Jhumpa Lahiri

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as "A Temporary Matter," in which a young Indian-American couple confronts their grief over the loss of a child, while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. Original. 20,000 first printing.

Interpreter of Maladies

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Randa Jarrar

With acerbic wit and tenderness, these often otherworldly stories capture the lives of Arab women across myriad geographies and circumstances.

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali

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Natalie Eve Garrett

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys and Struggles of Being Alone

A collection of essays about the joys and struggles of being alone by 22 literary writers including: Lev Grossman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lena Dunham, Jesmyn Ward, Yiyun Li, and Anthony Doerr. If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of personal essays illuminates what the experience of being alone is like for all of us. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as Jesmyn Ward’s reckoning with the loss of her husband, Imani Perry’s confrontation with chronic illness, and Dina Nayeri’s reflection on immigrating to a foreign country. Others are witty, such as Lev Grossman’s rueful tale of heading to the woods alone or Anthony Doerr’s struggles with internet addiction. Still others celebrate solitude and the kind of clarity it can bring about, such as Claire Dederer’s journey toward sobriety and Lidia Yuknavitch’s sensual look at women and desire. Thoughtful and ultimately affirming, The Lonely Stories explores emotions that so often go undiscussed, and lets us all know that we’re not alone. Contributors include: • Megan Giddings • Claire Dederer • Imani Perry • Jeffery Renard Allen • Maggie Shipstead • Emily Raboteau • Lev Grossman • Lena Dunham • Yiyun Li • Anthony Doerr • Helena Fitzgerald • Maile Meloy • Aja Gabel • Jean Kwok • Amy Shearn • Peter Ho Davies • Maya Shanbhag Lang • Jhumpa Lahiri • Jesmyn Ward • Lidia Yuknavitch • Dina Nayeri • Melissa Febos

The Lonely Stories

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Kaitlyn Greenidge

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Novel

A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE 2017 YOUNG LIONS AWARD "A terrifically auspicious debut." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Smart, timely and powerful . . . A rich examination of America's treatment of race, and the ways we attempt to discuss and confront it today." --The Huffington Post The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. But when Charlotte discovers the truth about the institute's history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past invade the present in devious ways. The power of this shattering novel resides in Greenidge's undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history's long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America's failure to find a language to talk about race. "A magnificently textured, vital, visceral feat of storytelling . . . [by] a sharp, poignant, extraordinary new voice of American literature." --Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

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Gerald Graff

Cathy Birkenstein

English

The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

A primer on persuasive writing for business, political, and educational writers, originally published as a best-selling college textbook, counsels practitioners on key principles without using cluttered language, in a straightforward guide that is complemented by user-friendly templates.

They Say / I Say

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Marita Golden

How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women (African American Studies)

This book unpacks the myth of the "strong black woman" who is never allowed any weakness and the health impacts, both physical and mental, of living in a skewed culture.

The Strong Black Woman

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Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

You're Breaking My Heart

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Helena María Viramontes

A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California's fields.

"Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality...working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle."--Publishers Weekly

At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death.
 
Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes' prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feet of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction.

Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature
Selected as the Univesity of Oregon's 2019 Common Reading book

Under the Feet of Jesus

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Daniel José Older

In the third in the "richly detailed and diverse" (io9) urban fantasy series, the time has come for the dead to rise up against the shady powers-that-be... The time has come for the dead to rise up... Trouble is brewing between the Council of the Dead and the ghostly, half-dead, spiritual, and supernatural community they claim to represent. One too many shady deals have gone down in New York City's streets, and those caught in the crossfire have had enough. It's time for the Council to be brought down--this time for good. Carlos Delacruz is used to being caught in the middle of things: both as an inbetweener, trapped somewhere between life and death, and as a double agent for the Council. But as his friends begin preparing for an unnatural war against the ghouls in charge, he realizes that more is on the line than ever before--not only for the people he cares about, but for every single soul in Brooklyn, alive or otherwise...

Battle Hill Bolero

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The New York Times bestselling author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel--a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death. The streets of New York are hungry tonight... Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York's ghostlier problems. This time it's a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn's Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals--and is bound to take more. The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie's botánica, where she worked. But the closer they've gotten, the more she's seeing the world from Carlos's point of view. In fact, she's starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that--because whatever is bringing out the dead, it's only just getting started.

Midnight Taxi Tango

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Jamaica Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River

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Dolen Perkins-Valdez

wench \'wench\ n. from Middle English “wenchel,” 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child. Situated in Ohio, a free territory before the Civil War, Tawawa House is an idyllic retreat for Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their enslaved black mistresses. It’s their open secret. Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at the resort, building strong friendships over the years. But when Mawu, as fearless as she is assured, comes along and starts talking of running away, things change. To run is to leave everything behind, and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances— all while they bear witness to the end of an era. An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.

Wench

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Elizabeth Strout

Fiction

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The beloved first novel featuring Olive Kitteridge, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Oprah’s Book Club pick Olive, Again “Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her.”—USA Today NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post Book World • USA Today • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Seattle Post-Intelligencer • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Christian Science Monitor • The Plain Dealer • The Atlantic • Rocky Mountain News • Library Journal At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life—sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition—its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. The inspiration for the Emmy Award–winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Bill Murray

Olive Kitteridge

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Shze-Hui Tjoa

A transcendent, profoundly imaginative memoir that explores the complexities of sisterhood, the cost of expectation, and the power of storytelling to shape--and ultimately repair--a life.

The Story Game

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Jonah Mixon-Webster

Poems

A radical, urgent collection of poems about Blackness, the self, and the dismantling of corrupt powers in the fight for freedom.
 
A PEN America Literary Award Winner


Jonah Mixon-Webster works at the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class. Stereo(TYPE), his debut collection of poetry, is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist.
 
Challenging stereotypes through scenes that scatter with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster invents visual/sonic forms, conceptualizes poems as transcripts and frequently asked questions, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies, deconstructing the very foundations America is built on. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a one-of-a-kind, rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems.
 

Stereo(TYPE)

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Andres Montoya

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. The late AndrA[a¬As Montoya's THE ICEWORKER SINGS AND OTHER POEMS evokes a world of machines and violence as it confronts a culture that has abandoned hope. His poems are stories, prayers, and letters that foster a spiritual resolve in the midst of a chaotic and concrete reality that denies the holy. Primarily urban and intensely personal, his poetry is nonetheless universal in dealing with issues of the day: race, faith, urban decay, poverty, police brutality, and the individual search for hope in the midst of despair. Winner of the 1997 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize.

The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems

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Marcus Samuelsson

Veronica Chambers

Small bend in cover right corner, as pictured

A Memoir

JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the great culinary stories of our time.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Yes, Chef chronicles Samuelsson’s journey, from his grandmother’s kitchen to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of chasing flavors had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs, and, most important, the opening of Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, and bus drivers. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home. Praise for Yes, Chef “Such an interesting life, told with touching modesty and remarkable candor.”—Ruth Reichl “Marcus Samuelsson has an incomparable story, a quiet bravery, and a lyrical and discreetly glittering style—in the kitchen and on the page. I liked this book so very, very much.”—Gabrielle Hamilton “Plenty of celebrity chefs have a compelling story to tell, but none of them can top [this] one.”—The Wall Street Journal “Elegantly written . . . Samuelsson has the flavors of many countries in his blood.”—The Boston Globe “Red Rooster’s arrival in Harlem brought with it a chef who has reinvigorated and reimagined what it means to be American. In his famed dishes, and now in this memoir, Marcus Samuelsson tells a story that reaches past racial and national divides to the foundations of family, hope, and downright good food.”—President Bill Clinton

Yes, Chef

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Minda Honey

A hilariously intimate memoir that gets to the turbulent joys and pains of coming of age and looking for love as a Black woman in America. In the car she'd had since high school--with the boyfriend she'd had just as long riding shotgun--Minda Honey made the cross-country drive to sunny Southern California. By the end of 2008, Obama would be president, she'd be single, and change would be upon us all. Thousands of miles away from her family and friends in the new era of smartphones and online dating, Minda navigates the treacherous waters of early adulthood and love: confounding relationships, steamy hookups, meet-cutes, chillingly narrow escapes, and the realization that nothing plays out quite like the rom-coms she'd bet her heart on as a teenager. She was frustrated, heartbroken, resentful--and free. Kinda. From California to Colorado to her hometown in Kentucky, Minda sets out to relaunch her life outside all that defined her adolescence. In an unflinching memoir, Minda casts her gimlet eye on her past relationships and the complicated dynamics of consent culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class. Remembering the promise and disappointments of her twenties with wisdom and compassion, this is Minda's story of a Black woman coming into herself and changing her own world with resilience and bracing independence.

The Heartbreak Years

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Jessica Hagedorn

Nominated for The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The author's first novel, Dogeaters, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1990 and was voted the best book of the year by the Before Columbus Foundation.Rocky Rivera arrives in the U.S. from the Philippines the day that Jimi Hendrix dies. So begins a blazing coming-of-age story suffused with the tensions of immigration which finds Rocky moving from the counter-culture in 1960s San Francisco to the extravagant music scene in Manhattan of the 1980s.The Gangster of Love tells the story of the Rivera family as they make their new life in the States all the while haunted by the memory of the father and the homeland they left behind. Among its members are Rocky's haughty mother, who has impulsively left her father; Voltaire, her brother, prone to heavy depression and odd friendships with strangers; and Rocky herself, unsure about sex and worshipful of her boyfriend, the guitar-playing Elvis Chang, who must learn to accept reality amidst the myths and lures of American success and idolatry.

The Gangster of Love

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Dave Eggers

When the world's largest search engine/social media company, The Circle, merges with the planet's dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous--and, oddly enough, most beloved--monopoly ever known: The Every. Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free? Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company--and the human animal.

The Every

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Gina Ann Garcia

Social Studies

Opportunities for Colleges and Universities

Incorporating the voices of faculty, staff, and students, Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions asserts that HSIs are undervalued, yet reveals that they serve an important role in the larger landscape of postsecondary institutions.

Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions

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Venita Blackburn

A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality from a soon-to-be superstar. Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles —and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present. A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

Dead in Long Beach, California

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Jervey Tervalon

That was Mother's life back then: planning one daughter's wedding while plotting to kill her other daughter's lover.... For feisty young Lita Du Champ, New Orleans is a place dominated by her hardworking family -- in particular, her strong-willed mother, Helen, who rules with an unshakable sense of propriety. Ever loyal to her mother, and adoring of her beautiful, restless, married sister Adele, Lita works hard to keep the family together as she attempts to establish her own life. But when Adele falls in love with Lucien Faure -- a smooth operator with "the devil's good looks" and a decades-old score to settle with Helen -- Lita unveils her mother's mysterious past to confront the Du Champs' long-buried secrets. Now, Lita finds she has one last and desperate chance to save the future of those she loves. Award-winning author Jervey Tervalon draws from his own heritage -- and the twisting family story that has lived and breathed inside him his whole life -- to create a spellbindingly luminous novel of passion, murder, and vengeance.

Dead above Ground [SIGNED]

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Laurel Braitman

An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love

A true story about the ways loss can transform us into the people we want to become.

Laurel Braitman spent her childhood learning how to outfish grown men, keep bees, and fix carburetors from her larger-than-life dad. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he went to spectacular lengths to teach her the skills she'd need to survive without him. But by her mid-thirties she is a ship about to splinter on the rocks, exhausted by running from her own bad feelings. We follow as Laurel changes course, navigating multiple wildernesses--from northern New Mexico and western Alaska to her own Tinder app. She learns the hard way that no achievement, no matter how shiny, can protect her from pain, and works to transform guilt and regret into gold: learning from a badass birder in the Bering Sea, a few dozen grieving kids in a support group, a pile of smoking ashes, and countless online dates. Along the way, she faces a wildfire that threatens everyone and everything she cares about, a grueling test of her own survival skills, and the fact that we often have to say our hardest goodbyes before we're ready. In the end Laurel realizes that being open to love after loss is not only possible, it can set us free.

What Looks Like Bravery is a hero's journey for our times. Laurel teaches us that hope is a form of courage, one that can work as an all-purpose key to the locked doors of your dreams.

Browse by categories

Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies

Randa Jarrar

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali

Natalie Eve Garrett

The Lonely Stories

Kaitlyn Greenidge

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

Gerald Graff; Cathy Birkenstein

They Say / I Say

Marita Golden

The Strong Black Woman

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich

You're Breaking My Heart

Helena María Viramontes

Under the Feet of Jesus

Daniel José Older

Battle Hill Bolero

Daniel José Older

Midnight Taxi Tango

Jamaica Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench

Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge

Shze-Hui Tjoa

The Story Game

Jonah Mixon-Webster

Stereo(TYPE)

Andres Montoya

The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems

Marcus Samuelsson; Veronica Chambers

Yes, Chef

Minda Honey

The Heartbreak Years

Jessica Hagedorn

The Gangster of Love

Dave Eggers

The Every

Gina Ann Garcia

Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Venita Blackburn

Dead in Long Beach, California

Jervey Tervalon

Dead above Ground [SIGNED]

Laurel Braitman

What Looks Like Bravery

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