Acclaimed local poet Kevin Coval comes to Barbara’s to read from his collection SLINGSHOTS (A Hip-Hop Poetica). “Slingshots is like a midnight craps game between Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks and Big Daddy Kane, thrown against a synagogue wall. Kevin Coval?s wordplay is fierce, frenetic and funny, but these words didn’t come to play...”— Adam Mansbach.

FOR EDGAR is a Barbara’s favorite—clever and tightly written. A skull is impaled on a tree, trailing a ribbon held by a gold-painted scarab. Agent Elizabeth Hewitt recognizes the tableau, the first in series of killings based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. To stop the killer Hewitt seeks the help of a former lover, a Poe expert. It’s a race against time as they struggle to understand the killer—by delving into the mind of literature’s dark genius.

David Gould is one man in life (lonely, bitter, and obsessed with internet diarist MISS MISERY), and another on-line (a night owl with an eye for the ladies and charm to spare). When, in the real world, Miss Misery (aka Cath Kennedy) starts hanging out with an insufferable hipster, and David finds his weblog is updating itself, he begins to suspect that he may have a doppleganger sharing his fabulous life. As Chuck Klosterman put it, “This is the emo Fight Club.”

Twenty years ago, Kaye Gibbons’s first novel, Ellen Foster, was published to great acclaim. Since then, Ellen Foster has become a classic American coming-of-age novel. Now Ellen has more to tell us, and though she’s older and wiser, her voice is unmistakable. THE LIFE ALL AROUND ME BY ELLEN FOSTER stands on its own as an unforgettable portrait of a redoubtable adolescent making herself up out of whole cloth.

Join Barbara’s Bookstore and the Chicago Public Library for an evening with writer, lecturer and literary provocateur Camille Paglia as she reads from and discusses her latest work—BREAK, BLOW, BURN: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems. Please call the Chicago Public Library Harold Washington Center at 312-747-4010 for further details.