Press Release
City Lights Bookstore
Who is helping give out half a million free books across America on April 23rd? We are.
City Lights Bookstore is proud to be one of 2,300 bookstores and libraries across America supporting World Book Night 2014.
On April 23 – Shakespeare’s birthday – 25,000 volunteers from Kodiak to Key West will give away half a million free books in more than 6,000 towns and cities across America.
City Lights Bookstore serves as a community base for local givers, receiving the books that they will be giving out and providing useful resources. We also hosted a reception for some of our local givers on April 15th. Givers collecting their book at City Lights will be giving away copies of the following titles: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs; Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers; Wild by Cheryl Strayed; Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein; Hoot by Carl Hiaasen; Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin; and After the Funeral by Agatha Christie.
City Lights is located at 3 E. Jackson St., Sylva. For more information call (828) 586-9499.
About World Book Night
World Book Night U.S. is an ambitious campaign to give thousands of free, specially-printed paperbacks to light or non-readers. Volunteer book givers help promote reading by going into our communities and handing out free copies to those without means or access to a printed book.
With the organizational support of local bookstores and libraries, they’ll be sharing them in locations such as hospitals, mass transit, nursing homes, food pantries, underfunded schools and more. This is not a random giveaway, but a person-to-person, carefully planned outreach.
World Book Night takes place on April 23, 2014 – Shakespeare’s birthday – and is in its third year in the U.S., after the UK launch in 2011. WBN US’s reach includes all 50 states, Puerto Rico, USVI, and overseas military bases. World Book Night is making a short, free original e-book available to everyone at their website on April 22. It contains ten short essays by booksellers, librarians and authors who were also givers.
The WBN picks are by a wide array of award-winning and bestselling adult and YA authors, as well as classics, books in Spanish, and books in Large Print. The assortment of WBN titles is based on diversity in subject matter, age level, gender, ethnicity and geography. The books were chosen in a vote by librarians, booksellers, and last year’s givers.
More information, including FAQs and links to all social media– including giver experiences and photographs – is at www.us.worldbooknight.org
About the volunteers
Volunteers applied online to be givers by stating where they intend to seek out book recipients, and noting which of the special WBN Book Picks they’d like to hand out. The volunteer givers come from all walks of life: teachers, book club members, social workers, first responders, local businesspeople, librarians, booksellers, students, parents, and more. All of our volunteers for this year are already signed up, but anyone can join the WBN mailing list in order to be notified when giver application begins anew next year.
The World Book Night U.S. titles for 2014, alphabetical by author, are:
The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane Ackerman (W.W. Norton)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Jesse Andrews (Amulet)
Zora and Me, Victoria Bond and T.S. Simon (Candlewick)
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)
The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown (Berkley)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky (Simon & Schuster)
After the Funeral, Agatha Christie (William Morrow Paperbacks)
The Ruins of Gorlan: Ranger’s Apprentice Book 1, John Flanagan (Puffin Books)
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – in Large Print (Thorndike/Gale; Cengage Learning)
The Lighthouse Road, Peter Geye (Unbridled Books)
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay Books)
Wait Till Next Year, Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (Simon & Schuster)
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller (Vintage)
Hoot, Carl Hiaasen (Knopf)
Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor (Penguin Books)
Same Difference, Derek Kirk Kim (First Second Books)
Enchanted, Alethea Kontis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Miss Darcy Falls in Love, Sharon Lathan (Sourcebooks)
Bobcat and Other Stories, Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books)
Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean (University of Chicago Press)
Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (New American Library)
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin (HarperPerennial)
Sunrise Over Fallujah, Walter Dean Myers (Scholastic)
Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup (Dover)
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson (HarperTrophy)
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan (Random House)
The Raven’s Warrior, Vincent Pratchett (YMAA Books)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs (Quirk Books)
When I Was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago (Da Capo)
Cuando era puertorriqueña, Esmeralda Santiago (Vintage Español)
Where’d You Go Bernadette, Maria Semple (Back Bay Books)
Where’d You Go Bernadette– in Large Print (Thorndike/Gale; Cengage Learning)
Wild, Cheryl Strayed (Vintage)
Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (Grand Central Publishing)
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein (Disney Hyperion)
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff (Grove Atlantic)
100 Best-Loved Poems, Philip Smith, ed. (Dover)
World Book Night U.S. is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization supported by UPS, authors, publishers, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, and the Ingram Content Group; a full list of sponsors is at our website. www.us.worldbooknight.org
Before you comment
The comments section is here to provide a platform for civil dialogue on the issues we face together as a local community. Xpress is committed to offering this platform for all voices, but when the tone of the discussion gets nasty or strays off topic, we believe many people choose not to participate. Xpress editors are determined to moderate comments to ensure a constructive interchange is maintained. All comments judged not to be in keeping with the spirit of civil discourse will be removed and repeat violators will be banned. See here for our terms of service. Thank you for being part of this effort to promote respectful discussion.