Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Tennessee

The Book of George 

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Self Discovery, Freedom, and Healing

Now in paperback and with journaling prompts, an Economist Best Book of the Year hailed as "Touching, joyful, defiant--and honest," celebrating African women's unique journeys toward sexual pleasure and liberation in this newly updated empowering, subversive collection of intimate stories.

"Dazzling... the tone is hopeful, resilient and accepting. Marked by the diversity of experiences shared, the wealth of intimate details, and the total lack of sensationalism, this is an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 
In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and desires, work toward healing their painful pasts, and learn to assert their sexual power. Weaving a rich tapestry of experiences with a sex positive outlook, The Sex Lives of African Women is an empowering, subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women's multifaceted sexuality. 
 
From a queer community in Egypt, to polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, feminist author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it defines who we are.

Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex for her blog, "Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women." For this book she spoke to over 30 African women across the globe while chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom.

The Sex Lives of African Women

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Elysha Chang

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

A Michelle Obama's Reach Higher Summer Reading List Pick - An NPR Critics Summer Pick - A Good Morning America Pick of the Month - A Good Reads Big Buzz Debut - A Tertulia Staff Pick of the Month - An Electric Literature Best Novel of 2023 "Compelling . . . Studded with sublime wit." --New York Times Book Review "A glorious, pondering, heartbreaking, extremely funny, very special book." --Sarah Jessica Parker In A Quitter's Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother's death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own. Eleanor knows she's been acting strangely. She's dropped out of her PhD program and is ignoring calls from her husband. Lately, she finds herself walking circles in the park, leaving a trail of nuts and raisins in her wake. It's all, in some sense, a response to her mother's recent death. This she knows. But Eleanor can't understand how you are supposed to grieve a mother you never understood. How do you love a person who refused to make herself known? As Eleanor wends her way forward, we catch glimpses of the past. Eleanor's parents emigrate from Taiwan to Queens in 1979. The couple thrives in business, importing Taiwanese-made trinkets and managing a growing number of workers at their warehouse. But Rita and Jing Liu remain confounded by the process of raising their two daughters. How do you dole out affection, discipline, protection, and care in a strange place, in a foreign tongue? Deliciously provocative and exquisitely crafted, A Quitter's Paradise is an intimate, intergenerational saga of American immigrant ambition, and a profound contemplation of its long afterlife. With a deft hand and a humor distinctly her own, Elysha Chang explores the extent to which we unwittingly guard the hearts of our loved ones, even from ourselves.

A Quitter's Paradise

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I got this book brand new, and some of the pages are already falling out!! I guess the glue is weak lol. If read carefully, this book can still be enjoyed!

A Novel Summer 

Holly Jackson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

From the author of the New York Times and multimillion-copy bestselling A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series comes a new blockbuster thriller about a road trip that turns deadly. Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive.

Red Kenny is on a road trip for spring break with five friends: Her best friend - the older brother - his perfect girlfriend - a secret crush - a classmate - and a killer. 

When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead.

With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night. . . . 

An instant classic, this crime thriller was named a best book of the year by Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Waterstones and Indigo. 


Five Survive

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Peter Handke

Ralph Manheim

Jeffrey Eugenides

I used this book for a class so it is lightly annotated 

A Life Story

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke--"the extravagantly talented Austrian playwright of chutzpah, novelist of sensibility, poet of linguistic games" (Kirkus)--ponders the life and early death of his mother

"The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under 'Local News': 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'"

So opens A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Handke's reckoning with his mother's life--which spanned the rise of the Nazis, World War II, and postwar suffering--and death. Both stark and lyrical, full of love, anger, admiration, and a keen sense of history, this slim book reveals Handke at his most lucid and direct. It is the most moving and accessible work in his distinguished career; it is "indispensable" (Bill Marx, The Boston Globe).

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

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Lily King

The perfect book for when you’re feeling lost in your 20’s 

#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Writers and Lovers

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Tania De Rozario

This is a really lovely essay collection/memoir about growing up queer that blends in horror elements. If you like Carmen Maria machado’s writing, you’ll probably like this!

Essays

In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different. Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to "banish the evil" from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren't just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere--including your own family and community--and look just like you. Dinner on Monster Island is Tania's memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore--where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think. Moving and lyrical, written with earnest candor, and leavened with moments of humor and optimism, Dinner on Monster Island is a deeply personal examination of one woman's experience grappling with her identity and a fantastic analysis of monsters, monstrous women and the worlds in which they live.

Dinner on Monster Island

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Kiley Reid

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • NPR • Vogue • Elle • Real Simple • InStyle • Good Housekeeping • Parade • Slate • Vox • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • BookPage Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize An Instant New York Times Bestseller A Reese's Book Club Pick "The most provocative page-turner of the year." --Entertainment Weekly "I urge you to read Such a Fun Age." --NPR A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both. Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right. But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other. With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

Such a Fun Age

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Celeste Ng

This is perfect if you like family drama and lit-fics!

The #1 New York Times bestseller! Now a Hulu original series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. “I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting.” —Jodi Picoult “To say I love this book is an understatement. It’s a deep psychological mystery about the power of motherhood, the intensity of teenage love, and the danger of perfection. It moved me to tears.” —Reese Witherspoon “Extraordinary . . . books like Little Fires Everywhere don't come along often.” —John Green From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste, Kirkus Reviews, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and many more... Perfect for book clubs! Visit celesteng.com for discussion guides and more.

Little Fires Everywhere

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A. J. Finn

This is a lovely hard back thriller in pristine condition!

Mary Bullard

@literary__mary

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Kate Greathead

The Book of George

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

The Sex Lives of African Women

Elysha Chang

A Quitter's Paradise

Jamie Brenner

A Novel Summer

Holly Jackson

Five Survive

Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim; Jeffrey Eugenides

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Lily King

Writers and Lovers

Tania De Rozario

Dinner on Monster Island

Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age

Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere

A. J. Finn

The Woman in the Window

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Kate Greathead

The Book of George

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

The Sex Lives of African Women

Elysha Chang

A Quitter's Paradise

Jamie Brenner

A Novel Summer

Holly Jackson

Five Survive

Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim; Jeffrey Eugenides

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Lily King

Writers and Lovers

Tania De Rozario

Dinner on Monster Island

Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age

Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere

A. J. Finn

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