Take a Bite Out of Prime

FREE SHIPPING ON OUR WEBSITE JUNE 21-22

In contrast to Amazon’s record profits this past year, more than one independent bookstore a week has closed during the pandemic. Carmichael's was able to survive through resilience, innovation, and community support. But bookstores, like many small businesses, are on precarious ground coming out of the pandemic: they are facing unprecedented expenses, supply chain disruption, and safety concerns continue, and in the weeks and months ahead we will be challenged by inflation, the labor shortage, and more uncertainty.

The 2019 Civic Economics Prime Numbers study reports that 28 percent of all revenue from indie bookstores immediately recirculates in the local economy vs. only 4 percent when you shop with Amazon.

Amazon is marketing two days of “epic deals,” on June 21 and 22, but the #BoxedOut campaign is back to talk about what is really important. Amazon only offers you lower prices (which undercuts and devalues the hard, necessary work of authors, publishers, and bookstores) because of:

➡️ Decades of sales tax collection avoidance
➡️ Special tax rebates & subsidies
➡️ Warehouse conditions that put employees in danger
➡️ Monopolistic practices — and we could go on.

Choose bookstores and small businesses, run by real people in your real community. Thank you for your continued support! We look forward to seeing you every time you shop with us.

In-Person/Webstream

Register for the event HERE

In-Person attendance is limited, masks may be required. Please follow us on social media for updates.

Pre-registering for the webstream helps us monitor interest for future author appearances, so we greatly appreciate your signing up!

Join Paul Griner interviewed by Ian Stansel, presenting "The Book of Otto and Liam"

Booklist, "Best New Books: Week of April 13, 2021"

Liam is the boy, lying in the hospital, in grave condition, a bullet lodged in his head. Otto is his father, a commercial artist whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of the disaster. Paul Griner’s brave novel taps directly into the vein of a uniquely American tragedy: the school shooting. We know these grotesque and sorrowful events too well. Thankfully, the characters in this drama are finely drawn human beings—those who gain our empathy, those who commit the unspeakable acts, and those conspiracy fanatics who launch a concerted campaign to convince the world that the shooting was a hoax. The Book of Otto and Liam is a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read and, at the same time, it is a meditation on the forms evil can take, from the irredeemable act of the shooter himself, to the anger and devastation it causes in the victims’ families. Griner has managed to make an amazing, incredibly powerful book, one that is like no other.

PAUL GRINER is the author of the acclaimed novels Collectors and The German Woman and the story collection Follow Me, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. He teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

IAN STANSEL is the author of the short story collections Glossary for the End of Days (Acre Books, 2020) and Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). He currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, the writer Sarah Strickley, and their two daughters.

Set in the run-up and aftermath of the 2016 election, Pop brings the Canard County trilogy to a close as Dawn, the young narrator of Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, is now the mother of the seventeen-year-old Nicolette. Whereas Dawn has become increasingly agoraphobic as the internet persuades her the world is descending into chaos, Nicolette narrates an Appalachia where young people start businesses rooted in local food culture and work to build community. But Nicolette’s precocious rise in the regional culinary scene is interrupted when her policeman cousin violently assaults her, setting in motion a chain of events that threaten to destroy the family—and Canard County in the process.

In the tradition of Gipe’s first two novels, Pop’s Appalachia is full of clear-eyed, caring, creative, and complicated people struggling to hang on to what is best about their world and reject what is not. Their adventures reflect an Appalachia that is overrun by outside commentators looking for stories to tell about the region—sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but almost always oversimplified.

Robert Gipe lives and works in Harlan County, Kentucky. Pop is his third Ohio University Press novel. His first, Trampoline, won the 2016 Weatherford Award for Appalachian novel of the year. His second novel, Weedeater, was a Weatherford finalist. For the past thirty years he has worked in arts-based organizing and is the founding coproducer of the Higher Ground community performance series. He has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies, is a playwright, and is currently a script consultant on a forthcoming television show based on Beth Macy’s Dopesick. Author photo by Amelia Kirby.

Ed “Nardie” White, Founder and Executive Director of Louisville’s River City Drum Corps, is a pillar in the city of Louisville, KY, especially as it pertains to educating our youth and participating in community activism. In 1991, he and his wife, the late Zambia Nkrumah, started the River City Drum Corps, a west Louisville nonprofit arts and education based program for at risk youth and families.

Praise For…

“A headlong tumble into a proud and problem-plagued Appalachia, this addictive illustrated novel by Gipe (third in a series after Weedeater) is a delightful gabfest.… Comedy and tragedy make way for unexpected uplift in this richly detailed story of people determined not to be forgotten.”—Publishers Weekly

“Robert Gipe has blown the lid off his already zany writing style with Pop, the conclusion to his Canard County Kentucky trilogy. It’s a celebration of diverse Appalachia, told from three perspectives…. As with the rest of the trilogy, the illustrations are hilarious, and pure genius. As a defense of the people and the region, I want to stand up and applaud Pop for its creativity and take up the phrase ‘nothing about us without us’ directed at the wider culture, and Hollywood in particular, as a mantra.”—Jill Minor, Washington County (VA) Public Library

“Nobody has captured contemporary Eastern Kentucky life as authentically as Robert Gipe. And nobody in Appalachian fiction has come up with a literary innovation as refreshing and enticing as his illustrated novels that feature his own rough caricatures to illustrate his well-chosen words.”—Appalachian Mountain Books, April 4, 2021

“Pop is sad, stupid funny, and savagely honest. Gipe’s prose rushes by in a whirl of strangeness, of characters and dialogue, jokes and heartbreaks, ghosts and wildfires, sinkholes and giants telling Jack Tales, plus a couple of movie stars. It leaves the reader with a feeling that it’s time to ‘set out’—whether that means taking on a corporate polluter, starting a new artisanal pop business, or just telling your own story in your own words to someone who will listen.”—Graham Marema, Daily Yonder

“Robert Gipe is Appalachia’s Willy Wonka. Pop is your golden ticket. It will crack your smile, break your heart, and rouse your soul all in the space of a page.”—Wesley Browne, author of Hillbilly Hustle

In partnership with Joseph Beth Booksellers

Register for the event HERE

Passcode: 095803

Acclaimed literary author Chris Offutt now delivers a breakout novel—The Killing Hills, a literary crime novel set in the Kentucky hills in which an Army CID agent on leave ends up investigating a murder and setting the secretive holler clans on edge.

A literary master across genres, award-winning author Chris Offutt’s latest novel, The Killing Hills, is a compelling, propulsive thriller in which a suspicious death exposes the loyalties and rivalries of a deep-rooted and fiercely private community in the Kentucky backwoods.

Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren’t getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can’t handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer’s increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife.

The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal—sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers—and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

Chris Offutt is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, the novel The Good Brother, and three memoirs: The Same River Twice, No Heroes, and My Father, the Pornographer. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among many other places. He has written screenplays for Weeds, True Blood, and Treme, and has received fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations. He lives in rural Lafayette County near Oxford, Mississippi.

Alex Segura is an acclaimed, award-winning writer of novels, comic books, short stories, and podcasts. He is the author of Star Wars Poe Dameron: Free Fall, the Pete Fernandez Mystery series (including the Anthony Award-nominated crime novels Dangerous Ends, Blackout. and Miami Midnight), and the upcoming Secret Identity (Flatiron Books). His short story “Red Zone” won the 2020 Anthony Award for Best Short Story, and his border noir short story, “90 Miles” will be included in THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE STORIES of 2020. He has also written a number of comic books, most notably the superhero noir The Black Ghost, the YA music series The Archies, and the “Archie Meets” collection of crossovers, featuring real-life cameos from the Ramones, B-52s, and more. He is also the co-creator/co-writer of the Lethal Lit crime/YA podcast from iHeart Radio, which was named one of the best podcasts of 2018 by The New York Times. By day he is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Oni Press, with previous stints at Archie Comics and DC Comics. A Miami native, he lives in New York with his wife and children.

TONIGHT! 8pm EST

*If you have not yet received your link for the event via email (free with purchase of book below), please call the Bardstown Road location at 502.456.6950 before 7:30pm.

IN THE HEIGHTS Virtual Book Launch

Lights up on Washington Heights! 

Before Hamilton became a global phenomenon, before Lin-Manuel Miranda became a household name, a little show called In the Heights shook up Broadway with its hip-hop and salsa soundtrack and big, bilingual heart. In the new book In the Heights: Finding Home, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Jeremy McCarter tell the story of the show’s humble beginnings, from rehearsals in a bookstore basement to the Broadway smash (and soon-to-be feature film!) that created an unbreakable community and a new kind of family for everyone involved. 

Join Miranda, Hudes, and McCarter and moderator America Ferrera for a very special In the Heights Virtual Book Launch on Tuesday, June 15 from 8:00 to 9:00pm ET on Zoom. Sure to be an unforgettable conversation on creativity, community, and finding home, this is your chance to hear directly from the creative team behind the timeless story of how one neighborhood—Washington Heights—can speak to the world. 

Your ticket includes admission to this exclusive event is a hardcover copy of In the Heights: Finding Home.  You will receive an email with the link to this event with purchase of the book (below).

Please contact Carmichael's with any questions. We can’t wait to see you there!