Join us the 2nd Tuesday of the month for our newest book club dedicated to Fantasy titles, THE ORDER OF BOOKS AND BANTER. We will gather to discuss a variety of fantasy sub genres, covering everything from high fantasy to romantasy to cozy fantasy. Our fantastic hosts will be choosing books with diverse characters, authors, and settings. We are excited to enter magical realms and explore new lands with you!

Our first book, which we’ll be discussing on Tuesday, March 11, is Grave Empire, by Richard Swan. We’ll meet in the shop at 6:30 p.m. Attendance is free, and there is no need to register ahead of time. We’d love to see you!

From critically acclaimed author Richard Swan, Grave Empire begins the epic tale of an empire on the verge of industrial revolution, where sorcery and arcane practices are outlawed – and where an ancient prophecy threatens the coming end of days.

Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.

But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse. 

Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence. 

It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save... 

We’re very pleased to welcome Bailey Gaylin Moore to Skylark to celebrate her brilliant book of essays, Thank You for Staying With Me, on Saturday, March 1.

Urgent, meditative, and searching, Thank You for Staying with Me is a collection of essays that navigates the complexities of home, the vulnerability of being a woman, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks. Using cosmology as a foil to discuss human issues, Bailey Gaylin Moore describes praying to the sky during moments of despondency, observing a solar eclipse while reflecting on what it means to be in the penumbra of society, and using galaxy identification to understand herself. During a collision of women’s rights, gun policy, and racial tension, Thank You for Staying with Me is a frank and intimate rumination on how national policy and social attitudes affect both the individual and the public sphere, especially in such a conservative part of the United States.

Bailey Gaylin Moore is an Ozarks-based writer who lives with her husband and son in the heart of Missouri, where she is amassing a plant collection for her cat to shamelessly destroy. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the online nonfiction series Past Ten, which asks contributors to consider where and who they were ten years ago. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, AGNI Magazine, Pleiades, Wigleaf, Willow Springs, Hayden's Ferry Review, and other journals. Thank You for Staying with Me is her debut essay collection.

We’re thrilled to welcome New York Times film critic and author Alissa Wilkinson to Skylark for what is going to be an outstanding evening of conversation about one of the most iconic figures of American letters: Joan Didion. Alissa will be in conversation with writer and curator Eric Hynes.

Joan Didion opened The White Album with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood.

Although she launched her career in New York City, Didion soon struck out for Los Angeles, where the nation’s dreams were manufactured—and every aspect of her work reflected what she saw there, whether she was writing on politics, society, or herself. In this riveting cultural biography, Wilkinson takes a fresh perspective on Didion’s career as a novelist, critic, and screenwriter deeply embroiled in the grit and glamour of Hollywood. In eloquent prose, she charts how Didion became intimately acquainted with power players of the Los Angeles elite, arriving in the twilight of the old studio system in time to see lines between the industry and public life blur. Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on American identity.

Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic at the New York Times and was formerly a senior correspondent and critic at Vox. Her previous book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, was published in 2022. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Eric Hynes is Senior Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, where he heads up year-round programming as well as the annual First Look Festival. He is also a longtime critic and journalist, with outlets that have included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, Slate, New York magazine, Sight & Sound, the Village Voice, and Reverse Shot, where he has been a staff writer since 2003 and writes a column on the art of nonfiction. 

We are thrilled to welcome Sara’s Yoga Studio back to Skylark for another session of PUPPY YOGA. It’s a pawsitively adorable experience, guaranteed to add a sprinkle of joy to your day!

Enjoy the delightful antics of playful puppies while stretching into relaxing yoga poses. Not only will you feel the stress melt away, but our furry friends also benefit from this fun-filled session! They get to learn important social skills and enjoy a fantastic playtime with you. And who knows? If you feel a special connection with one of these adorable pups, they are all available for adoption!

Tickets are available for purchase here. Hurry - they tend to go quickly!

February’s Skylarking bookclub will be a discussion of Louise Erdrich’s wonderful new novel, THE MIGHTY RED.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

As usual, we’ll meet upstairs in the shop at 6:30 p.m. Alex will be back from Boston and will be leading the discussion!

For our February New Romantics Book Club we are looking forward to discussing Meg Jones’s new romp, Clean Point, a spicy enemies-to-lovers romance about a disgraced tennis player who partners with her father’s rival for a chance at redemption—perfect for fans of Carrie Soto Is Back and Icebreaker. 

As usual, we’ll be meeting in the shop at 6:30 p.m.

Former tennis prodigy Scottie Sinclair is a cheat.

Or at least, that’s what the world thinks. After all, who would believe she was secretly drugged by her own father before winning the women’s singles title at Wimbledon?

The tabloids have called “Game, Set, Match” on Scottie’s career—but an offer at redemption, and more importantly revenge, may give her the chance at a clean serve.

Nico Kotas reigned the tennis world for almost a decade—until an injury took him from the baseline.

Now with a clean bill of health, he’s hungry for one last title. But his public image needs a new game plan—and according to his coach, his former rival’s daughter is the perfect advantage.

But with old enemies on the sidelines, scandal is seconds away.

Because, after all, revenge is best served Centre Court.

This Valentine’s Day we’re pleased to partner with our friends at Blooms and Wishes Flowers to offer our customers a very special Valentine’s treat.

Books and flowers - what’s not to like? On Friday evening we’ll be offering guests the opportunity to create their own “Books and Blooms Bouquet” for their special person. You’ll get to choose two or three books (with our help, if you need it) and you’ll get to make your very own bouquet of flowers to go with them. Right now we’re hard pushed to think of a more romantic gift for the book lover in your life!

There are two time slots to choose from. The first is from 6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. The second is from 7:45 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Click on the QR code below (or click here) to reserve your preferred time!

We are very pleased to welcome Matthew Morris to Skylark to discuss his new book, The Tilling, winner of the prestigious 2023 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.

“The tragic mulatto,” wrote the African American poet Sterling Allen Brown in a 1933 meditation on stereotype, “is a victim of a divided inheritance”: pulled this way and that, belonging nowhere. In 10 lyric essays shifting keys from Virginia, where he grew up, to Tucson, his first home as a young man, Matthew Morris sounds the depths of that embodied cliché: its fracturing simplifications, its (partial, mixed) truths. The light-skinned son of an African American father and a white mother, he asks after the skin-housed present by way of the rooted past, considering his late grandmother, a painter whose grandparents left Due West, South Carolina for Evanston, Illinois in the decades before her birth; the twice-made film Imitation of Life, which in its first iteration starred the light-skinned actor Fredi Washington; and the quiet gradations of color in an untitled Rothko print. Ever-searching, The Tilling is an excavation of identity and a reflection on the beginnings of life and love—a (sometimes soft, others chippy) biracial coming of age.

Son of an African American father and a white mother, Matthew Morris writes through questions of race, identity, family history, and love. His nonfiction has been published in Seneca Review, Fourth Genre via the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, and Mid-American Review through the AWP Intro Journals Project, and he has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His essay “Tidal Wave,” published in apt, was cited as “notable” in Best American Essays 2020. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Missouri –Columbia.

Matthew will be joined this evening by Sara “Eszi” Waters, who will also read from their work. Eszi is a poet, essayist, and parent at the University of Missouri – Columbia working towards their PhD in English/Creative Writing. Eszi’s work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Shelia-Na-Gig, and elsewhere. Their essays have been longlisted for a C&R Press Publication Prize, and their poems were longlisted for the Palette Poetry Love & Eros Prize. Their work explores connection to place, deep ecology, trauma and lineage, absurdity and estrangement. They are particularly interested in hybrid genre writing. 

Calling all Dragon Lovers! Come celebrate the release of Onyx Storm, Book 3 of The Empyrean Series by Rebecca Yarros at Skylark Bookshop on January 21!

There will be swag, a light breakfast spread, and an array of activities  (including some grab and go options). Your ticket gives you pre-open-hour access from 7 am - 10 am. We are all dangling on that cliff hanger, and excited to dive right back into Basgiath to see what happens next! Will Dain win over Violet? Will the Dragons take over the school? Will everyone feast on Turkey Legs? We have all of the theories and none of the spoilers.

Tickets for this event must be purchased in advance. They cost $15 and are available here.

If you already pre-ordered a book, it will be ready for pickup at the event. You can order it by clicking here.

We are thrilled to welcome Columbia resident Merrill Sapp to Skylark to celebrate the launch of her debut book, Knowing Wonder: An Elephant Story.

This is a stunning evocation of the lives of a small herd of elephants as they roam across the African continent, and a beautiful portrait of these majestic, deeply intelligent and empathetic creatures. It is both enchanting and enraging. It is the elephants’ fate to be so deeply attuned to their environment and yet ultimately helpless when confronted with the rapacious greed and stupidity of men. Sapp tells us that elephants never forget. We promise you that anyone who reads this book won’t forget it, either.

Merrill Sapp is a cognitive psychologist, physician assistant, professor, and student of nature. She has traveled the world to learn about and work in the service of elephants. As a cognitive psychologist, she explores elephants' experience of the world to show how they respond to their surroundings and their surroundings respond back. Her writing has appeared in About Place Journal, Ecological Citizen, Earth Island Journal, and Mongabay News. She teaches at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

We love a good pun here at Skylark, and you won’t find a richer source of them than the book titles in our Romance section. We present, as Exhibit A, January’s New Romantics Book Club selection, Lana Ferguson’s Under Loch and Key.

We’ll be meeting in the shop at 6:30 p.m. to discuss the book - come and join us and perhaps we’ll all learn what Scotsmen really wear under their kilts.

A woman discovers that not all monsters are her enemy—the opposite, in fact—in this new paranormal romance by Lana Ferguson, author of The Fake Mate.

Keyanna “Key” MacKay is used to secrets. Raised by a single father who never divulged his past, it’s only after his death that she finds herself thrust into the world he’d always refused to speak of. With just a childhood bedtime story about a monster that saved her father’s life and the name of her estranged grandmother to go off of, Key has no idea what she’ll find in Scotland. But repeating her father’s mistakes and being rescued by a gorgeous, angry Scotsman—who thinks she’s an idiot—is definitely the last thing she expects.

Lachlan Greer has his own secrets to keep, especially from the bonnie lass he pulls to safety from the slippery shore—a lass with captivating eyes and the last name he’s been taught not to trust. He’s looking for answers as well, and Key’s presence on the grounds they both now occupy presents a real problem. It’s even more troublesome when he gets a front row seat to the lukewarm welcome Key receives from her family; the strange powers she begins to develop; and the fierce determination she brings to every obstacle in her path. Things he shouldn’t care about, and someone he definitely doesn’t find wildly attractive.

When their secrets collide, it becomes clear that Lachlan could hold the answers Keyanna is after—and that she might also be the key to uncovering his. Up against time, mystery, and a centuries old curse, they’ll quickly discover that magic might not only be in fairy tales, and that love can be a real loch-mess.

Come and celebrate the arrival of the new year and join us in the always-hospitable surroundings of Twain Bar and BBQ on the first floor of the Tiger Hotel for an informal book discussion (with alcohol!) about a notable book with links to the Show-Me State. This month we’ll be reading and discussing Everywhere You Don’t Belong, the debut novel of Skylark favorite, Gabriel Bump. It’s a much-lauded book, and with very good reason - we all loved it. And part of the novel takes place in Columbia, Missouri!

In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. 
 
Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. 
 
Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Look, we get it. You’re all busy people. Sometimes there simply isn’t time to do all the things you need to get done. Like, oh I don’t know, get presents for everyone on your list.

But fear not! Skylark is here to help. On Monday, December 23, we’ll be staying open for an extra 2 hours (until 8:00 p.m.) to assist you with your last-minute holiday gift needs. Whether it’s bookish stocking-stuffers, gift certificates, subscriptions, our world-famous Skylark spa, or just the perfect book for that hard-to-please someone, we will be standing by to help you! We’ll even gift wrap it all at no additional cost.

So come by late on Monday and join your fellow procrastinators last minute shoppers!

A time travel romance with hockey and Jane Austen-related hijinks? Oh, go on, then. What could possibly go wrong?

December’s New Romantics Book Club choice is Puck and Prejudice by Lia Riley. The New Romantics discussions are always entertaining, and we think that this will be one of the best yet! Come and join us in the shop at 6:30!

From the author of Mister Hockey comes a sizzling marriage of convenience romance between a pro hockey player who accidentally travels back in time to Regency Era England and the brazen contemporary of Jane Austen he just can’t help but fall for… 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a modern single man in possession of a hockey jersey may be exactly what a Regency woman needs to avoid the shackles of marriage...

Goalie for the Austin Regals, Tucker Taylor is benched due to health issues. So he decides to visit his sister in England. But an accidental plunge into an icy pond thrusts him back to 1812 where he comes face to face with a captivating blue-eyed woman who regards him as if he’s grown two heads.

Lizzy Wooddash dreams of a life surrounded by books, engaging conversation, the presence of literary icons like Jane Austen, and... nary a husband in sight. But in Regency England, only widows like her cousin Georgie enjoy freedom and solitary pursuits, unencumbered by expectations. The only way to quickly become a widow is by marrying a dying man or killing a perfectly healthy one, neither of which Lizzy desires.

A visitor from the future might just be the husband of her dreams. Once married, they can figure out how to return Tucker to his proper time, and his absence—aka death—will make Lizzy the widow she always dreamed of becoming. Yet as sparks ignite, they soon realize that matters of the heart rarely adhere to carefully laid plans. Can their love stand the test of time, or will Lizzy get exactly what she wanted...as well as a broken heart?

Join Saralinda and Caroline for a Super Mega Fun Winter Storytime Adventure! There will be Stories. There will be Crafts. There will also be general Mega Fun Winter Adventures with Saralinda and Caroline. We can't wait to see you all there. All ages welcome.

And yes, of course, it's completely free.

Come and join us in the always-hospitable surroundings of Twain Bar and BBQ on the first floor of the Tiger Hotel for an informal book discussion (with alcohol!) about a notable book with links to the Show-Me State. In December we’ll be discussing Sarah Kendzior’s first book, The View from Flyover Country. Those of you who came to Skylark to hear Sarah talk about her newest book, They Knew, will remember what a passionate and brilliant speaker she is. She brings that same fiery intelligence to every one of these essays. Join us for what we know will be a fascinating discussion!

"A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus

In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays.

A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion.

Come and do a little after-hours book shopping on Monday, December 2 - we’ll be donating 20% of all sales made between 6 and 7 p.m. to the Atelier Elementary and Middle School for them to purchase books for their school library!

We'll also donate the same amount for online sales made ALL DAY that day if they reference the Atelier in the comments section of the purchase.

Details below.

We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Steven Watts to Skylark to discuss his new biography, Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People.

Will Rogers helped audiences cope with the dislocations of a modernizing world, according to this perceptive biography. Growing up in what’s now Oklahoma, Rogers pined for the glory days of the open plains that were quickly being divvied up into homesteads and farms. Seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1893 sparked the realization that “riding, roping, and cowboys” could be commercialized and inspired Rogers to join the vaudeville circuit performing lariat tricks. His ability to bridge the Victorian and modern ages was core to his appeal, Watts argues, suggesting that by playing rustic cowboys in early western films, Rogers injected nostalgia for the bygone frontier into the medium. Rogers also burnished his everyman persona in a weekly syndicated column that skewered urbanization and the ascendant white-collar class (in response to a report of job openings on the Wall Street stock exchange, Rogers quipped, “No conscience necessary; all you need is six hundred thousand dollars, but you get it back the first good day”). The liberal quotations from Rogers’s personal letters and public writings attest to his charisma, and Watts’s incisive historical contextualization illustrates how, for Rogers’s audience, he acted “as a beloved guide across shifting social terrain.” The result is an immersive look at a beloved performer negotiating a country in transition.

Steven Watts, Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri, is a historian and writer who has charted the sweeping evolution of American culture in several highly praised books. His biographies of major figures—Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Dale Carnegie, Hugh Hefner, John F. Kennedy, and now Will Rogers—has explored the shaping of a modern American value-system devoted to consumerism, self-fulfillment, leisure, and personality. Two earlier books on the early republic era examined the shift from an older society of republican virtue to a 19th -century Victorian era devoted to self-control, individual character, and the self-made man.

Watts’ books have been translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Polish, and Romanian. They have been reviewed in nearly every major newspaper and magazine in the United States, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, USA Today, New Republic, Commentary, Harper’s, Economist, Reason, and many others.  Watts has written numerous essays for public affairs journals such as The Atlantic, National Review, The Nation, American Spectator, Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, The Federalist, Salon, and The American Mind.  He has been involved in many media projects, including several films for PBS, the History Channel, and documentary venues in Germany and Brazil. He also has appeared in a variety of programs on CBS, NBC, CNBC, NPR, Fox, Fox News, C-Span, Bloomberg News, MSNBC, Telemundo, and the BBC.

The holidays are getting closer, and what better way to celebrate by an appropriately festive selection for November’s New Romantics Book Club: Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year! As usual, we’ll be meeting in the shop at 6:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of the month (the 20!) All are welcome - we just ask that you buy the book from us!

Knives Out gets a holiday rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers romance-mystery from New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter.

The bridge is out. The phones are down. And the most famous mystery writer in the world just disappeared out of a locked room two days before Christmas.

Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan Wyatt:

She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.

He’s Mr. Big-time Thriller Guy.

She hates his guts.

He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.)

But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the world: Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself.

That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone.

She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to wonder: Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust?

As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor.

Assuming they don’t kill each other first.

We know, we know. It’s election day. But our guess is that everyone will probably be ready for a drink and a distracting chat about books on today of all days. This month we’ll be talking about Bettyville, the charming memoir by friend of Skylark, the much-missed George Hodgman.

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure—the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.
 
As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town—crumbling but still colorful—to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman’s New York Times bestselling debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son’s return.

October’s Skylarking Book Club is the brilliant Colored Television, by Danzy Senna. Come and join the discussion about this stunning novel at 6:30 on October 31!

A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia

Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.

Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

Please join us on Thursday, October 24, for what will be a fascinating discussion about by author and professor Claire Horisk about the dangers of joking around. In this election season, with some highly unserious people vying for our votes, it seems like an especially good time to look at how jokes are weaponized.

People often get away with belittling others if they frame their speech as jokes-speech that would be condemned if stated seriously. "It's just a joke," they say. But what is different or special about joking? And if jokes about lawyers and politicians are morally acceptable, then what is wrong with joking about race or gender? Furthermore, if we may joke about a politician's shirts, may we joke about his weight? People who are targeted by demeaning jokes feel their impact but may not be able to pinpoint where the harm lies. 

Dangerous Jokes develops a novel, well-researched, and compelling argument that lays bare the power of demeaning jokes in ordinary conversations. Claire Horisk draws on her expertise in philosophy of language and on evidence from sociology, law and cognitive science to explain how the element of humor-so often used as a defence-makes jokes more potent than regular speech in communicating prejudice and reinforcing social hierarchies. She addresses the morality of telling, being amused by, and laughing at, derogatory jokes, and she gives a new account of listening that addresses the morality of listening to demeaning speech. She leaves us with no illusions about whether "it's just a joke" is an excuse for demeaning humor.

Claire Horisk is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, specializing in philosophy of language. Her current research focuses on how language shapes society. She is the author of Dangerous Jokes: How Racism and Sexism Weaponize Humor (OUP). Her published work also includes articles about the nature of truth, theories of meaning, contextualism, and animal communication.

Just in time for Halloween, October’s New Romantic Book Club will be discussing My Vampire Plus-One by Jenna Levine. As usual, we’ll be meeting in the shop at 6:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of the month (the 16!) All are welcome - we just ask that you buy the book from us!

Nothing sucks more than fake dating a vampire in this paranormal romantic comedy from the USA Today bestselling author of My Roommate Is a Vampire.
 
Amelia Collins is by definition successful. She would even go so far as to say successfully single. But not according to her family, and she's tired of the constant questions about her nonexistent dating life. When an invitation to yet another family wedding arrives, she decides to get everyone off her back once and for all by finding someone--anyone--to pose as her date. 
 
After a chance encounter with Reginald Cleaves, Amelia decides he's perfect for her purposes. He's a bit strange, but that’s fine; it'll discourage tough questions from her family. (And it certainly doesn't hurt that he's very handsome.) For centuries-old vampire Reggie, posing as her plus-one sounds like the ultimate fun. And if it helps his ruse of pretending to be human, so much the better.

As Amelia and Reggie practice their fauxmance, it becomes clear that Reggie is as loyal to her as the day is long, and that Amelia’s first impressions could not have been more wrong. Suddenly, being in a real relationship with Reggie sounds pretty fang-tastic.

A new book by local favorite Jake Adelstein is always something to celebrate, and we’re thrilled to welcome Jake back to Skylark on Saturday, October 12, to mark the publication of his most recent book, Tokyo Noir.

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.

It's 2008, and it's been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about--for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy--himself.

And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

The underworld isn't what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.

In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it's like when you're in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organised crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Nippon, The Evaporated: gone with the gods in 2023. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: a western reporter on the police beat in Japan, which is now a series on HBO Max, and also The Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld (2023).

He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets as a commentator on social issues in Japan, as well as its criminal justice system, politics, and nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.

We are HUGE fans of Leslie Jamison here at Skylark, and are very excited that she will be coming to Columbia, courtesy of our friends at the Missouri Review, on October 9 to discuss Splinters, her astonishing new memoir of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage. It’s an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love, and it will blow you away.

This conversation will be a behind-the-scenes look at the editing and publishing of Splinters, and is the next installment in the Missouri Review’s Miller Conversations on Literary Publishing.  It is open to the public and takes place at Memorial Union, 518 Hitt Street. Attendance is free but you must reserve tickets here. They will be made available on September 2, but we suggest that you go to the page and click on the “Remind Me” button.

You really won’t want to miss this talk. Jamison is one the best and most interesting writers working today and it is sure to be a fascinating evening. Space is limited.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.

Come and join us in the always-hospitable surroundings of Twain Bar and BBQ on the first floor of the Tiger Hotel for an informal book discussion (with alcohol!) about a notable book with links to the Show-Me State. In October we’ll be discussing the new novel by Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope.

It’s Columbia One Read time again, and we are thrilled to participate in this annual city-wide celebration of Migrations, the wonderful debut novel by Charlotte McConaghy. This is the second of two events we’ll be hosting at the store. As always, it’s completely free to attend.

The monthly Skylarking Bookclub will discuss Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. This novel, the first in the Monk and Robot series, is a wonderful example of solarpunk fiction. Unlike many genres that imagine the future in often grimly dystopic terms, solarpunk seeks to offer hope that will empower individuals and communities to work together for a better future. The novel is an optimistic look at how technology and humanity can exist and thrive in a lush, beautiful environment that is coming back from the brink of disaster. It is a fascinating counterpoint and companion to the ideas presented in Migrations.

Boyce Upholt and THE GREAT RIVER, presented with the Ag & Water Desk, KBIA, The New Territory and River Town.

We’re very pleased to welcome author Boyce Upholt to Skylark on Tuesday, September 24 to talk about his new book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. The book is brilliant, but don’t take our word for it. Dan Egan, a Skylark favorite, wrote: “With masterful research and reporting, Boyce Upholt makes a compelling case that, despite our centuries-long efforts to control its unpredictable pulses with concrete, steel, and earthen berms, the Mississippi River in many ways remains wild as ever. And he shows us why that is good.”

This conversation with Boyce Upholt is presented in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent environmental reporting network based at the Missouri School of Journalism, and the River Town podcast from KBIA and The New Territory magazine. It will be hosted by Ag & Water Desk editorial director Tegan Wendland and River Town host Tina Casagrand, the founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Territory magazine. 

The Mississippi River lies at the heart of America, an undeniable life force that is intertwined with the nation’s culture and history. Its watershed spans almost half the country, Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired our first national literature, and jazz and blues were born in its floodplains and carried upstream.

In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of this wild and unruly river, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.

Centuries of human attempts to own, contain, and rework the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist land hunger through today’s era of environmental concern, have now transformed its landscape. Upholt reveals how an ambitious and sometimes contentious program of engineering—government-built levees, jetties, dikes, and dams—has not only damaged once-vibrant ecosystems but may not work much longer. Carrying readers along the river’s last remaining backchannels, he explores how scientists are now hoping to restore what has been lost.

Rich and powerful, The Great River delivers a startling account of what happens when we try to fight against nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power—a lesson that is all too relevant in our rapidly changing world.

Boyce Upholt is a “nature critic” whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, especially in the U.S. South.

Boyce grew up in the Connecticut suburbs and holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He moved to the Mississippi Delta in 2009, where he discovered an unexpected wilderness amid an agricultural empire: the Mississippi River, which for hundreds of miles offers a corridor of islands and sandbars and wetland forests, with no settlement or development.

An obsession with how this wild place came to persist, despite so much change and engineering, inspired a wider interest in the strange nature of “nature” itself—this thing that we call separate but are really a part of. Boyce’s work ranges from straightforward journalism and science writing to travel writing that invites readers to better connect with the “more-than-human” world.

His work has been published in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and was awarded the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. His stories have been noted in the Best American Science & Nature and Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Boyce lives in New Orleans.

The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is a collaborative network of journalists focused on increasing coverage of agriculture, water and other environmental issues surrounding one of the world’s major river systems. Founded in 2021, the Ag & Water Desk brings together contributors from more than 20 local newsrooms from across the watershed, including KBIA. Newsrooms can run the Desk’s stories for free and the public can sign up for a weekly newsletter with the latest environmental news from the basin. This award-winning independent initiative is based at the Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

In the River Town podcast, host Tina Casagrand Foss, the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of The New Territory magazine, takes us all on a magical Disneyland log ride down the Missouri River. Along the way, we get to see how this mighty waterway shapes the people and places it flows through. River Town is a collaboration between KBIA, The Missouri News Network, The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, The New Territory Magazine, and PRX.

It’s always a pleasure to welcome back one of our favorite local authors, Marlene Lee, who will be reading from her new novel, Anna and Sebastian, on Thursday, September 19.

Anna and Sebastian opens as a much older Anna grapples with aging and a disorienting change in the relationship with her long-time lover, Sebastian. Years earlier he hired a woman who, unlike Anna, was still of child-bearing age. Now, eighteen years later, the daughter, attempting to live alone as an adult, is sexually assaulted and trafficked. At this point, the novel explores the effects of assault and trafficking not only on Sebastian’s daughter, but on Anna, who adapted to the unusual paternity, and on Sebastian, who did not bargain for the suffering he experiences as a father. 

Marlene Lee graduated from the Brooklyn College MFA program. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Calyx; The Christian Science Monitor; Descant; Indiana Review; Other Voices; Maverick Press/Armadillo; roger: an art and literary magazine; and Southern Humanities Review. She is the author of five novels (The Absent Woman, Rebecca’s Road, Scoville, Limestone Wall, and No Certain Home) and a collection of short stories, Inner Passage.

Oh, this is going to be a good one. Come and join us for what is always a hilarious and spirited discussion - this month we’ll be talking about #1 New York Times bestselling author Casey McQuiston's latest romantic comedy, The Pairing. Here’s the set-up: two bisexual exes accidentally book the same European food and wine tour and challenge each other to a hookup competition to prove they're over each other—except they're definitely not.

As always, we’ll meet in the shop at 6:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of the month - September 18! See you there!

Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.

Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.