Ruth Ozeki

Slight fading of the red along the edges of the cover, and some discoloration / marks on the outer edges of pages. Top right corner of the front cover is bent slightly.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

A Novel

Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction

"No one writes like Ruth Ozeki--a triumph." --Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library

"Inventive, vivid, and propelled by a sense of wonder." --TIME

"If you've lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home." --David Mitchell, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud Atlas

A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both--the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
 
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
 
And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
 
With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.

The Book of Form and Emptiness

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Joan Didion

John Leonard

Some dings on the dust jacket, one stain and dent in the pages visible from the side picture

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Collected Nonfiction; Introduction by John Leonard

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, this collection includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From.

As featured in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

Joan Didion's incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions-on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others-show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

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Jorge Carrion

Peter Bush

Some discoloration on the corners of front and back covers, visible in the photos

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

And Other Essays

Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader's History left off, Against Amazon explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. Collecting the author's essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, as well as his interviews with the writers who love them--including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara and Han Kang, among others--Against Amazon is equal parts a history of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter--and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive pressures of late capitalism.

Against Amazon

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Weike Wang

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A witty, moving, piercingly insightful new novel about a marvelously complicated woman who can’t be anyone but herself, from the award-winning author of Chemistry “A deeply felt portrait . . . With gimlet-eyed observation laced with darkly biting wit, Weike Wang masterfully probes the existential uncertainty of being other in America.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations. Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined. Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one’s voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.

Joan Is Okay

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Jo Nesbo

Don Bartlett

Slight crease in front cover, and corners are slightly rounded

The First Inspector Harry Hole Novel

Follows Harry Hole's efforts to solve the murder of a television celebrity whose demise is linked to a string of serial killings.

The Bat

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Jonathan Lethem

Their friendship compromised by the belief systems of the racially charged 1970s, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude share a series of misadventures based on their mutual obsession with comic-book heroes. By the author of Motherless Brooklyn. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

The Fortress of Solitude

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Stories

World Literature Today: Notable Translation of the Year A baker’s dozen of intertwined stories that brilliantly evoke the ups and downs of relationships between strangers, spouses, parents, and children. Drawing on the author’s own experiences, this slim, intimate collection of thirteen stories explores myriad forms of love (and disappointment and nostalgia and panic) through a narrator who bemoans his inability to wear a trench coat well, like Humphrey Bogart and the other elegant men his mother taught him to admire. In these encounters and these endings, in these details and these feelings, a compassionate portrait of a life emerges. Terse, droll, sometimes absurd but always lucid, Pàmies casts his gaze on the urge to write as seen through his mother’s final days; on his teenage fantasy that his father was actually Jorge Semprún; and on situations such as adopting a dog to staunch a failing marriage, or a father asked to play the part of a corpse in his son’s short film. In this phantasmagoria of failure and loss, Pàmies confronts us—pulling us in with his use of the second person—with the omnipresence of well-intentioned lies without which it might be impossible to ever make anyone else happy.

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

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Coffee spill on the spine, a small mark on page 71, and some fading on the bottom of the front cover

Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

The Woman Warrior

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slightly bent front cover, discolored pages

The author describes his twenty month ordeal in the Nazi death camp.

Survival in Auschwitz

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The author and her three brothers, left orphans at an early age, were raised together by guardians.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A gripping American-on-the-run thriller . . . a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships.”—Newsweek “One part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation.”—Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Washington Post • Paste Samuel Hawley isn’t like the other fathers in Olympus, Massachusetts. A loner who spent years living on the run, he raised his beloved daughter, Loo, on the road, moving from motel to motel, always watching his back. Now that Loo’s a teenager, Hawley wants only to give her a normal life. In his late wife’s hometown, he finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at the local high school. Growing more and more curious about the mother she never knew, Loo begins to investigate. Soon, everywhere she turns, she encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born. This hidden past is made all the more real by the twelve scars her father carries on his body. Each scar is from a bullet Hawley took over the course of his criminal career. Each is a memory: of another place on the map, another thrilling close call, another moment of love lost and found. As Loo uncovers a history that’s darker than she could have known, the demons of her father’s past spill over into the present—and together both Hawley and Loo must face a reckoning yet to come. Praise for The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley “A master class in literary suspense.”—The Washington Post “Tinti depicts brutality and compassion with exquisite sensitivity, creating a powerful overlay of love and pain.”—The New Yorker “Hannah Tinti’s beautifully constructed second novel . . . uses the scars on Hawley’s body—all twelve bullet wounds, one by one—to show who he is, what he’s done, and why the past chases and clings to him with such tenacity.”—The Boston Globe “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Laura Hart

@lauralhart

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Ruth Ozeki

The Book of Form and Emptiness

Joan Didion; John Leonard

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Jorge Carrion; Peter Bush

Against Amazon

Weike Wang

Joan Is Okay

Jo Nesbo; Don Bartlett

The Bat

Jonathan Lethem

The Fortress of Solitude

Sergi Pàmies

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior

Primo Levi

Survival in Auschwitz

Mary McCarthy

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Hannah Tinti

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

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Ruth Ozeki

The Book of Form and Emptiness

Joan Didion; John Leonard

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Jorge Carrion; Peter Bush

Against Amazon

Weike Wang

Joan Is Okay

Jo Nesbo; Don Bartlett

The Bat

Jonathan Lethem

The Fortress of Solitude

Sergi Pàmies

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior

Primo Levi

Survival in Auschwitz

Mary McCarthy

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Hannah Tinti

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Get The App