books yet . . .  it’s not too late. There are still some wintery nights left to curl up with a good book. And then you can talk it over with others who have joined in as St. Peter Reads.

This February, William Kent Krueger will be visiting St. Peter to discuss his Cork O’Connor mystery series.  Beginning with Iron Lake (1998),  Kruger introduced an Irish-Anishinaabe former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, who gets involved in a stormy case just as a blizzard is bearing down on his rural community. The eighth book in the series, Red Knife, has just been released. Read an excerpt.

William Kent Krueger’s work has received a number of awards including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. He composes his books at the St. Clair Broiler in St. Paul.

Kent will visit St. Peter on February 10th. He will meet with students at Gustavus Adolphus College at the Couryard Cafe at 2:30 p.m. From 4:30 to 5:30 he will be signing books at the St. Peter Library. At 7:30 p.m. he wil speak at Trinity Lutheran Church. All events are free and open to the public.

Students at Gustavus have been conducting a book drive to benefit schools in Uganda. They’ve been amazingly successful so far – and it has got three weeks yet to go!

This effort will benefit children in Uganda through the Invisible Children organization. You can learn more through this video.

London news sources are reporting that the home of a Dutch publisher who will be releasing a novel about Aisha, Mohammed’s wife, was the target of a firebombing. Police arrested three men in the attack.

The novel, Jewel of Medina, by American author Sherry Jones was nearing publication in the US with Random House when the reaction of an early reader led the publisher to cancel its publication. Some criticized Random House for the decision.

Banned Books Week “emphasizes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.” David Ulin, Books Editor for the L.A. Times, has an interesting essay on this “thorny issue.”

What happens when our ideals require us to defend a piece of writing that is reprehensible, that stands against everything we stand for?

It’s easy to condemn those who would remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from a library, but what about “The Turner Diaries” or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? Or for that matter, “Tintin in the Congo,” which Little, Brown dropped from its “Tintin” reissue series last fall after controversy arose about the book’s racist overtones?

These are not just academic questions; they are the heart of the matter, regardless of where you stand on the ideological divide. How do we defend one book without defending all? Such a notion can’t help but make us uneasy, but then, that’s one of the most essential things books can do. . . . Yet we forget the world is complicated, that it is full of opposing viewpoints and beliefs that, in many cases, we can’t accommodate, at our own peril. What to do, then? Sweep them under the rug? Or face them and consider what we’re up against?

This is the conversation we ought to be having during Banned Books Week, a conversation that encompasses not just a love of reading and a disdain for those who would restrict it but also the implications of the free flow of ideas. Even the most horrific things have something to teach us, something about human darkness, our capacity to go wrong. . . . if books don’t make us uncomfortable, they’re not doing their job.

To call that a mixed blessing is an understatement in a world where a work like “Mein Kampf” can continue to exert its awful pull. And yet to suggest otherwise is to declare that writing is unessential, which is even worse.

This year, St. Peter Reads has a bumper crop of events tied to our community reading. Those marked * require registration through St. Peter Community Education starting on August 20th.

• August 21, 6-7:30 pm – Learn to make traditional egg rolls at the Co-op*
• September 4, 6-7:30 pm – Long Life Chinese Noodles at the Co-op*
• September 6-7 – St. Peter Reads will be at the Rock Bend Folk Festival – look for our tent
• September 15, 10 -11 am. – book discussion with author John Pomfret, Riverrock Coffee
• September 15, 7pm – John Pomfret will give a public lecture at Christ Chapel, Gustavus Adolphus College
• September 16, 10:30 -11:30 am – book discussion of Chinese Lessons, Waldo’s Coffee Company
• September 22, 7-9 pm – Babies and Toddlers from Abroad: Experiences of International Adoptions – by a panel of local adoptive families – Community Center, room 217*
• October 2 – book signing by Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing
• November 15, 9:30 am – 3:30 pm & November 16, 1-4 pm – beginning Asian brush painting with Dee Teller at the Arts Center of St. Peter*

In addition to these events, the St. Peter Library has added a large selection of new Chinese-themed children’s books, thanks to support from the Friends of the Library.

And for even more lectures, films, theatre performances, and concerts, check out the Gustavus Global Insight Program, focused on China.

So you’ve read the St. Peter reads book and now you’re wondering what to read next. The Librarian in Black has some tools for you – a wealth of links to sites that help you find the next great book.

For example, she points out places where you can search for award-winning children’s books, fiction on a variety of topics, books that guys will like, or let the literature map suggest a book based on an author you like (though it may make you slightly dizzy). For mysteries, try Stop, You’re Killing Me, or for teen graphic novels, try No Flying, No Tights.

No excuses. There’s always something to read next.

The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton contest winners have been announced, along with dishonorable mentions. The winning entry – one of eight submitted by Garrison Spik, not to be confused with Garrison Keilor:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

What is this prize? It’s sort of like the Ig Nobel awards, but for literature, a celebration of truly bad writing. You can get a full literary critique by the winner in this Washington Post article.