Souvankham Thammavongsa

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

Stories

Spare, unsentimental, and distilled to riveting essentials, these stories honor the surreal, funny, often wrenching realities of trying to build a life far from home. In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father, the only adult in the family who can read English, to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at honing in on moments like this--moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right smack up against the limits of language. The taut, visceral stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory, or shuttling between idioms, cultures, and values. A failed boxer discovers what it truly means to be a champion when he starts painting nails at his sister's salon. A young woman tries to discern the invisible but immutable social hierarchies that govern relationships at a chicken processing plant. A mother -coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting. Charging her clear, direct sentences with immense power, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living, both in the sense of work and in the sense of creating meaning and identity in precarious circumstances. Aiming its penetrating gaze at brutality and tenderness, revulsion and arousal, pain and laughter alike, How to Pronounce Knife establishes Thammavongsa as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation.

How to Pronounce Knife

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Jonathan Franzen

sticker on cover (see photo), pages are clean and new, first edition

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease.

The Corrections

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slight dings to dust jacket but book is like new — first edition

A Novel

Freedom

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Vanessa Hua

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A teenage girl living in 1960s China becomes Mao Zedong's protégée and lover--and a heroine of the Cultural Revolution--in this "grand, cinematic, and captivating novel" (Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings)
 
"Forbidden City explores questions of power, ambition, and visibility through a lens that is both clear-eyed and compassionate."--Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Vulture, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, The Millions, Book Riot

On the eve of China's Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman's opulent residence--a forbidden city unto itself--that she learns that the girls' job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman. 

Mei gradually separates herself from the other recruits to become the Chairman's confidante--and paramour. While he fends off political rivals, Mei faces down schemers from the dance troupe who will stop at nothing to take her place and the Chairman's imperious wife, who has secret plans of her own. 

When the Chairman finally gives Mei a political mission, she seizes it with fervor, but the brutality of this latest stage of the revolution makes her begin to doubt all the certainties she has held so dear. 

Forbidden City is an epic yet intimate portrayal of one of the world's most powerful and least understood leaders during this extraordinarily turbulent period in modern Chinese history. Mei's harrowing journey toward truth and disillusionment raises questions about power, manipulation, and belief, as seen through the eyes of a passionate teenage girl.

Forbidden City

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Clarissa Goenawan

Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister, Keiko's, sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago. As he comes to know the figures in Akakawa, from the enigmatic politician to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, alluring student named Rio, Ren delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed, trying to piece together what happened the night of her death. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.

Rainbirds

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Meghan Daum

And Other Subjects of Discussion

Winner of the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction

"Daum is her generation's Joan Didion." --Nylon

Nearly fifteen years after her debut collection,My Misspent Youth, captured the ambitions and anxieties of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal essay withThe Unspeakable, a masterful collection of ten new works. Her old encounters with overdrawn bank accounts and oversized ambitions in the big city have given way to a new set of challenges. The first essay, "Matricide," opens without flinching:

People who weren't there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue ofVogue.

Elsewhere, she carefully weighs the decision to have children--"I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic and inorganic"--and finds a more fulfilling path as a court-appointed advocate for foster children. In other essays, she skewers the marriage-industrial complex and recounts a harrowing near-death experience following a sudden illness. Throughout, Daum pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of contemporary American experience and considers the unspeakable thoughts many of us harbor--that we might not love our parents enough, that "life's pleasures" sometimes feel more like chores, that life's ultimate lesson may be that we often learn nothing.
But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the New Age search for the "Best Possible Experience," champions the merits of cream-of mushroom-soup casserole, and gleefully recounts a quintessential "only-in-L.A." story of playing charades at a famous person's home.
Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with humor reminiscent of Nora Ephron's, Daum dissects our culture's most dangerous illusions, blind spots, and sentimentalities while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.

The Unspeakable

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Toni Jensen

A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land

"A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author's encounters with gun violence--for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Terese Marie Mailhot. Toni Jensen grew up in the Midwest around guns: As a girl, she learned how to shoot birds with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face in the fracklands around Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen recalls the discrimination she faced in college as a Native American student from her roommate to her faculty adviser. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a classmate repeatedly wrote stories in which he killed thinly veiled versions of her. In "Women in the Fracklands," Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access pipeline protests, as well as the peril faced by women, in regions overcome by the fracking boom. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history--as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates as a Native American woman. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one's country is not the same as surviving one's country."--

Carry

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Margaret Atwood

pages are slightly yellowed but book is clean and unread

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated by ecological and scientific disasters.

Oryx and Crake

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slight damage to corner (see photo), otherwise like new 

When a natural disaster predicted by God's Gardeners leader Adam One obliterates most human life, two survivors trapped inside respective establishments that metaphorically represent paradise and hell wonder if any of their loved ones have survived, while the outside world is overcome by gene-spliced life forms. Reprint. A best-selling novel.

The Year of the Flood

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Charlotte Bronte

Weike Wang

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

From the author of Jane Eyre, a strikingly modern story of a young woman starting over—with an introduction by Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of Chemistry “Villette! Villette! Have you read it?” exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë’s final novel appeared in 1853. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” Arguably Charlotte Brontë’s most refined and deeply felt work—Virginia Woolf called it Brontë’s “finest novel”—Villette draws on its author’s own experiences as a governess, and her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. It tells the story of parentless, friendless Lucy Snowe, who flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a boarding school in the small French town of Villette. Soon Lucy’s struggle for independence is challenged by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë’s strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance. AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Villette

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Cheryl Strayed

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Collects top-selected postings on life and relationships from The Rumpus' popular "Dear Sugar" online column, sharing recommendations on everything from infidelity and grief to marital boredom and financial hardships. Original. 40,000 first printing.

Tiny Beautiful Things

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Andrew Rannells

Ayelet Waldman

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Veronica Chambers

Deborah Copaken

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Trey Ellis

Ann Hood

Howie Kahn

Mindy Hung

Terri Cheney

Ann Leary

Larry Smith

True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption

The most popular, provocative, and unforgettable essays from the New York Times "Modern Love" column--now revised and updated, featuring stories from the upcoming anthology series starring Tina Fey, Andy Garcia, Anne Hathaway, Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, and John Slattery.tery.

Modern Love, Revised and Updated

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Yotam Ottolenghi

Ixta Belfrage

Tara Wigley

spine has a little damage from shipping, but the book is new

A Cookbook

The New York Times bestselling author of Plenty joins up with the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen's Ixta Belfrage to reveal how flavor is amplified in more than 100 innovative, super-delicious plant-based recipes. Yotam Ottolenghi--the beloved chef and influencer who has captured the hearts of home cooks looking for inspiration and great-tasting vegetable cooking--is back. In Ottolenghi Flavor, Yotam collaborates with longtime colleague Ixta Belfrage to identify the principles behind his stylish, innovative brand of cooking with a new collection of revolutionary plant-based recipes. Yotam and Ixta build on the vegetarian cooking that made Plenty and Plenty More phenomenal bestsellers, this time adding Italian and Mexican influences and revealing how to understand, build, and amplify flavor through more than 100 vegetarian recipes (half are also vegan). In essence, Yotam and Ixta show how to evolve creatively, be intuitive in the kitchen, and become ever-better cooks through the "three P's": * Process: Key reactions that happen when vegetables or supporting ingredients are cooked. * Pairing: Matching vegetables with flavorings to accentuate their qualities. * Produce: Identifying key ingredients that make vegetables shine. With surefire hits, such as Stuffed Eggplant in Curry and Coconut Dal, Spicy Mushroom Lasagna, and Vegetable Schnitzel, plus stunning photographs of nearly every recipe, Ottolenghi Flavor is the exciting, next-level approach to vegetable cooking that Yotam's fans, home cooks of all levels, and vegetable lovers everywhere have been craving.

Ottolenghi Flavor

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Sheila Heti

Heidi Julavits

Leanne Shapton

Collects essays, interviews, photographs, and other contributions inspired by surveys asking women of different backgrounds from throughout the world about clothing, fashion, personal appearance, and what they mean to each individual.

Women in Clothes

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Richard Chiem

the book is slightly bent but otherwise clean and has not been read 

Named a Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times, Richard Chiem brings readers a novel that is equal parts sledgehammer and sweet song--a neon, pulsing portrait of grief, and an electrifying story of one woman's survival against all odds. Corvus has always had an overactive imagination. Growing up, she develops a unique coping mechanism: she can imagine herself out of any situation, no matter how terrible. To get through each day, Corvus escapes into scenes from fantasy novels, pop songs, and action/adventure movies, and survives by turning the everyday into just another role to play in the movie of her life. After a tragic loss, Corvus finds a sadness so great she cannot imagine it away. Instead, she finds Tim, a pornographer with unconventional methods, who offers her a new way to escape into movies. But when a sinister plot of greed and betrayal is revealed, Corvus must fight to reclaim her independence, and discovers she is stronger than even she could have imagined.

King of Joy

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Gabriella Burnham

"Takes place over the course of a year in Säao Paulo, Brazil, [where] which two women's lives intersect: Linda, an anxious and restless American ... and [her] skilled maid Marta, [who] has more claim to Linda's home than she can fathom. [This is a] debut novel by young Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham ... about women whose romantic and subversive entanglements reflect on class and colorism, sexuality, and complex, divisive histories"--

It Is Wood, It Is Stone

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Rebecca Solnit

A landmark essay that went viral, inspired the word mansplaining,” and prompted fierce arguments.

Men Explain Things to Me

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Elise Hu

Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital

From 2014 to 2018, South Korean cosmetics exports quadrupled from £1.6 billion to £6.3 billion. With the help of YouTube and Instagram influencers, Korean beauty's multi-step skincare regimens, snail-slime facials, and selfie-ready face masks have catapulted into global consciousness and raked in billions. The K-wave captures imaginations worldwide by promising a kind of mesmerizing perfection, aspirational middle class lifestyles, and a sense of fun. These cultural exports, like face creams packaged to look like milkshakes or penguins or cacti, work together to fascinate us, champion consumerism and invite us to indulge. And yet, there is a dark side to this story. In South Korea, not meeting the aesthetic norm will cost you. Women are frowned upon, at best, or openly harassed by strangers if they so much as duck downstairs to the convenience store without makeup on. South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world, because 'your face is your fortune,' and determines not just

Flawless

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Mina Seckin

This wry and visceral debut novel follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine. Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father’s grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine. Also on Sibel’s mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret. Delving into her family’s history, the narrative weaves through periods of political unrest in Turkey, from military coups to the Gezi Park protests. Told with pathos and humor, Sibel’s search for strange and unusual cures is disrupted as she begins to see how she might heal herself through the care of others, including her own family and its long-fractured relationships.

The Four Humors

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Noah Galuten

Iliza Shlesinger

Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You

This is the book that seeks to answer the eternal question- "What am I supposed to eat?" Here the chef and writer Noah Galuten, host of the charmingly self-deprecating YouTube series "Don't Panic Pantry," serves up convenient, healthily delicious, mostly vegetarian comfort food, teaching you how to prepare meals and snacks you're genuinely excited to eat.

As the world changes around us, we are constantly vacillating between two different versions of ourselves- the one who wants to be healthier and the one who wants to be excited, or comforted, by the food that we eat. We all want to eat "better," but what does that mean? This book is here to say- Don't panic.

Don't panic about learning how to cook; or environmental sustainability; or nutrition. Don't panic about what to make for breakfast or dinner or midnight snacks, because Noah Galuten has your back! In Noah's kitchen, trying really matters, perfection is overrated, and better is good enough. Noah gives you the tools to create kitchen staples and vegetable-and-bean-centric dishes (with just a little meat too) that will become the beloved, simple, everyday meals you will make over and over in your home.

Here are recipes for a "Chef Salad" with Cheddar Croutons and Probiotic Ranch; and three different versions of broccoli pasta (vegetarian, pescatarian or with rosemary-infused sausage) that you will put on weekly rotation. There are recipes for Noah's Instagram-famous Krauty Beans; a 30-second Vegan Tahini Dressing that will become your new favourite dip; a Miso Roast Chicken with Vegetables that you can prep in advance and leave in the fridge for several hours, or even a day, that makes dinner for your entire family using a single sheet pan. But there's also-for when you really need it-the fresh herbed panko-crusted Mozzarella Marinara that made Galuten's famously funny wife, comedian Iliza Shlesinger, break down in grateful tears. Here are your pantry staples for the future, to help you make cooking at home the tastier, more convenient, don't panic option.

The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook

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Madeleine Thien

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

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Roselle Lim

Lush and visual, chock-full of delicious recipes, Roselle Lim's magical debut novel is about food, heritage, and finding family in the most unexpected places. At the news of her mother's death, Natalie Tan returns home. The two women hadn't spoken since Natalie left in anger seven years ago, when her mother refused to support her chosen career as a chef. Natalie is shocked to discover the vibrant neighborhood of San Francisco's Chinatown that she remembers from her childhood is fading, with businesses failing and families moving out. She's even more surprised to learn she has inherited her grandmother's restaurant. The neighborhood seer reads the restaurant's fortune in the leaves: Natalie must cook three recipes from her grandmother's cookbook to aid her struggling neighbors before the restaurant will succeed. Unfortunately, Natalie has no desire to help them try to turn things around--she resents the local shopkeepers for leaving her alone to take care of her agoraphobic mother when she was growing up. But with the support of a surprising new friend and a budding romance, Natalie starts to realize that maybe her neighbors really have been there for her all along.

Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune

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Edgar Gomez

A Memoir

This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo-from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.-and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride

I've always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others.

A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space- Edgar Gomez's uncle's cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor's office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual."

With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Browse by categories

Souvankham Thammavongsa

How to Pronounce Knife

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

Freedom

Vanessa Hua

Forbidden City

Clarissa Goenawan

Rainbirds

Meghan Daum

The Unspeakable

Toni Jensen

Carry

Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood

Charlotte Bronte; Weike Wang

Villette

Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things

Andrew Rannells; Ayelet Waldman; Amy Krouse Rosenthal; Veronica Chambers; Deborah Copaken; Jean Hanff Korelitz; Trey Ellis; Ann Hood; Howie Kahn; Mindy Hung; Terri Cheney; Ann Leary; Larry Smith

Modern Love, Revised and Updated

Yotam Ottolenghi; Ixta Belfrage; Tara Wigley

Ottolenghi Flavor

Sheila Heti; Heidi Julavits; Leanne Shapton

Women in Clothes

Richard Chiem

King of Joy

Gabriella Burnham

It Is Wood, It Is Stone

Rebecca Solnit

Men Explain Things to Me

Elise Hu

Flawless

Mina Seckin

The Four Humors

Noah Galuten; Iliza Shlesinger

The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook

Madeleine Thien

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Roselle Lim

Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune

Edgar Gomez

High-Risk Homosexual

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Harmless Like You

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