Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Celebrating 20 years!

It’s been 20 years since the founding of Beagle Books, and we’re celebrating all year long! The 20th of each month we’ll give away a bag stuffed with books and bookish swag. Enter every time you’re in the store, no purchase necessary. If you can’t get in, email sally@beagleandwolf.com to enter. These are the only two ways to enter the drawing. (Note: prize bags must be picked up as we are unable to mail them. We will hold them, however.)

One Day. Hundreds Of Bookstores. Fifty States. Join the Celebration!

Independent Bookstore Day is a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April. Every store is unique and independent, and every party is different. But in addition to other fun stuff, there are exclusive books and literary items that you can only get on that day. Not before.
Nowhere else.

Sally and Jen on Independent Bookstore Day 2019. This year: new hair colors, new tshirts!

Glennon Doyle has been named the 2021 IBD ambassador.

The bestselling author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed, is now a champion of independent bookstores.

“I have been to one million independent bookstores. I have met the booksellers who founded them and own them. I have fallen in love with them,” said Doyle. “Zero jerks own independent bookstores. They just don’t. They are — always — people who believe in and deeply invest in communities and art and ideas. And during this pandemic, in which we have lost one local indie per week, we need to prioritize investing in these local businesses who invest so much in us.”

At Beagle and Wolf, you’ll find exclusive IBD merchandise, some fun give a-ways, the great stock coming in for summer, a free book with every purchase, and a chance to sign up for the book bag drawing. With any luck, you’ll walk through the newly completed entryway, but we’re not making any promises! In the meantime, we’ll be slipping an IBD bookmark in every book we sell.

Mary Casanova
Thursday, May 13 at 7:00

Join Jen in conversation with author Mary Casanova to discuss her new book, Waterfall!

In her third Rainy Lake historical drama, Mary Casanova takes us back to pristine and rugged northern Minnesota. It's 1922, women have won the right to vote, and Trinity Baird is of age. But at 21, after nearly two years at Oak Hills Asylum, she returns to her family's island summer home with her self-confidence in tatters and her mind seared by haunting memories. Her parents are oblivious to what they have put her through and instead watch their daughter for the least sign of defiance. Trinity struggles to be the "respectable" young woman her parents (especially her mother) demand, so that she can return to her independent life studying art and painting in Paris. She never wants to go back to Oak Hills, where they "treat" hysterical, i.e., unconventional, young women.

With enough talent and ambition to be accepted into the Sorbonne, Trinity had hoped she would be well on her way as an artist by now. On the island, she returns to what sustains her: painting. While her love for this beautiful place is deep and abiding, the few months ahead present a near-impossible task: recover the strong sense of self she's nearly lost during her time away, while holding off her powerful family's efforts to coerce her into submission. When her parents arrive on Baird Island, her father brings along a promising young architect to help with plans to build new guest cabins. Trinity suspects her parents are trying to introduce yet another marriage prospect. Or might she have found an ally?

Informed by historical figures, by the burgeoning growth of women's rights in the early twentieth century, and the complicated issue of mental illness and how "difficult" women were silenced, Waterfall offers a compelling story of an inspired, ambitious, and soulful young woman's fight to find her way.

A link will be available closer to the event.

Announcing our Fall Reading Retreat,
scheduled for October 8 to 10!

A Reading Retreat is a gift you give yourself. It’s time outside your ordinary schedule when you can relax, discuss books with other lively and interesting readers, and eat meals which someone else has prepared. We’ve cancelled three reading retreats during the pandemic, but are cautiously optimistic that the one for this fall will be a go. We will expect that participants will have been vaccinated against COVID. More details will be forthcoming, but we can tell you that one of the books we’ll be reading is The Seed Keepers, by Diane Wilson.

New Releases!

The Book of Longings
Sue Monk Kidd

Carefully researched and imaginatively told, Sue Monk Kidd’s latest novel, now out in paperback, l is the story of Ana, the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. Ana was self-educated, literate, rebellious, and longed for her voice to be heard and her story to be told. Born into a wealthy family, she pushed against cultural norms and married a peasant, a man far below her social status, after refusing to marry the man who parents had chosen for her. Jesus, a man with longings of his own, was a good partner for her. Kidd seamlessly weaves together imagined events and people with events and persons from the Biblical accounts of the life of Jesus. I loved this book!

—Sally

 

Continued Pandemic Protocol in the Store

Since the pandemic started, we have followed the guidance of the CDC, the Minnesota Department of Health, and the governor’s mandates, and we will continue to do so. At this point, this is what we are asking of you:

Farewell to two Noteworthy Authors

The literary world grieved the deaths of two noted authors in March.

Rest in Peace, Beverly Cleary and Larry McMurtry.

To an Athlete Dying Young
by. A. E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

I asked our staff what poems they remember from youth
and here’s how they answered.

Sally: Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -

My introduction to poetry came during family car rides, when my grandmother would recite from memory long passages from Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” which began ‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,” Even after all these years, every time I read those words, I hear my grandmother’s voice.

Ann: anyone lived in a pretty how town by e. e. cummings

I had many e.e. cummings books during my high school and college years. This poem was one that I liked and that has stuck with me:

Pam: It Couldn’t Be Done by Edgar Albert Guest

 My mother would recite the first stanza of this poem anytime we complained that we couldn’t so something.

Hannah: General William Booth Enters into Heaven by Vachel Lindsay

It was the rhythm of the first lines that rocked me, and still do.

Experience Poem by Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was the go-to poet whenever my heart got broken.

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