Yiyun Li

First Edition, 1st printing, mint condition in Mylar jacket 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A collection by the author of The Vagrants brings to life the rich levels of Chinese-American and Chinese experience in stories like "Prison," in which a Chinese-American woman travels to rural China to choose a surrogate mother for her child.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

a46d8d65-9f07-4540-a87c-d3f0de90e61d-1

Anne Enright

A Novel

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

The Wren, the Wren

d7b8292c-80bc-4efb-9b0e-69b4901244ca-1

Audrey Schulman

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Based on the true story of an infamous 1960s experiment, The Dolphin House is a meditation on what makes us truly human. 1965: outside a small house on the coast of St. Thomas, four dolphins are circling in a pool. This is where Cora, newly arrived on the island, finds them by accident, as though they've been waiting for her. She won't discover the motives of the scientists working in the house until later, but by then her apparent connection with the animals--aided by her own deafness--has given her every reason to stay. The house is a research facility led by the obsessive Dr. Blum, a man aiming to teach the dolphins' human language. To stave off some of Blum's more insidious experimentations, Cora suggests they build a flooded apartment where she can live and speak with the youngest dolphin around the clock. The radical research forges ahead, but Blum has other ideas and Cora's instincts clash with the male-dominated world of science in the sixties. As a terrible scandal threatens to engulf the experiment, Cora's determination to save the dolphins becomes a battle to save herself.

The Dolphin House

189f610e-14a0-448f-b02a-ffc4d198c282-0

Pip Williams

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK FOR MAY '22! * "Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded."--The New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress."--Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means "slave girl," begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD

The Dictionary of Lost Words

e64713e8-6e59-4dac-9814-cca068eab7ce-1

Lan Samantha Chang

An acclaimed storyteller returns with "a gorgeous and gripping literary mystery" that explores "family, betrayal, passion, race, culture and the American Dream" (Jean Kwok). The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last. Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead--presumed murdered--and his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant's reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens--and the family dog meets an unexpected fate--Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father's outsized appetites and their own future survival. Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.

The Family Chao

3e218bfb-fc1b-4245-a191-3a2c95d9df78-1

Martin MacInnes

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

In Ascension

f5f0ef2e-6b7a-4595-aa99-853a2eecb1a8-1

Sarah Winman

From the Bestselling Author of STILL LIFE

From the author of STILL LIFE, WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT and A YEAR OF MARVELLOUS WAYS This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. It begins with two boys, Ellis and Michael, who are inseparable. And the boys become men, and then Annie walks into their lives, and it changes nothing and everything. 'Packs an enormous punch' Independent 'Exquisite. I haven't been so moved and so in love with a book and its characters for a very long time' Joanna Cannon 'This book is why I read' Nina Pottell, Prima 'Ephemeral yet powerful... Every fleeting moment is worth repeating, again and again' Stylist

Tin Man

6e882dfc-17cf-40f9-904f-bc3e10e8c9e6-1

Guadalupe Nettel

Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel, treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence and originality that have won her international acclaim. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth - after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite - and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Still Born

d227ea0a-212f-4258-8670-e3fbd6b4f79b-0

Gina Frangello

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why.

Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously.

A Life in Men

e30da692-d7d1-48fa-8901-8baac3e4dde5-1

Lise Marzouk

Adriana Hunter

A Mother's Memoir

When her ten-year-old son is hospitalised at the Curie Institute in Paris for lymphoma treatment, Lise finds herself torn between two worlds, one at his bedside, and the other at home with her two younger children, struggling to maintain a sense of stability in their lives. And so she writes - of their fears and doubts, but also of their moments of tenderness and joy - and through these memories, stories, and reveries, she arrives at a deeper understanding of herself as a woman, a mother, and a writer.

d4c9d5bb-a314-4b2a-93d2-9d5cd959be76-1

Joan Silber

An engineer in Vietnam is shaken by the discovery about why his company's planes are getting lost, while a marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman sparks a terrible family fight, and a young woman in 1920s Siam experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. By the author of Ideas of Heaven.

The Size of the World

37708ac5-5fd8-4fd5-8bc3-0d5cc6d40863-1

Heather Rose

An Amazon Editors' Best Book of December 2018

"Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless." --from The Museum of Modern Love

Arky Levin has reached a dead end. Unexpectedly separated from his wife, he suddenly has the space he needs to work composing film scores--but none of the peace of mind he needs to create. As he wanders the city, guilty and restless, it's almost by chance that he stumbles upon an exhibition that will change his life. 

The installation the fictional Arky discovers--which is based on a real piece of performance art that took place in 2010--is inexplicably powerful. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art sit across a table from the performance artist Marina Abramović, for as short or long a period as they choose. Although some go in skeptical, almost all leave moved. And the participants are not the only ones to find themselves changed by this unusual experience: Arky finds himself drawn to the exhibit. He returns day after day to watch other people sit with Abramović--and as he does, he begins to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

The Museum of Modern Love

4166c9a5-9114-4f99-8d15-51c15622eba4-1

Tobias Wolff

"With the same masterful prose and emotional subtlety that distinguished his bestselling memoir This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff's first novel, Old School, explores the deceptions and betrayals that turn a boy into a writer. The protagonist is a student at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants to be a writer. But to do that he must learn to tell the truth about who he actually is. Through the agency of a school literary contest-whose winner will be recognized by the most legendary writer of his time-Wolff animates the clash between idealism and ambition, the fear of obscurity and the fear of revelation."

Old School

e5935cbb-348f-42e9-9b7f-689a83417cf3-1

Luis Alberto Urrea

Stories

A new short story collection from Luis Alberto Urrea, bestselling author of The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Devil's Highway. From one of America's preeminent literary voices comes a new story collection that proves once again why the writing of Luis Alberto Urrea has been called "wickedly good" (Kansas City Star), "cinematic and charged" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and "studded with delights" (Chicago Tribune). Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice. Suffused with wanderlust, compassion, and no small amount of rock and roll, THE WATER MUSEUM is a collection that confirms Luis Alberto Urrea as an American master.

The Water Museum

30c93748-4f77-4d27-a407-cf016ad2742c-1

Yasmina Reza

John Cullen

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis Borges Schnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.

Happy Are the Happy

6b03c07e-1712-42da-a8c2-078068d88724-1

Claire Vaye Watkins

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus 
 
Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012
Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 
A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . .

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Battleborn

b94806c4-9cef-480f-a11d-032bf6d4877e-1

Cara Hoffman

"Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack, and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive"--Amazon.com.

Running

06ede7d8-a06f-4d3a-a12c-13f37544869a-1

George Saunders

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented Named One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade • Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR • One of Time’s Ten Best Novels of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book • One of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of the Year February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end? “A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review “A masterpiece.”—Zadie Smith

Lincoln in the Bardo

68bb3c39-2abc-410c-8ba9-e00f78363d2e-1

Ibram X. Kendi

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “A vital addition to [the] curriculum on race in America . . . a gateway to the solo works of all the voices in Kendi and Blain’s impressive choir.”—The Washington Post “From journalist Hannah P. Jones on Jamestown’s first slaves to historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Sally Hemings to the seductive cadences of poets Jericho Brown and Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls weaves a tapestry of unspeakable suffering and unexpected transcendence.”—O: The Oprah Magazine The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

Four Hundred Souls

7932c971-d47d-4d07-a542-2549bead61aa-1

Rebecca Makkai

Named a must-read by the Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The L Magazine

Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers will be available in summer 2018.

Rebecca Makkai's first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.

A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father's past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction.

These transporting, deeply moving stories--some inspired by her own family history--amply demonstrate Makkai's extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form. 

"Richly imagined."
--Chicago Tribune
 
"Impressive."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
 
"Engrossing."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
"Inventive."
--W Magazine
 

Music for Wartime

c51667a5-1dfc-4698-827e-2a74b5d0473f-1

Khashayar J. Khabushani

A poetic, open-hearted debut about an Iranian American boy searching for his place in the world--"exquisite, heartbreaking, incredibly beautiful" (Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water)

K just wants to be an American boy--shooting hoops with his two older brothers and riding his Huffy with his buddies around the San Fernando Valley. But K knows there's something different about himself, a longing that draws him closer to his best friend while making him feel increasingly alienated from everyone around him. At home, K must navigate another confusing identity: that of the faithful son of Iranian immigrants struggling to survive in the United States. To make his mother proud, he tries to do well in school and help around the apartment, uncertain of whether he can live up to her ideal of a son. On Friday nights, K dutifully attends prayers at the local mosque with his unknowable father, whose affection and violence distort K's understanding of what it means to be a man and how to love.

A stunning, tender novel about being lost in one's family, one's country, and one's skin, I Will Greet the Sun Again stares down the brutality of being a queer kid in America and an immigrant in an unwelcoming land. Khashayar J. Khabushani transforms personal and national pain into an unforgettable work of art: an urgent and beautifully rendered exploration of youth, love, family--and becoming yourself.

I Will Greet the Sun Again

64d1e4ed-1c76-4012-af0d-a85889b33d48-1

Dinitia Smith

A Novel of George Eliot

When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of 26 years. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans - who would later be known as George Eliot - was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day - with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and the possibility of happiness even in an 'imperfect' union.

The Honeymoon

4088ac59-eb65-43c3-a072-357b7686685c-1

Jennine Capo Crucet

Notes from an Unfinished Education

From the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, essays on being an “accidental” American—an incisive look at the edges of identity for a woman of color in a society centered on whiteness In this sharp and candid collection of essays, critically acclaimed writer and first-generation American Jennine Capó Crucet explores the condition of finding herself a stranger in the country where she was born. Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family’s attempts to fit in with white American culture—beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant. In prose that is both fearless and slyly humorous, My Time Among the Whites examines the sometimes hopeful, sometimes deeply flawed ways in which many Americans have learned to adapt, exist, and—in the face of all signals saying otherwise—perhaps even thrive in a country that never imagined them here.

My Time among the Whites

7959fd7d-2dda-4150-b5de-b49693497fb3-1

Deborah Levy

A Living Autobiography

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, TIME.com, and Kirkus A Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year A USA Today Book Not to Miss A LitHub Best-Reviewed Book of the Year

Browse by categories