Zadie Smith

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

Stories

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal! A dazzling collection of short fiction Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us. Nothing is off limits, and everything—when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze—feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.

Grand Union

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Vivian Gornick

Approaching Eye Level

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020.

One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life

I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading--and re-reading--as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette's The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras's The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen's prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, "a writer whose work has often made me love life more." After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing's Particularly Cats.

Guided by Gornick's trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature's power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who "still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L."

Unfinished Business

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Joseph LeDoux

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety

"[Anxious] helps to explain and prevent the kinds of debilitating anxieties all of us face in this increasingly stressful world." --Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain On Music

A comprehensive and accessible exploration of anxiety, from a leading neuroscientist and the author of Synaptic Self

Collectively, anxiety disorders are our most prevalent psychiatric problem, affecting about forty million adults in the United States. In Anxious, Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of these disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy.

LeDoux's groundbreaking premise is that we've been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way. These are not innate states waiting to be unleashed from the brain, but experiences that we assemble cognitively. Treatment of these problems must address both their conscious manifestations and underlying non-conscious processes. While knowledge about how the brain works will help us discover new drugs, LeDoux argues that the greatest breakthroughs may come from using brain research to help reshape psychotherapy.

A major work on our most pressing mental health issue, Anxious explains the science behind fear and anxiety disorders.

Anxious

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Lorrie Moore

A Novel

"Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore." —Harper's Magazine Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (Caryn James; The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . . With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

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Patrick Modiano

Mark Polizzotti

Patrick Modiano explores the boundaries of recollection in his tenth book published by Yale University Press

Invisible Ink

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Joseph Brodsky

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Selected Essays

This collection of essays thrusts Joseph Brodsky—previously known more for his poetry and translations—into the forefront of the “Third Wave” of Russian émigré writers. Originally published the year before Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Less Than One includes intimate literary essays and autobiographical pieces that evoke the daily discomfort of living under tyranny. His insights into the works of Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov, as well as the non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant; Seamus Heaney said of Brodsky’s treatment of one of Auden's most famous poems, “There will be no greater paean to poetry as the breath and finer spirit of all human knowledge than Brodsky’s line-by-line commentary on ‘September 1, 1939.’” Less than One, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, was Brodsky’s first published work of prose, and “if there’s an essential essay collection . . . it’s this one” (The Guardian). This edition, reissued to mark Brodsky’s eightieth birthday, allows the reader to delve into the Nobel laureate’s mastery of language, through both his analysis of great works and his own brand of descriptive dissent, at a pivotal point in his career.

Less Than One

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Alexander Mackendrick

Martin Scorsese

Art, Music, Drama/Theater

A masterclass in film-making from the acclaimed director of Whisky Galore and The Ladykillers

On Film-Making

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Antonio Damasio

Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

A new theory of consciousness and the construction of identity focuses on the body's reaction to its world, postulating that a complex relationship between body, emotion, and mind is required to configure the self. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

The Feeling of What Happens

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J. M. Coetzee

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

This brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Disgrace" and "Diary of a Bad Year" allows Coetzee to imagine his own life, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being.

Summertime

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Teju Cole

A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year —Time and NPR NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul. “[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original.”—The New Yorker “A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic “Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—The Seattle Times “A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation.”—The Economist

Open City

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W. G. Sebald

Michael Hulse

A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia whose sights and sounds conjure up images of Britain's imperial past. They range from the slave trade to the Battle of Britain. By the author of The Emigrants.

The Rings of Saturn

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Linda Nochlin

Catherine Grant

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later. Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women artists” on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art. With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After.” Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, “Thirty Years After” is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

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Marilynne Robinson

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers--a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

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Joyce Carol Oates

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys

"Its power of evocation is remarkable." --The New Yorker 

In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her--something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have.

However, as The Senator's car whips around the island's roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America's foremost storytellers.

Black Water

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Umberto Eco

William Weaver

Playful parodies by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Here, Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art in criticism.

Misreadings

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Roland Barthes

Richard Howard

Adam Phillips

First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work—a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

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Jez Butterworth

"An instant modern classic" - Daily Telegraph

"One of the most exciting new plays in ages" - New York Times

"Jez Butterowrth's gorgeous, expansive new play keeps coming at its audience in unpredictable gusts, rolling from comic to furious, from winsome to bawdy" - Observer

A Comic, contemporary vision of rural life in England's green and pleasant land.

On the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron is a wanted man. Local officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his son wants his full attention, and his motley crew of friends wants his ample supply of booze...

After its 2009 premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, Jerusalem won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 2009 and transferred to the West End in 2010. It opened on Broadway in April 2011 at the Music Box Theatre, with Mark Rylance reprising his award-winning performance as Byron.

Jez Butterworth is the author of The River, Mojo, The Night Heron, The Winterling, Parlour Song and Jerusalem. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Somerset, England.


Jerusalem

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Colson Whitehead

In a series of personal reminiscences, anecdotes, lyrical meditations, and vignettes, the award-winning author of The Intuitionist captures the complex inner and outer landscapes of the city of New York in an intimate portrait of life in the city. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

The Colossus of New York

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Mohamed Choukri

Jonas Elbousty

Roger Allen

The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri

The complete short stories of acclaimed Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri, translated into English and collected in one volume for the first time A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023 "Choukri is one of Morocco's most revered figures. . . . To have his words translated is to have the privilege to view the inner world of his intellect and the obscured landscapes of Tangier."--Noshin Bokth, The New Arab Mohamed Choukri's vivid stories invite the reader to wander the streets of Tangier, the ancient coastal crossroads between Europe and Africa, and to meet its denizens at markets, beaches, cafés, and brothels. Choukri's Tangier is a place where newborns are for sale, swindlers hawk the Prophet's shoes, and boys collect trash to sell for food. Choukri says that "writing is a protest, not a parade." And in these thirty-one stories he privileges the voices of those ignored by society: the abused, the abandoned, the addicted. The tales are at once vibrant local vignettes and profound reflections on the lives, sufferings, and hopes of Choukri's fellow Tangerines.

Tales of Tangier

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Yaa Gyasi

"A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice"--

Transcendent Kingdom

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Thomas Goltz

A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia fell prey to a series of power struggles. This work provides details about the struggles of this region of the former Soviet Union. Featuring portraits of individuals in high places and low, it traces the story from 1992 through the "Rose Revolution.

Georgia Diary

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Deesha Philyaw

DrunkPotato

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions. There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher's wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta's "same time next year" arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other. With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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Browse by categories

Zadie Smith

Grand Union

Vivian Gornick

Approaching Eye Level

Vivian Gornick

Unfinished Business

Joseph LeDoux

Anxious

Lorrie Moore

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Patrick Modiano; Mark Polizzotti

Invisible Ink

Joseph Brodsky

Less Than One

Alexander Mackendrick; Martin Scorsese

On Film-Making

Antonio Damasio

The Feeling of What Happens

J. M. Coetzee

Summertime

Teju Cole

Open City

W. G. Sebald; Michael Hulse

The Rings of Saturn

Linda Nochlin; Catherine Grant

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

Joyce Carol Oates

Black Water

Umberto Eco; William Weaver

Misreadings

Zadie Smith

Grand Union

Roland Barthes; Richard Howard; Adam Phillips

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Jez Butterworth

Jerusalem

Colson Whitehead

The Colossus of New York

Mohamed Choukri; Jonas Elbousty; Roger Allen

Tales of Tangier

Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom

Thomas Goltz

Georgia Diary

Deesha Philyaw

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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