Ian Rankin + Ex-Arab Strap Aidan Moffat "Upstairs at the Square" April 12, 2007

NEW YORK, NY (March 14) – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced the next event in its new series, “Upstairs at the Square,” held at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan (33 East 17th Street at Union Square). On Thursday, April 12, at 7pm, singer-songwriter Aidan Moffat and his band, The Best-ofs, and Ian Rankin, whose new novel is The Naming of the Dead (Little, Brown & Company), discuss and perform their work. Journalist Katherine Lanpher hosts the program, presented in association with the Scottish Book Trust as part of the Isle of Jura Festival of Scottish Writing. Admission is free, and no tickets are required. Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

In his decade of recording as half of the seminal Scottish indie band, Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat made music best described as “an elegiac lament for loves won and lost.” Moffat has also made three albums as the solo artist L. Pierre, been a part of Scottish supergroup, The Reindeer Section, recorded his first spoken-word style album of poetry, I Can Hear Your Heart, and formed a new band, Aidan Moffat & The Best-Ofs, performing for the first time at Upstairs at the Square (only scheduled appearance in 2007). The band, currently at work on an album, can be heard on Ballads of the Book, a new compilation featuring “The Sixth Stone,” with lyrics by Ian Rankin.

Ian Rankin is the United Kingdom’s number-one bestselling crime author, famous for the acclaimed Inspector Rebus series, which has topped the Sunday Times bestseller lists and been adapted into a major TV series. On his origins as a writer, Rankin writes, “I grew up in a small coal-mining town in central Scotland.… It was mind-boggling to me that (at the age of 11 or 12) I could not gain access to a movie theatre to see such classics as The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs, yet no one stopped me from borrowing these titles from my library. Books seemed to have about them a whiff of the illicit and the dangerous. That was all the encouragement I needed.”

Katherine Lanpher is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist. Springboard Press recently published her first book, Leap Days: Chronicle of a Midlife Move.

The next “Upstairs on the Square” will take place on Thursday, May 10, at 7PM, and features French author Anna Gavalda (Hunting and Gathering) and musician Rosie Thomas (These Friends of Mine).

Audio downloads of all eight previous events are available on Barnes & Noble.com (bn.com/upstairs).

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 793 bookstores in 50 states. For the fifth year in a row, the company is the nation’s top retail brand for quality, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites and the number one online bookseller for quality among e-commerce companies, according to the latest EquiTrend survey.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate Web site: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

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Official Website: http://www.bn.com/upstairs