Author Event

LAKE FOREST BOOK STORE WILL BE DONATING $1 PER BOOK SALE BETWEEN JUNE 19th UNTIL SEPTEMBER 19th TO REBECCA MAKKAI'S FUNDRAISING EFFORT.  #TheGreatBelieversDonate.  ALL DONATIONS WILL GO TO VITAL BRIDGES FOOD PANTRY

Join Lake Forest Book Store as we host a cocktail reception and book talk featuring author Rebecca Makkai and her book The Great Believers

$45 individual or $55 per couple and includes 1 book

Reservations required, call 847-234-4420

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Harper's, and Tin House, among others. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Author Photo Credit to Susan Aurinko

Join us in welcoming Jennifer Haupt, author of In the Shadows of 10,000 Hills, as she appears in-conversation with Chicago-based writer and author of The Comedown, Rebekah Frumkin.

IN THE SHADOW OF 10,000 HILLS

THE COMEDOWN

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

Jennifer Haupt went to Rwanda as a journalist in 2006, a decade after the genocide that wiped out over a million people, to explore the connections between forgiveness and grief. She spent a month traveling in the 10,000 hills with a guide, interviewing genocide survivors and humanitarian aid workers, and came home to Seattle with something unexpected: the bones of a novel. Her essays and articles have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, The Seattle Times, Spirituality & Health, and many other publications. In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills is her first novel.

Rebekah Frumkin is a writer based in Chicago. She also teaches writing and literature at Northeastern Illinois University and University of Illinois-Chicago. Her fiction, nonfiction, and journalism have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Pacific Standard, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Comedown will be published by Henry Holt in April 2018. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism. She is the recipient of the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Grant and the Meta Rosenberg Fellowship for her fiction. She has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and currently teaches creative writing at Open Books in Chicago. She also works as a freelance reporter for the Social Justice News Nexus and In These Times. She speaks and studies German, for which she received a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, as well as Spanish and intermediate-level Hindi, for which she received a Critical Languages Scholarship. 

Join us at Lake Forest Book Store as we welcome author Spencer Wise celebrating his new historical novel.

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a transfixing story about an expatriate in southern China and his burgeoning relationship with a seamstress intent on inspiring dramatic political change Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant's vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex's own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line. When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite? Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution, set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.

Born in Boston, Spencer Wise is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Texas at Austin and worked in the editorial departments at Sports Illustrated and Time Out New York. His work has appeared in Narrative magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Florida Review, and New Ohio Review. He is the winner of the 2017 Gulf Coast Prize in nonfiction. Wise teaches at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee.

Author photo by Molly Hamill

Greet former Lake Forest resident, Beth Ann Fennelly at Lake Forest Book Store as we celebrate her most recent book.

W. W. Norton & Company  $23.00

Thursday, May 31st at 6:00 PM

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

Call 847-234-4420

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments, and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks, and Open House; two memoirs, Heating & Cooling and Great with Child; and a novel, The Tilted World, coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, and is also the state's Poet Laureate. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Join the Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods and Lake Forest Book Store as we host Dave and Amy Freeman to support their Pedal to D.C.: A Book Tour to Save the Boundary Waters and celebrate their book.

Tickets for the event are $5 for BCRW members, $10 for non-members, and free for students

Register at: https://www.brushwoodcenter.org/Events/PedaltoDC.html 

Books available for purchase and signing

Dave and Amy Freeman will tow a canoe while bicycling 1,750 miles from Ely, MN to Washington D.C. to raise awareness of the threat from sulfide-ore copper mining proposed in the Boundary Waters watershed and to promote their award-winning book, A Year in the Wilderness.

On December 22nd, 2017, a critical decision was made by the Trump administration that puts the BWCAW region and watershed under an urgent threat. The U.S. Department of the Interior is reinstating two expired mineral leases first issued in 1966 that could allow Antofagasta, a Chilean mining company (and subsidiary, Twin Metals) to build a copper-nickel mine adjacent to the Boundary Waters and upstream from Voyageurs National Park. Sulfide-ore copper mines require a toxic mining practice that has never before been allowed in Minnesota. Supporters of the mine say it will create 650 jobs; however, it will also endanger 4,490 jobs in local tourism that depend on a clean Boundary Waters, including the Freeman’s work as dogsled and canoe guides. Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness plans to sue to challenge the decision.

Pedal to DC is a collaborative effort between Save the Boundary Waters and Milkweed Editions.

Dave and Amy Freeman's expeditions have taken them over thirty thousand miles by canoe, kayak, and dogsled through some of the world's wildest places, from the Amazon to the Arctic. National Geographic named the Dave and Amy Adventurers of the Year in 2014 and their images, videos, and articles have been published by a wide range of media sources from the CBC, NBC, and FOX to the Chicago Tribune, National Geographic, Outside, Backpacker, Canoe and Kayak, and Minnesota Public Radio.

Join us for a meet and greet with children's book author Gigi Priebe during her stop at Lake Forest Book Store in her tour of our local schools.

THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY WHISKERS #1 and #2

Aladdin Paperbacks  $5.99 each 

Sunday, April 8th 1:30 pm

at Lake Forest Book Store

Gigi Priebe 1:30-2:30

Books available for purchase and signing

Contact the store at 847-234-4420

Henry Whiskers must face his fears and rescue his little sister from the scary Rat Alley in this fun, fast-paced debut chapter book set in Queen Mary's historical dollhouse at Windsor Castle. Twenty-five generations of Whiskers have lived in Windsor Castle's most famous exhibit: Queen Mary's Dollhouse. For young, book-loving Henry Whiskers and his family, this is the perfect place to call home. But when the dollhouse undergoes unexpected repairs and Henry's youngest sister, Isabel, goes missing, he risks everything in a whisker-whipping race against time to save her. His rescue mission will take him to the murky and scary world of Rat Alley, and Henry will have to dig deep and find the courage he never knew he had in order to bring his sister back home.

Gigi Priebe is the mother of three, the founder of Stepping Stones, an award-winning children's museum in Norwalk, Connecticut and the author of The Adventures of Henry Whiskers, the first in her middle grade series. When she is not writing,or rewriting, she is a philanthropic advisor and community volunteer in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, a cat named Tigger, a dog named Clover, and probably some mice.

Join Allison Pataki at Lake Forest Book Store as she presents her moving new book Beauty in the Broken Places.

at Lake Forest Book Store

Books available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served.

Register at 847-234-4420

A deeply moving memoir about a young couple whose lives were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future. Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave--a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident--had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night. When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison had lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come. As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation of this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again. This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It's a tale of a man's turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.

Allison Pataki is the author of the bestselling novels Sisi, The Traitor's Wife, and The Accidental Empress, as well as the co-author of Where the Light Falls, with her brother Owen Pataki, and two children's books. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Pataki and her husband, Dave Levy, are passionate about raising awareness of the difficulties of life after a stroke or traumatic brain injury. The daughter of former New York State governor George E. Pataki, Allison Pataki graduated cum laude from Yale University and lives in New York City with her family.

Join us for a Meet & Greet Book Signing with author Kristin Cavallari at Lake Forest Book Store as we celebrate her new book.

Kristin Cavallari is a television host, designer, entrepreneur, and author of the New York Times bestseller Balancing in Heels. She starred in MTV 's hit series Laguna Beach and The Hills. Kristin has a recurring role on E! co-hosting the pre-show during award season . She designs her own shoe line and founded and creatively runs the lifestyle brand Uncommon James. Kristin lives in Nashville with her husband, NFL quarterback Jay Cutler, and their three children.

IMPORTANT!  All books signed at Lake Forest Book Store events must be purchased at Lake Forest Book Store.

Local resident Mark Litzsinger discusses his newly updated book entitled

OUT OF THE SHADOWS: REVEALING THE PATH TO RECOVERY 

RML Press $17.00 Released January 1, 2018

at Lake Forest Book Store

Thursday, April 12th at 6 P.M.

Books available for purchase and signing

Reservations suggested but not required

Call 847-234-4420

Imagine living in a darkness so deep, you can't eat well, you can't sleep well, you can't concentrate on anything for very long--in short, your life is not as it once was. Depression often feels like moving through a fog so thick it envelopes every aspect of your entire life.

Depression had its claws in Mark Litzsinger for years, but by taking the hands offered to him from family, friends, and medical professionals, he was able to climb out of the shadows and back into his life. You too can make the same journey.

This updated book provides a hand to hold as you deal with depression. It is designed to help you--and your family, friends, and doctors--understand the disease and develop a plan for getting the best care to overcome depression.

A graduate of Texas Christian University, Mark Litzsinger is the former chairman of Follett Corporation. Now retired, he spends time sailing and traveling. Mark shows his Samoyeds, Sanibel and Aston, as well as his collection of antique cars, including a 1935 Packard Twelve 1207 Coupe Roadster. In addition, he invented the Leash Grip, which gives a dog walker a firmer, more comfortable handle, and the Leash Grip Extender, which allows one person to walk multiple dogs. Mark also gives talks about his experiences with depression. He is a firm believer in giving back to society. Out of the Shadows is his first book.

Author Photo courtesy of Furlo Studios