Excited to join forces with Split Lip Press and Barrelhouse this December to celebrate new work from Sara Schaff and Gina Myers, who'll be joined by one of our favorite local poets and editors, Nicole Lourette!

Check out our ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don't see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.

You can purchase Sara's and Gina's books on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events. Check out our curated lists and picks on our main Bookshop.org affiliate page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.)

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 12/10. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

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About The Invention of Love:

What is love, if not an invention—not just a human instinct but an artful construction? The women who people The Invention of Love, Sara Schaff's second story collection, long to conceive of themselves as artists, as lovers, as good sisters and daughters—while contending with financial insecurity and the reality of twenty-first century womanhood. A college student finds her voice as an artist through a tiny lie. A woman grieves her mother's death by shopping for houses she can't afford and will never live in. Against the backdrop of the 2016 election, a copywriter contends with misogyny in the workplace by using that very misogyny against her incompetent male boss. Nostalgic for the women they were or might have been—or still might yet become—their stories illuminate the moments where everything changes—even when what changes is how we must see our futures.

About Some of The Times:

Those who are familiar with Gina Myers's previous work will be pleased to see Some of the Times build from the same base of social consciousness while also pushing in new directions. Myers captures what it feels like to live in this era of late capitalism in a way that few other poets do. This is a book for those who suffer and endure and laugh about the suffering later.

Sales of Some of the Times support the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project in Philadelphia and the First Ward Community Center’s LACER (Literacy Arts Cultural Enrichment Recreation) program in Saginaw, Michigan.

About the authors:

Sara Schaff is the author of two story collections, The Invention of Love (Split/Lip Press 2020) and Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books 2016), a 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, The Yale Review Online, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

Gina Myers's newest book, Some of the Times, was published by Barrelhouse in October 2020. She is the author of two other full-length poetry collections, A Model Year (2009) and Hold It Down (2013), as well as several chapbooks. In addition to poetry, she has published essays, reviews, and articles for a variety of publications, including Hyperallergic, Frontier Psychiatrist, Fanzine, The Rumpus, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Originally from Saginaw, MI, she now lives in Philadelphia, PA, where she co-edits the tiny with Emma Brown Sanders.

Nicole Lourette received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University in 2015. Originally from Rochester, NY, she now resides in Pittsburgh, PA where she serves as an editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. Her work has been featured in IDK Magazine, Vagabond City, The Paragon Journal, and elsewhere. You can find her doom-scrolling on Twitter @nlourette where she frequently expresses her disdain for most things.