Three upcoming events: Elinor Lipman for Ms. Demeanor at Boswell, Tim Birkhead for Birds and Us (virtual), and Dan Kois for Vintage Contemporaries (virtual)

Three events this week - two virtual and one in person!

Elinor Lipman, author of Ms. Demeanor
in conversation with Daniel Goldin and Nancy Quinn at Boswell
Tuesday, January 17, 6:30 pm - click here to register. 

Boswell is happy to welcome Elinor Lipman back to the store for a conversation about her new novel, Ms. Demeanor, which is a delicious and witty romantic comedy about love under house arrest - for fans of Sophie Kinsella, Maria Semple, and Linda Holmes. In conversation with Daniel Goldin of Boswell Book Company and former Schwartz bookseller Nancy Quinn.

When attorney Jan is caught by a nosy neighbor having sex on the roof of her apartment building, she’s sentenced to a 6-month house arrest in her apartment. She's bored and lonely until a doorman lets slip that Jane isn't the only resident wearing an ankle monitor. Soon, she strikes up a friendship with a white-collar felon neighbor. Can her house arrest have a silver lining? Can two wrongs make a right?

From Cathleen Schine: ""Elinor Lipman, she of the lightest touch and quickest wit, has written a novel to delight even the weariest, wariest soul of our times. Art, food, real estate - New York City rises enthusiastically to embrace the reader. And the characters rise to embrace each other. Lockdowns morph into charming English villages, and love, as it must, wins out. An enchantment I, for one, really needed."

Schine has her own novel with COVID inspirations coming out in March called Künstlers in Paradise. It's good, says Daniel.

And here’s Daniel’s take on Ms. Demeanor: "When is a COVID novel not a COVID novel? When it’s about a lawyer under house arrest for having sex on a private rooftop, only to be spotted by a snoopy neighbor. Yes, it’s all the claustrophobia and sourdough starter with none of the public health panic - probably best for a romantic comedy. I love that Lipman has taken the classic English drawing room novel and morphed it onto the modern Manhattanite. I laughed out loud while I was reading Ms. Demeanor and sighed when it was over."

Elinor Lipman has been to Milwaukee for every novel since 1995's Isabel's Bed, but this this the first time she'll be in conversation with longtime Schwartz bookseller and current Schlitz Audubon Director of Marketing and Visitor Experience Nancy Quinn. If you follow Nancy on social media, you already know that her passion for books and literature is infectious.

Elinor Lipman is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including The View from Penthouse B and The Inn at Lake Devine, as well as the essay collection I Can’t Complain and humorous poetry book Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus.

Tim Birkhead, author of Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation
a virtual event
Wednesday, January 18, 2 pm - click here to register. 

Boswell Book Company and Schlitz Audubon Nature Center present a virtual program featuring preeminent ornithologist Tim Birkhead, author of Birds and Us, a book that examines the changing relationship between humans and birds, from the earliest depictions in cave art to the threat of extinction now and in the near future.

Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance fascination with woodpecker anatomy, and from the Victorian obsession with egg collecting to today’s fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.

Birds and Us has earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, which says, "This is a must-read for nature lovers," and from Kirkus Reviews, which says, "From acorn woodpeckers to zebra finches, Birkhead examines bird habitat, behavior, cultural meaning, and physiology in species around the world… A fascinating, authoritative avian history."

Tim Birkhead is an award-winning author and one of the world’s leading bird biologists. He is author of The Wonderful Mr. Willughby: The First True Ornithologist, The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg, and Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, as well as coauthor of Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Sheffield.

Dan Kois, author of Vintage Contemporaries
in conversation with Jami Attenberg for a virtual event
Thursday, January 19, 6 pm - click here to register. 

Boswell joins forces with Flyleaf Books of Chapel Hill, NC, to present a virtual event with Slate editor and podcaster Dan Kois, who will chat about his long-awaited first novel, Vintage Contemporaries. In conversation with Jami Attenberg, author of books such as I Came All This Way to Meet You.

Click here to order from Boswell. Alternatively, click here to order from Flyleaf Books.

Kois’s book is a stunning coming-of-age novel set in New York City, about the power of leaning into the moment, the joys of unexpected life-altering relationships, and learning to forgive ourselves when we inevitably mess everything up. A sharp yet reflective story of a young woman coming into herself and struggling to find her place, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel about art, parenthood, loyalty, and fighting for a cause - the times we do the right thing, and the times we fail - set in New York City on both sides of the millennium.

Here’s early praise from Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave
the World Behind: "Vintage Contemporaries is about being young and becoming less young, exploring friendship (sometimes magical, sometimes messy), parenthood (ditto), and how to reconcile youthful ambition and ideals with real life. It’s a warm and big-hearted coming of age story that made me wistful for my own twenties, set in a vividly rendered and long-vanished New York City."

And here's Daniel Goldin's angle on Vintage Contemporaries: "The first thing local readers need to know is that this author and Slate editor was once a bookseller in Milwaukee - that semi-familiar minor character’s name is not an accident - it’s a shout out to his former

store manager. And for a Downer Avenue reference, at one point, lunch on a family trip back home is at the legendary Coffee Trader.”

Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where he’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. He is author of How to Be a Family and co-author of The World Only Spins Forward, was a Stonewall Honor book. Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours.