Albert Camus

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Washington

And Other Essays

Essays deal with nihilism and the problem of suicide

The Myth of Sisyphus

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An ordinary man is unwittingly caught up in a senseless murder in Algeria

The Stranger

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Christopher Byron

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Martha Stewart has generated an enormous following by establishing herself as the leading authority for all things domestic and in the process created a multimillion-dollar enterprise and a personal net worth of nearly $2 billion. As one of the most successful self-made female business owners in American history, Martha Stewart is a topic of interest for fans, business professionals and would-be entrepreneurs alike.
Martha Inc. tells the compelling story of how this complex woman created an empire on domesticity and examines her business inside and out. Through an engaging narrative by popular columnist Christopher Byron, this book chronicles how the business was built, what it took to take it public, and the personal and professional transformation Martha has undergone to make it all work. To get a true portrait of the woman whose work ethic is her personal life, Byron delves into the underreported facets of Martha's past, such as the effects her challenging childhood and years on Wall Street have had on her uncompromising business acumen. From Martha Stewart Living magazine and marthastewart.com to a K-Mart line of houseware products, a line of house paints, and a television show, this book details how a former caterer from Connecticut has created a media and merchandising empire, pulling off what large media corporations with vast resources struggle to accomplish.
Martha Stewart has sold America on good taste and now readers can learn exactly how she did it and what drives her to keep conquering new vistas. A corporate biography as well as a success story worthy of Horatio Alger, Martha Inc. also delves into how a cult of personality is created and how Martha Stewart capitalized on the zeitgeist that characterized the last half of the twentieth century. This book is a must read for anyone who has been touched by Martha's marketing savvy or who dreams of making it big.

Martha Inc.

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Michael Walker

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood

In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin'" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "It's Too Late," selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boom's leading musical lights--including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few--who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.

Laurel Canyon

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Zadie Smith

Six Essays

“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 “Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

Intimations

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J. D. Salinger

"Perhaps the best book by the foremost stylist of his generation" (New York Times), J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey collects two works of fiction about the Glass family originally published in The New Yorker.


"Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."


A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It is a gleaming example of the wit, precision, and poignancy that have made J. D. Salinger one of America's most beloved writers.



Franny and Zooey

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Leo Tolstoy

The legendary author’s passionate and iconoclastic writings – on issues of faith, immortality, freedom, violence, and morality--reflect his intellectual search for truth and a religion firmly grounded in reality. However, despite his success with works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, at age 51, looked back on his life and considered himself a failure. A Confession provides valuable insight into Tolstoy’s thoughts and ideas as his later philosophical ideas began to evolve and change.

A Confession

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Oscar. Wilde

Features the tale of a man who has been sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. This title expresses the author's belief that humanity is made up only of offenders, each of us deserving a greater charity for the severity of our crimes.

Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems

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Douglas Preston

A True Story

The #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller! A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

The Lost City of the Monkey God

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Thomas Pynchon

A Novel

Thomas Pynchon's classic post-modern satire, which tells the wonderfully unusual story of Oedipa Maas, first published in 1965. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Mass is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

The Crying of Lot 49

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Ma Jian

Flora Drew

Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

China Dream

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Holly Whitaker

The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The founder of the first female-focused recovery program offers a groundbreaking look at alcohol and a radical new path to sobriety. “You don’t know how much you need this book, or maybe you do. Either way, it will save your life.”—Melissa Hartwig Urban, Whole30 co-founder and CEO We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but. When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular. What’s more, she could not ignore the ways that alcohol companies were targeting women, just as the tobacco industry had successfully done generations before. Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people—who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives. When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it. Written in a relatable voice that is honest and witty, Quit Like a Woman is at once a groundbreaking look at drinking culture and a road map to cutting out alcohol in order to live our best lives without the crutch of intoxication. You will never look at drinking the same way again.

Quit Like a Woman

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Penelope Mortimer

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion--"her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel" (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)

Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is "paralysed by triviality," measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties--routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself.

First published in 1958, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its "feminine rage" (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man's world.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

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Kay Dick

Lucy Scholes

A dark, dystopian portrait of artists struggling to resist violent suppression—“queer, English, a masterpiece.” (Hilton Als) Set amid the rolling hills and the sandy shingle beaches of coastal Sussex, this disquieting novel depicts an England in which bland conformity is the terrifying order of the day. Violent gangs roam the country destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out. Winner of the 1977 South-East Arts Literature Prize, Kay Dick’s They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual.

They

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Suyin Han

The raw account of a life-altering affair in wartime London--"Han Suyin's outstanding achievement . . . her finest novel." (Alison Hennegan)

As a college student in London during the bitterly cold winter of 1944, Red falls in love with her married classmate Mara. Their affair unleashes a physical passion, a jealousy, and a sense of self-doubt that sweep all her previous experiences aside and will leave her changed forever. Set against the rubble of the bombed city, in a time of gray austerity and deprivation, Winter Love recalls a life at its most vivid. "Probably the best thing she has ever written" (Daily Telegraph), it is also Han Suyin's most unexpected, tender, and stirring work.

Winter Love

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Maxine Clair

Too long unavailable, this luminous classic of small-town life in the segregated 1950s has "magic dust sprinkled over each and every page" (Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review). Irene Wilson knows that a “no-name invisible something” has settled over her parents’ marriage and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In the town of Rattlebone, a small Black neighborhood of Kansas City, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair. As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of neighbors whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own. Capturing an entire world through the eyes of its unforgettable heroine, Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction.

Rattlebone

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Christopher Andersen

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Final Year of Jack with Jackie

An account of Jack and Jackie Kennedy's final year together reveals details of their complex marriage, including rumored infidelities, the president's hidden medical problems, and the tragic death of their infant son.

These Few Precious Days

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Chuck Palahniuk

The Oral Biography of Buster Casey

Based on the reminiscences of his three friends following Casey's spectacular death, a fictional oral biography of Buster "Rant" Casey chronicles the violent world of a small-town rebel who heads for the big city to become the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, as well as rumors that his saliva infected hundreds with a plague of rabies. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

Rant

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Julia Child

Alex Prud'homme

The legendary food expert describes her years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence and her journey from a young woman who could not cook or speak any French to the publication of her cookbooks and becoming "The French Chef."

My Life in France

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Sheilah Graham

Wendy W. Fairey

The Story of How F. Scott Fitzgerald Educated the Woman He Loved

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved. In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Sheilah Graham met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a party in Hollywood. Graham, a British-born journalist, broke off her engagement, and until Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack in her apartment in 1940, the two writers lived the fervid, sometimes violent affair that is memorialized here with unprecedented intimacy. When they met, Fitzgerald’s fame had waned. He battled crippling alcoholism while writing screenplays to support his daughter and institutionalized wife. Graham’s star, however, was rising, to the point where she became Hollywood’s highest-paid, best-read gossip columnist. But if Fitzgerald had lived out his “crack-up” in public, Graham kept her demons secret—such as that she believed herself to be “a fascinating fake who pulled the wool over Hollywood’s eyes.’’ Most poignantly, she keenly felt her lack of education, and Fitzgerald rose to the occasion. He became her passionate tutor, guiding her through a curriculum of his own design: a college of one. Graham loved him the more for it, writing the book as a tribute. As she explained, “An unusual man’s ideas on what constituted an education had to be preserved. It is a new chapter to add to what is already known about an author who has been microscopically investigated in all the other areas of his life.”

College of One

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Margaret Atwood

The Sequel to the Handmaid's Tale

In this electrifying sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the question that has tantalised readers for decades: What happened to Offred?

The Testaments

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Leonard Cohen

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings

“There are very, very few people who occupy the ground that Leonard Cohen walks on.” —BONO The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist. A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work. “This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.” Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”

The Flame

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Nick Wise

From Napa to Los Olivos in Search of Great Wine

Following the success of their first book, authors Nick Wise and Linda Sunshine, focus on the wines and winemakers of California in this latest edition. They go behind the tasting rooms to show how these spectacular wines came into being and to interview the men and women who craft them. The authors revisit Robert Kamen, BR Cohn, Francis Ford Coppola, Fess Parker, Randy Lewis, Charlie Palmer, Raymond Burr, Lillian Disney, and Mario Andretti to update their stories and taste their new vintages. They add more celebrities including Kurt Russell, musician Carlos Santana, Mike Ditka, basketball star Yao Ming, golfers Luke Donald and Jack Nicklaus, writer Molly Chappellet and Nigel Newton, publisher of Harry Potter. For fans of wine, travel, California, and the rich and famous, here are stories about the love of wine, the joy of creating something amazing from the land and the respect for the grape that is thousands of years old but uniquely American.

California Celebrity Vineyards

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Malte Herwig

Dust cover shows some wear but otherwise in new condition

Françoise Gilot on Her Life with and Without Picasso

Françoise Gilot left Picasso after a ten-year relationship, the only woman to escape his intense attentions unscathed. Malte Herwig dropped by her ateliers in Paris and New York to chat with her about life, love, and art. She shared observations, her sharp sense of humor, and over ninety years of experience, much of it in the company of men who changed the world: Picasso, Matisse, and her second husband, the famous virologist Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine.

Browse by categories

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus

The Stranger

Christopher Byron

Martha Inc.

Michael Walker

Laurel Canyon

Zadie Smith

Intimations

J. D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey

Leo Tolstoy

A Confession

Oscar. Wilde

Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems

Douglas Preston

The Lost City of the Monkey God

Thomas Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49

Ma Jian; Flora Drew

China Dream

Holly Whitaker

Quit Like a Woman

Penelope Mortimer

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

Kay Dick; Lucy Scholes

They

Suyin Han

Winter Love

Maxine Clair

Rattlebone

Christopher Andersen

These Few Precious Days

Chuck Palahniuk

Rant

Julia Child; Alex Prud'homme

My Life in France

Sheilah Graham; Wendy W. Fairey

College of One

Margaret Atwood

The Testaments

Leonard Cohen

The Flame

Nick Wise

California Celebrity Vineyards

Malte Herwig

The Woman Who Says No

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