Brazos Bookstore

Story Time ft. Kat Hyde

Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!

Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan - BIRD/DOG

Brazos welcomes Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan on Monday, October 26 to discuss their book Bird/Dog. The authors will be in conversation with DaQuon Wilson. What does home mean to you? Is it a place where you are safe? The freedom to go wherever you please? Or the people who understand you?High above, Bird roams the open sky but dreams of having a home. Down below, Dog has a family, yet longs to discover life beyond the fence. When their separate adventures lead them away from everything familiar, both must navigate uncertainty, new relationships and the surprising ways in which friendship can appear.Told through two very different perspectives, Bird/Dog is a warm and hopeful story about freedom, belonging, individuality and finding your place in the world.Copies of Bird/Dog will be available for purchase at the event. Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan is a student at Lanier Middle School in Houston, Texas. A highly motivated young writer, Mrinalini benefited from the isolation of the pandemic years, when she found herself reading for hours daily. She is currently a Speech and Debate Team Captain, Lanier Leader, and member of the National Junior Honors Society. She has won numerous writing and speaking competitions at the University Interscholastic League and is the founder of a Banned Books Club. Mrinalini has studied bharatanatyam, Carnatic music, and the clarinet, and is a competitive swimmer with HTX Swims. She has lived in six U.S. states and two countries.Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is an award-winning author of 15 books for children and adults, published in India and the United States, and the recipient of India’s 2022 National Film Award for Best Narration. Her acclaimed works include It’s Time to Rhyme, winner of PublishingNext’s Children’s Book of the Year 8+ (2022), and Prince with a Paintbrush: The Story of Raja Ravi Varma. She writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and picture books, with her work appearing in international journals and anthologies. A frequent speaker at literary festivals, Shobha divides her time between California and India, drawing on her cross-cultural experiences as a proud global citizen.DaQuon Wilson is a PhD student in the English department at Rice University, where he studies African American and Black Diasporic literature with an emphasis on children’s literature and social justice. Before coming to Rice, DaQuon worked with Scholastic Book Clubs and earned a B.A. from Emory University.

The Living Read Book Club

Join us every month for a ghastly good time, open to all who seek to explore the darkest regions of fiction. Our lead buyer and hopeless horror nerd Keaton curates and conducts this newest addition to our book group offerings—THE LIVING READ! Monsters, ghosts, murderers, and more await all who descend into this literary lair of horrors. And perhaps you’ll even find the authors of these nightmarish works themselves lurking among the shadows!September's book is The Final Girl Support Group and we will be joined by author Grady Hendrix. This event will be hosted on Zoom. Click here to register. Click here to view our main Living Read Book Club page.Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!

Story Time

Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!

Love Letters Romance Book Club

Love Letters Romance Book Club! Meets every first Sunday of the month at 11:30am.

Karen Olsson - DEAR THORNS

Join Texas author Karen Olsson on Thursday, November 5 as she discusses her new book Dear Thorns. Karen will be in conversation with Texas Monthly executive editor Mimi Swartz. Lora has worked at the wildlife refuge in South Texas for seven years, trapping and studying the elusive Texas ocelot. Interns come and go, but when Ben arrives, something in Lora breaks loose.Much as she wishes she could devote all her time to the elusive animals, Lora is saddled with office work, her new boss wants to turn the refuge into a hunting destination, and her attraction to Ben gets the better of her. Along the way, she recalls the sacrifices she's made for her career and navigates the distinctive terrain she's come to think of as home: the ranchlands just above the Texas-Mexico border.With sharp prose and subtle humor, critically-acclaimed writer Karen Olsson mines the gulf between youth and middle age and reckons with the ecological disaster of species loss. Her novel illuminates how the things we do to wild animals—isolating them, reducing their habitats, disconnecting them from other groups—are all things we seem to do to ourselves. Brainy, elegant, and deeply engrossing, Dear Thorns is a portrait of a woman’s idealism in a compromised world. Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo, which was a runner-up for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and All the Houses, as well as the nonfiction work The Weil Conjectures. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Bookforum, and Texas Monthly, among other publications, and she was an editor of The Texas Observer. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics and lives in Austin, Texas with her family. Mimi Swartz is a long-time staff writer at Texas Monthly, and a two-time National Magazine Award winner and a two-time finalist. The co-author of the national bestseller Power Failure, with Sherron Watkins, about the failures at Enron, she is also the author of Ticker, the Quest to Create an Artificial Heart. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Esquire, Slate, and she has been a contributing Op-Ed writer for the New York Times.

Mel Thacker, MD - SCRUBBING IN

Brazos welcomes Mel Thacker, M.D. with her debut memoir Scrubbing In on November 6 at 6:30 p.m. Mel Thacker, MD, spent her childhood cycling through periods of homelessness. She found safety and stability in the one place that seemed to reward discipline and hard work: school. She studied her way through premed, medical school, surgical training, and ultimately into a career as an attending surgeon. Then, seven years into practice, everything came crashing down. Thacker began experiencing panic attacks in the operating room. The same body that had carried her through several marathons and had never failed to obey her, suddenly stopped cooperating. The identity she had spent her life building no longer felt like enough to hold her together.In her debut memoir, Scrubbing In, Thacker weaves together family dysfunction and extraordinary achievement, the demands of surgical life and the moral injury of modern medicine, and the profound lack of agency that shadows physician practice. Scrubbing In is the story of a woman who describes her transformation as going from “feral to whole.” It is also the story of a surgeon who did not leave the operating room, but had to learn how to stand in it without fear. This journey charts Thacker’s hard-won path back to peace and part-time locums practice, on her own terms. At its center is a question that lingers long after the final page: Who are you when the role you built your life around is no longer enough? Mel Thacker, MD is an ENT surgeon, professional coach, two-time TEDx speaker, and host of the Surgeons with Purpose podcast. With an audience of 58,000 on social media, she is a thought leader in medicine and surgery who now pairs a locums surgical practice with coaching physicians. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Michael, their two children, and a bunny named Daisy. Find her on IG @the_surgeon_coach.

Story Time

Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!

Stitch and B*tch - Open Crafting Night

Thao Ha - LOVE LETTERS TO THE DIRTY SOUTH

Brazos Bookstore welcomes Thao Ha on Wednesday, November 11 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss Love Letters to the Dirty South, her stunning debut memoir about love, loss, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the American South. As an infant, Thao Ha was evacuated on one of the last flights out of Saigon during the fall of the city in April 1975. Like the other lucky few—and the thousands who came after—she and her family found sanctuary in America. Raised in the growing Vietnamese community in Houston, she did all the things American kids of the ’80s and ’90s did—but she also ran with a Vietnamese street gang. By her early twenties she’d picked fights with other girls who threatened her sister, transported a fugitive across county lines, and been shot as a bystander in a pool-hall fracas turned violent. But the greatest shock came when her boyfriend, Vu, the love of her early life, took the rap for a drive-by shooting and went to prison for sixty years. Enough was enough. Thao got serious about school and majored in sociology under the mentorship of an inspiring professor. She went on to earn a PhD and a tenured professorship at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California. But as William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The decades of her professional success brought marriages, divorces, failed relationships, and family trauma. But one person stayed with her through it all. Like a still-small flame far out on the landscape, the figure of Vu was somehow always with her. Sentenced to sixty years, Vu was locked up in the infamous Beto Unit, the most violent maximum-security prison in Texas. Nicknamed “the gladiator unit,” it is a place where inmates must be prepared to fight for status and for their very survival. Nearly twenty years into his sentence, Thao and Vu reconnected. Three years after that, he was dead. Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. A testament to lifelong love, it is also an unflinching depiction of prison culture, a loving portrait of family life in the Vietnamese diaspora community, and a counternarrative to the typical immigrant’s story. As a Vietnamese refugee and sociologist, Thao Ha deftly explores refugee trauma, mass incarceration, and prison injustice, and she shows how unconditional love attempts to navigate, resist, and thwart a dehumanizing system. In this stunning debut, she tells her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction. Thao Ha is a professor at MiraCosta College. She earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and has published in the areas of race, immigration, and Vietnamese American experiences in the South.

Claire St. Amant - KILLER STORY: THE TRUTH BEHIND TRUE CRIME TELEVISION

Join us for the paperback release of Texas author Claire St. Amant's book Killer Story: The Truth Behind True Crime Television on Thursday, November 12. Claire will be in conversation with local author Lise Olsen.Follow a journalist and TV producer from 48 Hours and 60 Minutes as she carves out a career in the ruthless, knives-out world of true crime television . . . one killer story at a time.Serial killers. Homicidal spouses. Sociopathic criminals. Claire St. Amant has met them all.She spent nearly a decade in network television chasing the biggest true crime stories in the country, including the murder of Chris Kyle, plastic-surgeon-turned-murder-for-hire suspect Thomas Michael Dixon, the Parkland high school mass shooting, the disappearance of Christina Morris, and serial killer Samuel Little.Bringing a true crime story to network television requires quick thinking and tenacious stamina, and in her debut memoir, Claire offers true crime fans a rare in-depth look from the other side of the yellow tape.This eye-opening look behind the scenes of true crime television offers an unforgettable read—and a window into the daily reality of investigative journalism.Pre-order the paperback here and get it nearly two weeks before the November 24 release date when you come to the event! Investigative journalist Claire St. Amant is a former CBS News producer for 48 Hours and 60 Minutes, host of the podcast Final Days on Earth, and author of Killer Story: The Truth Behind True Crime Television, which was recognized by the Texas Institute of Letters as a best first work of nonfiction. She has reported on murder-for-hire stings, cold-case kidnappings, and the attempted assassination of a Texas judge.In 2026, she created and executive produced Killer Confessions: Case Files of a Texas Ranger, for Warner Brothers Discovery/HBO Max. A returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Ukraine, she currently teaches writing classes at Baylor University, her alma mater.Lise Olsen is an investigative reporter and editor and the award-winning author of Code of Silence and The Scientist and the Serial Killer. Her reports have contributed to the prosecutions of a former congressman and a federal judge, inspired laws and reforms, helped solve cold cases and identify murder victims, and freed wrongfully held prisoners. Her writing has appeared in the Texas Observer, NBC News, the Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. She is featured in Netflix’s The Texas Killing Fields, Paramount+’s The Pillowcase Murders, CNN’s The Wrong Man, and the A&E series The Eleven. She lives near Houston, Texas, where she and her husband raised two boys of their own.

Nick Bruel - BAD KITTY GETS A JOB

Bad Kitty creator Nick Bruel will be at Brazos for a reading from Bad Kitty Gets a Job on Saturday, November 14 at 10:30 a.m.Kitty must get a job to buy a new video game in this brand new graphic novel adventure by New York Times-bestselling creator Nick Bruel, for fans of DOG MAN and INVESTIGATORS.Kitty wants the newest, coolest video game, Hyper Crazed Feral Alley Cat Mayhem 3. She wants it badly enough she's considering the worst...getting a job. It will take dedication, a bit of trickery, and plenty of hi-jinks. Will Kitty be able to stay focused enough to get her video game, and maybe even get the job done?Find out in this hilarious full-color addition to the bestselling Bad Kitty series! Nick Bruel is the creator of the New York Times bestselling Bad Kitty series. He lives with his family in Pleasantville, New York along with their sometimes-good-sometimes-bad cats Rose and Noodles.

Lenna Mendoza - AS LIGHTNING

Brazos welcomes Texas-born poet Lenna Mendoza on November 16 with her debut poetry collection As Lightning. Lenna will be in conversation with Analicia Sotelo.Highlighting the prominent and contradictory place children occupy in Western culture, where they are at once cherished and reviled, As Lightning interrogates the nature of childhood itself. Offering multiple pathways through her own past via unexpected means—tests, riddles, word searches, rhyme, and a tour-de-force grouping of choose-your-own-adventure poems—Lenna Mendoza reveals the inherent pitfalls of imposing a narrative on a life. In a paean to “the stuffed puppy I won’t leave,” she deftly observes, “we can hold more than we think.” This collection traces one multiracial queer girl’s experiences of identity, sexuality, trauma, race, gender, and the body itself, in vibrations and resonances that reconfigure these lenses of self-awareness and the limits of our understanding. Advance praise:“A wondrous debut. Composed with cunning diction and surprise, the poems move with and beyond form: sometimes quietly and sometimes full of thunder.”—Jake Skeets“In manic, addictive rhyme, As Lightning upends ideas of innocence, revealing childhood to be a dangerous, haunted land, shining nonetheless from spilled ultrafine glitter. Mendoza navigates form with an engineer’s precision and an uncanny, prophetic vision. An essential book about girlhood and survival.”—Melissa GinsburgLenna Mendoza is a poet from Texas living in Tucson, Arizona. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Quarterly West, Passages North, Four Way Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin, the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay. She is also the author of the chapbook Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, the Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston.

Brazos Book Club

Brazos Bookstore buyer extraordinaire Keaton leads a freestyle conversation about a wide variety of fiction. No need to worry if you haven’t read this month’s book - all are welcome! But be prepared for spoilers...This month we are reading Twenty Minutes of Silence. Click here to view our main Brazos Book Club page.Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!

Voices of Asia Book Club

Join us in-person on the fourth Thursday of the month for our Voices of Asia Book Club, hosted by Interim General Manager Keerthi. We will explore the authors and literature of Asia as we did into this rich and important literary culture. Click here to see our Voices of Asia main page. Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!This month we are meeting a week early on November 19, due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

Story Time

Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!

Author Story Time with Lisa Chow - BEAR WAKES UP

Local author Lisa Chow will visit Brazos for a story time reading and book signing on Saturday, November 28 at 10:30 a.m. When a troop of awfully loud children stomp through the woods outside his home, Bear is woken up before he’s done hibernating. And, wow, does the world look different! Bear has never experienced winter before, so he has never seen snow before. He has never seen naked trees before. And he has never seen his food trapped in the river before. It is a total catastrophe! Bear does what anyone does when confronted with a new and shocking situation—he PANICS. But when ignoring the problem doesn’t help, Bear begins to find a way to face the incomprehensible. And maybe he’ll find a few things to like about his new, snowy and sparkly world. Lisa Chow is a Houston-based artist who loves quirky characters, dry humor, and plot twists. After a brief stint in IT, she followed her passion for art and spent years running craft fairs, hosting workshops, showing in galleries, and designing products. Now, Lisa spends her days illustrating mischievous characters and dreaming up tall tales. When Lisa isn’t creating, she can be found debating the merits of indie films with her husband, playing ponies with her two daughters, and analyzing picture books with the family cat.

Story Time

Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!

Love Letters Romance Book Club

2026 Book Club Titles are as follows: October: Dearly Departed November: Pot Shot December: The Miseducation of Caroline Bingley

Matthew Salesses - TO GRIEVE IS TO CARRY ANOTHER TIME

Brazos welcomes Matthew Salesses on Wednesday, January 13, 2027, in conversation with Lacy M. Johnson. From the critically acclaimed author of The Sense of Wonder and Craft in the Real World comes a deeply personal, poignant memoir, weaving together Salesses’ multiple identities: adoptee, Asian American, husband, father, and, finally, widower. Matthew Salesses has spent his career writing about the power of storytelling, but he wasn’t prepared for the story of his own life to fall apart. A Korean American adoptee, Salesses grew up unsure of who he was—until he fell in love and started a family with a native Korean, Cathreen. But when Cathreen was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer, the map they made together suddenly led nowhere. After her untimely death, Salesses realized he would need new paths, new stories, new philosophies, new ways of understanding the world, to navigate the unknown landscape of loss. To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is a stunning, thought-provoking meditation on what grief can offer the grieving, illuminating the way to embracing yourself, finding your community, and even loving and changing the world. Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), Craft in the Real World (Catapult Books, 2021), Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020), and other books. He was adopted from Korea and lives in Blacksburg, VA, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Virginia Tech MFA Program.Lacy M. Johnson is the author of four books, including The Past and Possible World: A Field Guide to Restoring Ecosystems, Communities, and Hope, forthcoming from Scribner. She is co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rice University, where she teaches nonfiction as the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of Creative Writing.