Daniel Heath Justice

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

North Carolina

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today.

In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future.

This provocative volume challenges readers to critically consider and rethink their assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics while never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the power of story to effect personal and social change. Written with a generalist reader firmly in mind, but addressing issues of interest to specialists in the field, this book welcomes new audiences to Indigenous literary studies while offering more seasoned readers a renewed appreciation for these transformative literary traditions.

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

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Kurt Vonnegut

A Novel

"A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!"--The New York Times 

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of the twentieth century's most important works--and Vonnegut at his very best.

"[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist."--Harper's Magazine

"Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense."--Atlantic Monthly

Cat's Cradle

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties. “Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”—The Boston Globe

Slaughterhouse-Five

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David Treuer

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Native America from 1890 to the Present

Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

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Billy-Ray Belcourt

"A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief. In Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel. He is adrift, caught between his childhood on the reservation and this new life of the urban intelligentsia. Billy-Ray Belcourts unnamed narrator chronicles a series of encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted adult from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Amid these conversations, the narrator is haunted by memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jacks life parallels the narrators own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces the dazzling literary voice of a Lambda Literary Award winner and Canadian #1 national best-selling poet to the United States, shining much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival"--

A Minor Chorus - a Novel

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Terese Marie Mailhot

A Memoir

A powerful, poetic memoir of an Indigenous woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest—this New York Times bestseller and Emma Watson Book Club pick is “an illuminating account of grief, abuse and the complex nature of the Native experience . . . at once raw and achingly beautiful (NPR). Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

Heart Berries

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Haruki Murakami

An unlikely alliance forms between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, fantastical world.

Kafka on the Shore

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Mattie Montgomery

Good condition overall, inscription inside fromt cover

Lovely Things in Ugly Places

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James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

The sequel to The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, The Committed follows the "man of two minds" as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism, dealing drugs in 1980s Paris but unable to escape his past

The Committed

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Louise Erdrich

In her boldest and most darkly humorous novel yet, award-winning, critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist Louise Erdrich tells the intimate and powerful stories of five Great Plains women whose lives are connected through one man.

Stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, Jack Mauser's former wives huddle for warmth and pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking and often times comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

Tales of Burning Love

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Lemony Snicket

Very good condition. First edition with dust jacket.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Dear Reader, If you have just picked up this audio, then it is not too late to put it back down. Like the previous books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, there is nothing to be found in these pages but misery, despair, and discomfort, and you still have time to choose something else to read.Within the chapters of this story, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire encounter a darkened staircase, a red herring, some friends i a dire situation, three mysterious initials, a liar with an evil scheme, a secret passageway, and parsley soda.I have sworn to write down these tales of the Baudelaire orphans so the general public will know each terrible thing that has happened to them, but if you decide to read something else instead, you will save yourself from a heapful of horror and woe.With all due respect, Lemony Snicket

The Ersatz Elevator

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Muriel Spark

The arrival of Chris Wiley, a seventeen-year-old literary prodigy, at the College Sunrise finishing school sparks a dangerous game of envy, sexual jealousy, and adultery for Rowland Mahler, a would-be novelist, and his wife, Nina.

The Finishing School

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Stephen Graham Jones

Excellent condition overall, one small corner bump 

NOMINATED FOR THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2016 BY TOR.COM AND BOOK RIOT A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy, whose family lives on the fringe of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them. He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks. For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes—always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they’ve been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change. A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story— funny, bloody, raw, and real—told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.

Mongrels

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Mike Marqusee

Good shape overall, some age related wear, nothing that affects readability. Small piece of tape on dust jacket.

The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art

Bob Dylan's lyrics are at once abstruse and evocative, urgent and timeless. But, as Mike Marqusee's compelling study makes clear, behind the anarchy and playfulness of Dylan's imagery lie meanings that are often highly charged with political and social concerns. politics that unlocked his own astonishing songwriting ability, evidenced by dazzling responses in the early 1960s to the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. Marqusee traces the young song-writer's subsequent reluctance to be pigeonholed, his rejection of protest, and his turn to electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He shows the way folk tradition, modernism, and commercial popular culture are sublimely fused in Dylan's masterworks of the mid-1960s, notably on the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and discusses the artist's quest for American identity-amid the continuing carnage in Vietnam and growing chaos at home - in The Basement Tapes.

Chimes of Freedom

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Greil Marcus

Good shape overall, a little bit of wear on the egdes 

Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music— "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian"— and Bob Dylan, who in 2016 won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute masterwork in its richest, fullest context, capturing the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as musicians and technicians clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan at the height of his powers. But Marcus shows how, far from being a song only of 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" is rooted in faraway American places and times, drawing on timeless cultural impulses that make the song as challenging, disruptive, and restless today as it ever was, capable of reinvention by artists as disparate as the comedian Richard Belzer and the Italian hip-hop duo Articolo 31. "Like a Rolling Stone" never loses its essential quality, which is directly to challenge the listener: it remains a call to arms and a demand for a better world. Forty years later it is still revolutionary as will and idea, as an attack and an embrace. How Does it Feel? In this unique, burningly intense book, Marcus tells you, and much more besides.

Like a Rolling Stone

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Stephanie Clifford

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise, a rich and riveting novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle that tells the story of one unforgettable woman's rise in country and western music.

It's 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.

Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian's youth--the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville--and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.

Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, she'll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.

Exploring one unforgettable woman's creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world--and an art form--made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.

The Farewell Tour (ARC)

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Donald L. Maggin

A Life in Jazz

"Georges Remi's Tintin has long been one of the world's most beloved characters; Frederic Tuten has long been one of the fiction world's best-kept secrets. Their meeting here is nothing short of a literary event: a dazzling, hauntingly lyrical reimagining of the adventure novel." "Tintin has been to the Yucatan and Tibet, to the South Sea Islands and the Great American Plains; he's even traveled to the moon. Until now, however, he has never charted the restless geography of his mind: Averse to self-examination, unschooled in worldly ways, he is forever trapped in the body and psyche of a young teenager, content to combat evil and let his personal demons slumber. Then a summons comes to his home at Marlinspike Hall, and he ventures forth - accompanied by his great-hearted, hard-drinking companion Captain Haddock and his faithful dog, Snowy - to Machu Picchu, where he encounters a cast of characters that includes several from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. He will discover among them minds that can create and destroy the world he knew with but a thought, and the woman to whom he will lose his heart for the first - and last - time. He will find in his hands the power to take a life, in his heart the power to feel hatred, and in his soul the power to become one with all living things." "Instantly recognizable as the boy-man first brought to life by the Belgian artist Remi (a.k.a. Herge) over sixty years ago, and familiar to readers in more than thirty languages, Frederic Tuten's Tintin is, nevertheless, completely his own creation. Tintin in the New World, a novel for both the fan and the initiate, places our hero in his most incredible adventure yet."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Stan Getz

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Nice shape overall, light wear on edges, spine is in tact

American Jazz Singers

Louis' Children

Marshall W. Stearns

General wear but all oages and pictures present and in tact. 

The effect of jazz upon American culture and the American character has been all-pervasive. This superlative history is the first and the most renowned systematic outline of the evolution of this unique American musical phenomenon. Stearns begins with the joining of the African Negro'smusical heritage with European forms and the birth of jazz in New Orleans then follows its course through the era of swing and bop to the beginnings of rock in the 50s, vividly depicting the great innovators, and covering such technical elements as the music's form and structure.

The Story of Jazz

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Ira Gitler

General wear on the cover but pages all in good shape

An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in The 1940s

Interviews with more than fifty of the seminal figures in jazz history recall how jazz moved from the big band era into the modern jazz period

Swing to Bop

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Joe Goldberg

Light age related wear on edges, pages all in very good condition 

The fifties, though a quiescent period in many ways, was one of the most fervent decades in jazz history. The landmarks of modern jazz were firmly planted and, it could be argued, nearly all directions the music has taken since then can be charted back to recordings, groups, or individuals from this era. In this series of profiles, Joe Goldberg examines the lives and the music, the crucial events and dominant forces of a decade of great music and conflicting esthetics: Miles Davis's recording of Kind of Blue; Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet; Cecil Taylor's percussive keyboard experiments; John Coltrane's and Sonny Rollins's marathon saxophone solos; MJQ's blending of classical structure and jazz improvisation; Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz. From Mingus to Monk to Blakey, it was an age of giants. Perhaps never before or since in jazz history have so many wildly idiosyncratic jazz innovators been contemporaries. Joe Goldberg was there and what his ears heard has become here a lasting music document.

Jazz Masters of The 50s

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Thomas Owens

Generally good condition. Pages all in tact. Some discoloration on edges.

The Music and Its Players

Discusses the origins of bebop, a style which at first even other jazz musicians considered chaotic, describes the contributions of Charlie Parker, and profiles the oustanding players of each of the instruments commonly used

Bebop

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Dave Gelly

Very good conditon. Pages and photos all in tact and clean. 

Browse by categories

Daniel Heath Justice

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

David Treuer

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Billy-Ray Belcourt

A Minor Chorus - a Novel

Terese Marie Mailhot

Heart Berries

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Mattie Montgomery

Lovely Things in Ugly Places

James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Committed

Louise Erdrich

Tales of Burning Love

Lemony Snicket

The Ersatz Elevator

Muriel Spark

The Finishing School

Stephen Graham Jones

Mongrels

Mike Marqusee

Chimes of Freedom

Greil Marcus

Like a Rolling Stone

Stephanie Clifford

The Farewell Tour (ARC)

Donald L. Maggin

Stan Getz

Leslie Gourse

Louis' Children

Marshall W. Stearns

The Story of Jazz

Ira Gitler

Swing to Bop

Joe Goldberg

Jazz Masters of The 50s

Thomas Owens

Bebop

Dave Gelly

Lester Young

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