Robert Whitaker

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Oregon

Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation's children. What is going on? Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix l "chemical imbalances" in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled-and dismayed-to discover what was reported in the scientific journals. Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness? This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit? By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies-all of which point to the same startling conclusion-been kept from the public? In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

Anatomy of an Epidemic

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James Wesley Rawles

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Surviving the Coming Collapse

A tale by the creator of SurvivalBlog.com imagines a world in which a cataclysmic financial crisis prompts a total collapse of American society and forces people to fend for themselves, in a story that follows a group of protagonists who make their way to a shared secure ranch in northern Idaho, where they struggle to survive against violent looting and natural hazards. Original.

Patriots

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John Phillips

An Expository Commentary

"John Phillips writes with enthusiasm and clarity, . . . cutting through the confusion and heretical dangers associated with Bible interpretation." —Moody Magazine

Exploring the Love Song of Solomon

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Tove Ditlevsen

Tiina Nunnally

Michael Favala Goldman

Childhood; Youth; Dependency

Called "a masterpiece" by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family, and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences, but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with "Tove fever" gripping readers.

The Copenhagen Trilogy

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Stephen King

In four previously unpublished short works, a man explores his dark nature, a writer confronts a stranger, a cancer patient makes a deal with the devil, and a woman makes a horrifying discovery about her husband.

Full Dark, No Stars

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An omnibus anthology containing the first three novels set in the magical world of Mithgar features The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Trilogy The Dark Tide Shadows of Doom The Darkest Day

The Iron Tower 

True Detectives

Alan Vermilye

John Bunyan

A Readable Modern-Day Version of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

The most readable version of Pilgrim's Progress available!Reading The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan can be a bit challenging even for the best of readers. Not so with this new, easy-to-read version that translates the original archaic language into simple conversational English allowing readers of all ages to easily navigate the most popular Christian allegory of all time.The story chronicles the epic adventure of a man named Christian who leaves his home in the City of Destruction and begins a life-long quest to the Celestial City. Set against the backdrop of a hazardous journey, this powerful drama unfolds as Christian's adventures lead him into fascinating lands and encounters with interesting people who either help or hinder his progress along a narrow way. With a gallery of memorable characters and visits to colorful places, Bunyan's allegorical narrative describes one man's extraordinary adventure on his journey to faith.Without losing any faithfulness to the original text, now you can read Bunyan's timeless classic and reimagine this famous quest that has challenged and encouraged believers for centuries.The book includes the original Bible references and a Bible study guide is available separately for individual and small group use.

The Pilgrim's Progress

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James Salter

This collection gathers Salter’s thoughts on writing and profiles of important writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe that first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People, Condé Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, among other publications.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles

"In Don’t Save Anything . . . Kay Eldredge Salter assembles her late husband’s bread–and–butter journalism—yet how delicious good bread and butter can be! . . . As always, Salter emphasizes simple, vivifying details." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post One of the greatest writers of American sentences in our literary history, James Salter’s acute and glimmering portrayals of characters are built with a restrained and poetic style. The author of several memorable works of fiction—including Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award—he is also celebrated for his memoir Burning the Days and many nonfiction essays. In her preface, Kay Eldredge Salter writes, “Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s nonfiction—articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it . . . One of the great pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer’s feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That’s what you’ll find here.” This collection gathers Salter’s thoughts on writing and profiles of important writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe that first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People, Condé Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, among other publications.

Don't Save Anything

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Don DeLillo

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Winner of the National Book Award – an “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (New York Times) family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, from the author of The Silence Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread." Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an "airborne toxic event" unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings--pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.

White Noise

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Edith Wharton

Regina Barreca

Judith P. Saunders

Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman, The Age of Innocence is a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny.

In the polished works of Edith Wharton, Old New York is a society at once infinitely sophisticated and ruthlessly primitive, in which adherence to ritual and loyalty to clan surpass all other values-and transgression is always punished.

The Age of Innocence is Wharton's 1920 novel of love menaced by convention, played out against a gorgeously arrayed backdrop of opera houses, lavish dinner parties, country homes, and luxurious deathbeds. The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice- domesticity with his docile and lovely fiancee, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. What Newland does not suspect-but will learn-is that the women also hold cards in this game...

The Age of Innocence

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Dave Eggers

An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence. With echoes of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene, this timeless novel questions whether we can ever understand another nation’s war, and what role we have in forging anyone’s peace. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Novel

From the bestselling author of The Monk of Mokha and The Circle comes a taut, suspenseful story of two foreigners' role in a nation's fragile peace.

An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence. With echoes of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene, this timeless novel questions whether we can ever understand another nation's war, and what role we have in forging anyone's peace.

The Parade

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Karen Rauch Carter

How to Use Feng Shui to Get Love, Money, Respect and Happiness

Applying the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui to modern life, the author reveals how carefully arranging items in the home can lead to remarkable results in love, career, and personal happiness. Original.

Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The author of The Caged Virgin recounts the story of her life, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia and escape from a forced marriage to her efforts to promote women's rights while surviving numerous threats to her safety. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

Infidel

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Out of print for several decades, here is Edith Wharton's superb satirical novel of the Jazz Age, a critically praised bestseller when it was first published in 1927.

Sex, drugs, work, money, infatuation with the occult and spiritual healing--these are the remarkably modern themes that animate Twilight Sleep.

The extended family of Mrs. Manford is determined to escape the pain, boredom, and emptiness of life through whatever form of "twilight sleep" they can devise or procure.

Though the characters and their actions may seem more in keeping with today's society, this is still a classic Wharton tale of the upper crust and its undoing--wittily, masterfully told.

Twilight Sleep

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Emily St. John Mandel

A National Book Award Finalist A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band's existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

Station Eleven

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Chuck Klosterman

A Book

In The Nineties, cult author Chuck Klosterman makes a home in every element of 90s culture: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written could the sentence, 'The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany' make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis that's equal parts smart and delightful.

The Nineties

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David Foster Wallace

Essays

Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.

Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.

Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.

Both Flesh and Not

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Kiese Laymon

An American Memoir

*Named a Best Book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* *WINNER of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and FINALIST for the Kirkus Prize * In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.

Heavy

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Slavoj Zizek

The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

Slavoj Žižek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the “Elvis of cultural theory”, and today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema and Žižek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life’s work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged, including new introductions from Žižek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Žižek’s thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology: A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject. In this book Slavoj Žižek unearths a subversive core to this elusive specter, and finds within it the indispensable philosophical point of reference for any genuinely emancipatory project.

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