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 Winter/Spring 2023

 

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Mark Munger

"Duck and Cover"

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January 19

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A coming of age memoir set in a suburban neighborhood of Duluth, Minnesota chronicling one boy's losses, loves, battles, struggles, and successes during the Cold War.

​“The stories in this collection are especially evocative for those of us who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. Inviting us all in like a kitchen door swinging open, Munger honestly depicts, through his particular lens, the joy and the angst, the pleasures and the anxieties of childhood and youth. These selections are woven together in a perfect mix of humor and tenderness.”  – Deborah Cooper, former Duluth Poet Laureate.

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Paul Legler

"Half the Terrible Things"

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February 16

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A true crime story involving the murder of a young man in Dixie County, Florida in 1922. Half the Terrible Things is an intimate and sometimes violent novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic.

 

Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp Whipping Boss. His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country.
Eighty years later, his girlfriend, Edna, nearing her end in a nursing home in Devils Lakes, ND, asks her granddaughter, Nicole, to find his grave. Nicole, a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. The Tabert case resulted in prison reform in Florida after North Dakotans intervened following Tabert's death.

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Daniel O'Brien

"Japanese Ghost in America"

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March 16

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Jimmy, an introspective and world-traveled social studies teacher, lives a quiet life working in a Minnesota high school. Having lived in Japan for several decades-a country that he considers his second home-he is caught off-guard by the ancient and unfinished legacy that has followed him back across the Pacific.

As the sun sets, Jimmy begins to see strange events in his home: a disembodied hand in the moonlight, then the full apparition of a Japanese woman in traditional kimono. Despite being separated by the boundaries of time and space, life and death, Jimmy and the mysterious woman discover a karmic connection. Together, they search for the root of her eternal restlessness in the hopes of attaining her redemption. Jimmy must unravel her past to discover how their destinies are intertwined, and how they might heal one another.

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Rob Jung

"Judgment Day"

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April 20

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:Judgment Day is the third book of the Chimera Chronicles trilogy, bringing to a close the story which began with the disappearance of a painting in 1937 (The Reaper) and the conflict that lost painting created between a Minnesota artist and his estranged mother (The Sower).
 

Magnolia Kanaranzi, a woman with a mysterious past, is charged with conspiring to murder her own mother. Kanaranzi adamantly maintains her innocence, but the facts point to her guilt, and her attorney seeks to have her declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.  She is examined and diagnosed with multiple personalities, at least one of which has violent tendencies.  Fearing that she will end up in a mental institution for the rest of her life, she escapes from custody and goes into hiding.  Her abandoned son, Blethen, seeks reconciliation and sets into motion a collision of perception and reality.

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Joan Treppa

"Reclaiming Live"

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May 18

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Joan Treppa is a wife, mother, and social justice advocate for those who’ve been victimized by the criminal justice system i.e., prosecuted for crimes they did not commit. With no formal legal training, her bold stance on behalf of six Green Bay, WI men she believes were wrongfully convicted of murder in 1995 (a high profile case cited as one of the greatest travesties of injustice in WI history), created a groundswell of support and renewed hope when the case was reopened by a sizable MN law firm in 2013.

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