Events

Join us for an evening with Lorraine Monteagut in celebration of the paperback release of her book Brujas. She will be in conversation with Christina Rosso-Schneider.

Friday, May 26th 6pm at A Novel Idea
*Suggested $5 Donation

There is a new kind of witch emerging in our cultural consciousness: the bruja. Witchcraft has made a comeback in popular culture, especially among feminists. A growing subculture of BIPOC witches, led by Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Indigenous Americans, and other witches of color, is reclaiming their ancestral traditions and contributing their voices to the feminist witchcraft of today. Brujas chronicles the magical lives of these practitioners as they develop their healing arts, express their progressive politics, and extend their personal rituals into community activism.

They are destigmatizing the “witch” of their ancestries and bringing persecuted traditions to the open to challenge cultural appropriation and spiritual consumerism. Part memoir, part ritual guide, Brujas empowers readers to decolonize their spiritual practices and connect with their own ancestors.

Brujas reminds us that witchcraft is more than a trend—it’s a movement.

About the Author

Lorraine Monteagut, PhD, is a writer, astrologer, and all around green witch. The daughter of Cuban-Colombian immigrants, she studies bruja feminism and the reclamation of ancestral healing traditions. Her first book, Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color, explores the ways that descendants of the indigenous Americas and the Latinx/Afro-Caribbean diaspora are breathing new life into historically stigmatized spiritual practices. Lorraine resides in St. Pete, Florida, and on her free time, she enjoys growing plants, beekeeping, long-distance hiking, and listening to podcasts about 90s movies and tv shows—especially her favorite, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is currently working on a short story collection inspired by occult folklore of the global south.

Join us for an evening with Steven Salvatore and Erik J. Brown in celebration of their latest young adult novels.

Thursday, June 1st 6pm at A Novel Idea
Suggested $5 Donation

About the Authors
STEVEN SALVATORE is a gay, genderqueer author; writing professor; Mariah Carey lamb; and Star Wars fanatic with an MFA in creative writing from the New School. They are the founder and CEO of Queerative Writers, a virtual creative workshop series for LGBTQ+ aspiring writers. They are the author of And They Lived . . . and Can’t Take That Away. As a native New Yorker, their heart belongs to the Adirondacks.

Erik J. Brown is the author of Lose You to Find Me and All That’s Left in the World. Erik was selected as a Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellow. When not writing genre-blending books for young adults, he enjoys traveling and embarking on the relentless quest of appeasing his Shiba Inu. He lives in Philadelphia with his husband. You can find him on Twitter @WriterikJB, and Instagram @ErikJB

Preorder their books today!

Join us for an evening of poetry in order to celebrate the release of local author Nicole Steinberg’s newest chapbook dear Elsie / seltzer. Ft. Steven Karl and Kim Gek Lin Short.

Saturday, June 3rd 6pm at A Novel Idea
Suggested $5 Donation

About the Authors
Steven Karl is the author of two collections of poetry, Dork Swagger (Coconut Books, 2013) and Sister (Noemi Press, 2016), and several chapbooks including If Your Lungs Are Skied Make the Scar Song Echo Until All the Winged Things Bleed Your Poetry (Bloof Books, 2023). From 2010–2020 he served as Editor-in-Chief for the online poetry journal Sink Review. Recent poems have appeared in jubilat, Heavy Feather Review, the tiny, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Apartment Magazine, and Typo. Originally from Philadelphia, he spends his time between Boston and Tokyo.

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of the lyric novels China Cowboy and The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, and the chapbook editions Run and The Residents. Her work has been described as “stealing back for prose both the compressed sounds of poetry and the tugs and pangs of story” (The Denver Quarterly) and as “multilevel formal hybridity” (American Book Review). Kim is a contributing author of I Know What’s Best For You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney’s), and her work is anthologized in Asian Anglophone (Dusie), The &Now Awards (Lake Forest College), and others. Her poems appear in journals such as American Poetry Review, BOMB, and Pen America.

Nicole Steinberg is the author of dear Elsie / seltzer, a new chapbook out now from Bloof Books. Her full-length poetry collections are Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017) and Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), and her other chapbooks include Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018) and Clever Little Gang, winner of the 4X4 Furniture Press Chapbook Award (2014). She is also the editor of an anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011). Her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, and Hyperallergic. In 2021, she was honored to be named the 2021 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her family.

Tarot is a window into the soul. Feeling Blocked?
Seeking Guidance? Tarot can help you find the way.
Book a reading with Marguerite Recupero in-person or via video chat.
$30 for 30 minutes.

Sundays, June 4th and June 25th 12-3pm at A Novel Idea on Passyunk

Marguerite is a Death Doula, Tarot Reader, and Writer. As an extension of her work with the Tarot, in 2021, she became a certified Death Doula through the Conscious Dying Institute. Her work with Death and Tarot is largely based in the Mundane as she seeks to destigmatize what is often seen as the mystical.  She hosts a podcast, called Death Becomes Tarot, where she discusses each tarot card through this Mundane lens to help people deal with the Changes of Life. 2023 marks her ten-year anniversary of her Tarot Journey.  For more information about her work, visit her website: wickedwitchywriter.com

Our very own Christina Rosso-Schneider is officially reading tarot at the shop! Tarot is a vehicle for self-care, divination, and creative expression. Christina offers queer, sex, and death-positive readings.

Wednesdays, June 7th and 21st 4-6pm at A Novel Idea

$30 for 30 minutes

Christina Rosso-Schneider (she/they) is the author of Creole Conjure and She is a Beast. She co-owns A Novel Idea on Passyunk and teaches a variety of writing and occult-based classes through the bookstore. They have been exploring the witch path for nearly a decade and their witchy offerings focus on the intersection of magic and creativity.

Book your intuitive tarot reading with her today!

Join us for an evening with TikTok sensation Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger. She will be in delicious conversation with Susan Elizabeth Shepard.

Thursday, June 8th 6pm at A Novel Idea
Suggested $5 Donation

About the Authors
Chelsea G. Summers is a former academic and college professor with Ph.D. training in eighteenth-century British literature. A freelance writer, Chelsea’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vogue, The New Republic, Racked, The Guardian, and other fine publications. She splits her time between New York and Stockholm, Sweden, and can be found on twitter @chelseagsummers. A Certain Hunger is her first novel.

Susan Elizabeth Shepard is one of the cofounders of Tits and Sass and has written for outlets including the Missoula Independent, Willamette Week, Texas Monthly, and Pitchfork. Her essay about working in a North Dakota strip club during the Bakken fracking boom, “Wildcatting,” was a Best American Essays Notable Pick in 2014, she received an Oregon Literary Fellowship in 2018, and she is the only person to simultaneously hold awards from the Montana Newspaper Association for sports reporting and the Erotic City (Portland, OR) stripper awards show. Originally from Harlingen, Texas, she lives in Philadelphia with her spouse, the accomplished culture journalist Jason Cohen, and their cat, Bubbles. She can be found online at susanshepard.com and at @susanelizabeth on Twitter.

Join us for an evening with Unnamed Press authors Adorah Nworah and Stephanie Feldman in celebration of Nworah’s debut novel House Woman.

Friday, June 9th 6:30pm at A Novel Idea
Suggested $5 Donation

When Ikemefuna is put on a plane from Lagos to Texas, she anticipates her newly arranged All-American life: a handsome husband, a beautiful red-brick mansion in Sugar Land, pizza parlors, and dance classes.

Desperate to please, she’ll happily cater to her family’s needs. But Ikemefuna soon discovers what it actually means to live with her in-laws. Demands for a grandson grow urgent, her every move comes under scrutiny, and the America she imagined from Nigeria shimmers almost as distantly through the locked windows of the Sugar Land house, unattainable. As Ikemefuna finds there’s no way out, her new husband Nna, a corporate attorney, grapples with the influence of his parents against his own increasing affection for her, juggling their deeply traditional expectations with his own.

As family secrets boil to the surface, Ikemefuna must decide how to scrape herself out of an impossibly sticky situation: a marriage succumbing to generational cycles of pain and silence. In the end, she may be carrying the greatest secret of all. An unforgettably delicious thriller, this is the story of a woman trapped in a dangerous web of conflicting desires, melting in the Texas heat.

About the Authors
Stephanie Feldman is the author of The Angel of Losses and Saturnalia. She is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic and Locus Awards. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

Adorah Nworah is an Igbo writer from South-East Nigeria. Her stories have been published in AFREADA and adda magazine. Her short stories, “The Bride” and “Broken English” made the shortlist for the 2019 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the longlist for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa Prize respectively. She lives in Philadelphia, where she practices real estate finance law and is cat mom to her handsome Napoleon cat. House Woman is her debut novel.

Join us in celebrating the release of the third book in the Gem Universe series, The Book of Gems, by local author Fran Wilde. Ft. Eric Smith and Stephanie Feldman.

Tuesday, June 20th 6:30pm at A Novel Idea

Two ticket options!
Free admission (doesn’t include copy of book!)
Admission + 1 copy of The Book of Gems

“A glittering tale of academic jealousy and ancient artifacts, The Book of Gems is a pulse-pounding adventure.” –Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor

Some truths are shatterproof…

It’s been centuries since the Jeweled Valley and its magical gems were destroyed. In the republics that rose from its ashes, scientists craft synthetic jewels to heat homes, power gadgetry, and wage war.

Dr. Devina Brunai is one of these scientists. She also is the only person who believes true gems still exist. The recent unearthing of the Palace of Gems gives her the perfect opportunity to find them and prove her naysayers wrong.

Her chance is snatched away at the last moment when her mentor steals her research and wins the trip for himself. Soon, his messages from the field transform into bizarre ramblings about a book, a Prince, and an enemy borne of the dark. Now Dev must enter the Valley, find her mentor, and save her research before they, like gems, become relics of a time long forgotten.

About the Authors
Eric Smith is a YA author and literary agent with P.S. Literary. His books include You Can Go Your Own Way, Battle of the Bands (edited with Lauren Gibaldi), Don’t Read the Comments (a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection), The Girl and the Grove, and The Geek’s Guide to Dating. Originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey, he now lives in Philadelphia with his family.

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

Two-time Nebula Award-winner Fran Wilde has (so far) published seven novels, a poetry collection, and over 50 short stories for adults, teens, and kids. Her stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, and her Nebula-winning, Best of NPR 2019, debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple years’ best anthologies.

Fran teaches for Vermont College of Fine Arts’ WFCMYA MFA and the Genre Fiction MFA concentration at Western Colorado University and also writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Tor.com. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

Preorder your signed copy of The Book of Gems today!

Superstar fantasy author Claire Legrand (New York Times bestselling Empirium Trilogy) makes her adult hardcover debut with A Crown of Ivy and Glass. This gorgeously dark fantasy-romance is perfect for those allured by the glittering society intrigues of Bridgerton and for readers who can’t resist the fantastical setting and characters that have entranced readers of the A Court of Thorns and Roses novels. Each book in Legrand’s lyrical, otherworldly Middlemist Trilogy is inspired by a different classic romantic ballet: Giselle, The Firebird, and Swan Lake.

In A Crown of Ivy and Glass, three sisters of a noble magic family must fight to protect their home from invasion by the creatures of the Old Country—the realm of the gods and the birthplace of magic—before the boundary dividing the two worlds disappears forever. And at the nexus of this brewing chaos looms an all-powerful demon who holds the fates of both worlds in deadly claws.

The reader anticipation for these novels is intense, with hundreds of fans flooding social media to swoon the moment Legrand sent news of this “Adult. Fantasy. Romance.” in a dedicated email newsletter announcement. And why not? As Kirkus Reviews attests, the author weaves compelling fantasy with “high stakes, epic scope, intense action, and sweeping mythologies.” The Middlemist Trilogy is all of this…and more.

Friday, June 23rd 6pm at A Novel Idea

*Suggested $5 Donation

About the Author

Claire Legrand used to be a musician until she realized she couldn’t stop thinking about the stories in her head. Now she is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven published novels, with more on the way.

Her first novel is The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, one of the New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing in 2012. She is also the author of The Year of Shadows, a ghost story for middle grade readers; and Winterspell, a young adult re-telling of The Nutcracker. Some Kind of Happiness, her middle grade novel about mental illness, family secrets, and the power of storytelling, is a 2017 Edgar Award Nominee. Claire’s latest middle grade novel, Thornlight, is a classic fantasy-adventure and a companion novel to the acclaimed Foxheart, a 2016 Junior Library Guild selection. She is one of the four authors behind The Cabinet of Curiosities, an anthology of dark middle grade short fiction that was a Junior Library Guild selection, a Bank Street Best Book, and among the New York PublicLibrary’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing in 2014.

Her first young adult horror novel, Sawkill Girls, received five starred reviews. It was also a 2018 Bram Stoker Award finalist and a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her second young adult horror novel, Extasia, was a Spring 2022 Kids’ Indie Next List pick.

Furyborn, an epic fantasy novel for young adults, debuted at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list and is the first book in the Empirium Trilogy. The next book in the series, Kingsbane, was also an instant New York Times bestseller, followed by Lightbringer, the series conclusion, which was released to immense critical and reader acclaim.

Bordighera Press is dedicated to publishing creative works on the Italian diasporic experience. Julia Lisella and Maria Famà, two award-winning poets, will read from their work published by this press. Julia Lisella reads from her new book of poems, Our Lively Kingdom; Maria Famà will read a selection of her poems from several of her books. The poets invite questions about their work in an informal discussion after the reading!

Wednesday, June 28th 6:30pm at A Novel Idea
Suggested $5 Donation

About the Authors
Julia Lisella’s books include Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press 2022) Always and Terrain both from WordTech Editions, and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Mom Egg Review, and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the IAWA Literary Reading Series in Boston.

Maria Famà, author of eight books of poetry, won Second Prize in the 2018 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Her poems appear in many publications and she is featured reading her poetry in three films. Her latest book is The Good for the Good, published by Bordighera Press in 2019. Famà lives and works in Philadelphia.