Rachel Beanland

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

A Novel

"Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to Americas Playground and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest. Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control. When tragedy strikes, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truthat least until Fannies baby is bornand pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies."--

Florence Adler Swims Forever

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Ralph Ellison

A black man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility

Invisible Man

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. "Contexts" includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskell's 1850 short story "Lizzie Leigh," which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkes's essay on Victorian working women. "Criticism" collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian's 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schor's recent study of North and South in the context of discourse analysis. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

North and South

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#hardcover #humor #cats #fiction #nonfiction #meow #comedy #poetry 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A collection of humorous poems delves into the cat psyche, covering such topics as separation anxiety, scratching at closed doors, and trips to the veterinarian.

I Could Pee on This: and Other Poems by Cats (Gifts for Cat Lovers, Funny Cat Books for Cat Lovers)

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"A delightful novel...impossible to resist."—Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times Book Review Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

So Far from God

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Award-winning author of "Under the Feet of Jesus," Helena Mari a Viramontes offers a profoundly gritty portrait of everyday life in L.A. in this lyrically muscular, artfully crafted novel. In the barrio of East Los Angeles, a group of unbreakable young women struggle to find their way through the turbulent urban landscape of the 1960s. Androgynous Turtle is a homeless gang member. Ana devotes herself to a mentally ill brother. Ermila is a teenager poised between childhood and politicalconsciousness. And Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, finds hope in faith. In prose that is potent and street tough, Viramontes has choreographed a tragic dance of death and rebirth.Julia Alvarez has called Viramontes "one of the important multicultural voices of American literature." "Their Dogs Came with Them" further proves the depth and talent of this essential author. Helena Mari a Viramontes is the acclaimed author of "The Moths and Other Stories" and "Under the Feet of Jesus," a novel; and the coeditor, with Mari a Herrera-Sobek, of two collections: "Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and Film" and "Chicana Creativity and Criticism," She is the recipient of the 2006 Luis Leal Award and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and adopted for classroom use and university study. Viramontes lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a professor in the Department of English at Cornell University.

Their Dogs Came with Them

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#paperback #fiction #swedish #philosophical #philosophyfiction

"I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up his head from the depths of their souls."

Pär Lagerkvist's richly philosophical novel The Dwarf is an exploration of individual and social identity. The novel, set in a time when Italian towns feuded over the outcome of the last feud, centers on a social outcast, the court dwarf PIccoline. From his special vantage point Piccoline comments on the court's prurience and on political intrigue as the town is gripped by a siege. Gradually, Piccoline is drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict, and he inspires fear and hate around him as he grows to represent the fascination of the masses with violence.

The Dwarf

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David Copperfield

The Portrait of a Lady

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.

When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.”

Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym.

Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of.

Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force.

A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.

Until I Find You

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

A major new translation of one of the most enduring works of literature, from the award- winning, bestselling co-translator of Anna Karenina-with a spectacular, specially illustrated cover The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas's historical novels and one of the most popular adventure stories ever written. Now in a bracing new translation, this swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d'Artagnan, a brash young man from the countryside who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to become a musketeer and guard to King Louis XIII. Before long he finds treachery and court intrigue-and also three boon companions: the daring swordsmen Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Together they strive heroically to defend the honor of their queen against the powerful Cardinal Richelieu and the seductive spy Milady. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Three Musketeers

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“The Bonesetter’s Daughter dramatically chronicles the tortured, devoted relationship between LuLing Young and her daughter Ruth. . . . A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery.”
–Los Angeles Times

“TAN AT HER BEST . . . Rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down–by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“AMY TAN [HAS] DONE IT AGAIN. . . . The Bonesetter’s Daughter tells a compelling tale of family relationships; it layers and stirs themes of secrets, ambiguous meanings, cultural complexity and self-identity; and it resonates with metaphor and symbol.”
–The Denver Post


The Bonesetter's Daughter

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"City of God is an unsparing account of devastation and empowerment in the age of AIDS. From the body's first mysterious eroticism to its final humiliation and pain, Gil Cuadros gives voice to both the beauty and sorrow of our common fate. His writing cuts like a double-edged sword--at times artful and sharp, at times unfiltered and raw. This is an awesome and haunting book."--David Trinidad

"The sensual, the expressive, the daring, the transformed become the matryrs of every era, every family. Their memoirs, heroics are our most devastating works of art. Gil Cuadros's story 'Unprotected' is a classic of AIDS fiction and deserves a place of honor in the mosaic of American writing."--Sarah Schulman

"In a voice poised between plainspokenness and urgency, Gil Cuadros writes about the remnants of love in a devastated world. The poems and stories in City of God are as dire as they are beautiful, and sharp as a blow to the body."--Bernard Cooper

"I accuse Gil Cuadros of literary seduction in the nth degree ... He makes me read on when I want to cry ... I do not want to look at his words, and yet I cannot take my eyes away. His images sooth, burn, inspire. I accuse Gil Cuadros of language abuse--his stroke of silk, his pen a bludgeon. I accuse him of heart-bashing."--Wanda Coleman

City of God

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Stories

Luis Negron's debut collection reveals the intimate world of a small community in Puerto Rico joined together by its transgressive sexuality. The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

Mundo Cruel

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#paperback #historicalfiction #fiction #losangeles #latinx #latino #latina


The further adventures of "Dr. Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" -- the Chicanos of East Los Angeles.

Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.

In this exhilarating sequel to The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta takes us behind the front lines of the militant Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, a movement he served both in the courtroom and on the barricades. Here are the brazen games of "chicken" Acosta played against the Anglo legal establishment; battles fought with bombs as well as writs; and a reluctant hero who faces danger not only from the police but from the vatos locos he champions. What emerges is at once an important political document of a genuine popular uprising and a revealing, hilarious, and moving personal saga.

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

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#paperback #fiction #lgbt #queer #transgender #contemporary


"Supremely humane.... Kay leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love." --The New York Times Book Review

In her starkly beautiful and wholly unexpected tale, Jackie Kay delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind and offers a triumphant tale of loving deception and lasting devotion.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret, one that enrages his adopted son, Colman, leading him to collude with a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.

Trumpet

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#paperback #fiction #classics #historicalfiction #war #ww2 #britishliterature #irishliterature

In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.

Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay. But for her, the sense of impending catastrophe becomes acutely personal when she discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling secrets to the enemy, and that the man who is following him wants Stella herself as the price of his silence. Caught between these two men, not sure whom to believe, Stella finds her world crumbling as she learns how little we can truly know of those around us.

The Heat of the Day

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#paperback #fiction #education #teaching #realisticfiction #backlistbooks

A debut novel told with humor, intelligence, and heart, a “funny but insightful look at teachers in the workplace…reminiscent of the TV show The Office but set in an urban high school” (The Washington Post), perfect for fans of Tom Perrotta and Laurie Gelman. Roxanna Elden’s “laugh-out-loud funny satire” (Forbes) is a brilliantly entertaining and moving look at our education system. Each new school year brings familiar challenges to Brae Hill Valley, a struggling high school in one the biggest cities in Texas. But the teachers also face plenty of personal challenges and this year, they may finally spill over into the classroom. English teacher Lena Wright, a spoken-word poet, can never seem to truly connect with her students. Hernan D. Hernandez is confident in front of his biology classes, but tongue-tied around the woman he most wants to impress. Down the hall, math teacher Maybelline Galang focuses on the numbers as she struggles to parent her daughter, while Coach Ray hustles his troubled football team toward another winning season. Recording it all is idealistic second-year history teacher Kaytee Mahoney, whose anonymous blog gains new readers by the day as it drifts ever further from her in-class reality. And this year, a new superintendent is determined to leave his own mark on the school—even if that means shutting the whole place down.

Browse by categories

Rachel Beanland

Florence Adler Swims Forever

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man

Elizabeth Gaskell; Alan Shelston

North and South

Francesco Marciuliano

I Could Pee on This: and Other Poems by Cats (Gifts for Cat Lovers, Funny Cat Books for Cat Lovers)

Ana Castillo

So Far from God

Helena María Viramontes

Their Dogs Came with Them

Pär Lagerkvist; Alexandra Dick (Translator)

The Dwarf

Charles Dickens

David Copperfield

Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

John Irving

Until I Find You

Alexandre Dumas; Richard Pevear (Translator, Introduction by); Tom Gauld (Illustrator)

The Three Musketeers

Amy Tan

The Bonesetter's Daughter

Gil Cuadros

City of God

Luis Negron; Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator)

Mundo Cruel

Oscar Zeta Acosta

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Jackie Kay

Trumpet

Elizabeth Bowen

The Heat of the Day

Roxanna Elden

Adequate Yearly Progress

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