Edith Grossman

Gabriel García Márquez

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

Having decided to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by spending the night with a young virgin, an old man falls deeply in love for the first time in his life when he spots the girl at a local brothel. 250,000 first printing.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

cf30d161-e8f5-4c9d-9c23-2df9785619c8-1

Antonio Di Benedetto

Esther Allen

Juan José Saer

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

In post-WWII South America, a struggling writer embarks on a murderous thought experiment to help kickstart his career in this next tale of longing from the author of Zama.

The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choos- ing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.

The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication "To the victims of expectation" in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer's words, "one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish."

The Silentiary

06c75918-1456-49d4-ad1e-e08111368060-1

Carrie Brownstein

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance. With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. They would be cited as "America's best rock band" by legendary music critic Greil Marcus for their defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations, and redefined notions of gender in rock. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era's flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later. With deft, lucid prose Brownstein proves herself as formidable on the page as on the stage. Accessibly raw, honest and heartfelt, this book captures the experience of being a young woman, a born performer and an outsider, and ultimately finding one's true calling through hard work, courage and the intoxicating power of rock and roll.

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

52dd6902-ac81-427c-a19b-5faa09002911

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet!

On Booze

da8c192c-83db-42cc-838c-dce8aac14f70-1

Jonathan Franzen

Front cover slight folded but otherwise good condition 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he starts to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease. Winner of the National Book Award. Reprint. 500,000 first printing.

The Corrections

412c6e14-08b5-410f-8d4a-d2899b037546

Grace Jones

I'll Never Write My Memoirs

572c1698-2aa0-478c-9728-6d5d5c008635-1

Kim Gordon

Selected Texts

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon's writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance. Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Is It My Body?

c9f5b28c-6f43-4ed5-9c7a-2c4f4e42ce33-0

A memoir

Pretty Baby

Jami Attenberg

The Middlesteins

4a7c00a8-7a5b-43c2-be2e-adca78d29ece-1

Sharlene Teo

Tiny pen mark on back cover (see photo) otherwise like new!

An award-winning fiction debut about the value of friendships in present-day Singapore—a surprising and powerful portrait of Asia that shows the unique blend of modern and traditional cultures coming together—for fans of Elena Ferrante and Emma Cline. “I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve.” So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of this richly atmospheric and endlessly surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation. Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress—who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost—and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come. With remarkable emotional acuity, dark comedy, and in vivid prose, Sharlene Teo’s Ponti traces the suffocating tangle the lives of four misfits, women who need each other as much as they need to find their own way. It is an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of adolescence, the surrealness of the modern city, and the strangeness of living with and loving other people.

Ponti

e1050860-6c43-4c3a-9cd3-e9df7c750e85-1

K-Ming Chang

"One evening, Ma tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body, named Hu Gu Po. She hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; another aunt arrives with eels in her belly. All the while, Daughter is falling for her neighbor, a girl named Ben with mysterious powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies an old Taiwanese myth--and that she will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the magical realist aesthetic of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family's history from Mainland China to Taiwan, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and womanhood"--

Bestiary

ca78d502-d708-40ca-8a73-0eef55d4c735

Gary Shteyngart

Some black wear and tear on cover- see photo 

Lake Success

b15737ef-0be9-4d55-a1b2-15f595ad077a-1

Garth Greenwell

Some water/coffee stains on inside cover but otherwise excellent condition!

Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction * A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction * A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction * A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize * A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year)

"Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement."--James Wood, The New Yorker

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko's own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.

What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

What Belongs to You

02474f6b-85fd-4636-b5c0-2d7850041a3b-1

John Wray

Some stain to front and back cover but otherwise pages in good condition!

Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B train alone. Will is on a mission to save the world from global warming—to do it, though, he'll need to cool down his own body first. And for that he'll need one willing girl. Lowboy tells the story of Will’s odyssey through the city’s tunnels, back alleys, and streets in search of Emily Wallace, his one great hope. It also follows his mother, Violet Heller, as she tries desperately to find her son before psychosis claims him completely. Violet is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing-persons specialist, who learns over the course of the day that more is at stake than the recovery of a runaway teen: Will Heller has a chilling case history, and Violet—beautiful, enigmatic, and as tormented as her son—harbors a secret that Lateef will discover at his own peril.

Lowboy

d1a3ede3-10dd-43a1-bd76-d45f1515c66e-1

Jennifer Egan

Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

c9d24e3f-2a26-4787-8cbe-beb1ed408655-1

Maya Angelou

Tenderly, joyously, sometimes in sadness,nbsp;nbsp;sometimes in pain, Maya Angelou writes from the heart andnbsp;nbsp;celebrates life as only she has discovered it. Innbsp;nbsp;this moving volume of poetry, we hear thenbsp;nbsp;multi-faceted voice of one of the most powerful andnbsp;nbsp;vibrant writers of our time.

Poems

1301c3d9-e7d2-4d5b-9b72-89149c499547-1

Brian Broome

A Memoir

Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --

Punch Me up to the Gods

306cae66-e492-415b-8394-6f1a43b575ad

Jim Crace

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

"Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

From that moment forward,Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.

Being Dead

bcd6ecd1-ac31-476f-bbba-dd7519c2a560-1

Maria Amparo Escandon

FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. Weather, a fun, fast-paced novel of a Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza's Box of SaintsL.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He's harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters--Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers--are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.With quick-wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

L. A. Weather

e7eeac96-2221-4e9a-956d-f9274ecd39ad

Holly Whitaker

The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The founder of the first female-focused recovery program offers a groundbreaking look at alcohol and a radical new path to sobriety. “You don’t know how much you need this book, or maybe you do. Either way, it will save your life.”—Melissa Hartwig Urban, Whole30 co-founder and CEO We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but. When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular. What’s more, she could not ignore the ways that alcohol companies were targeting women, just as the tobacco industry had successfully done generations before. Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people—who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives. When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it. Written in a relatable voice that is honest and witty, Quit Like a Woman is at once a groundbreaking look at drinking culture and a road map to cutting out alcohol in order to live our best lives without the crutch of intoxication. You will never look at drinking the same way again.

Quit Like a Woman

a19b4c33-f115-4c78-83d6-5c969284d451-1

Kate Walbert

Inspired by a suffragist ancestor who starved herself to promote the integration of Cambridge University, Evie refuses to marry and Dorothy defies a ban on photographing the bodies of her dead Iraq War soldier sons, a choice that embarrasses Dorothy's daughters. Reprint. A best-selling book.

A Short History of Women

c137c1a8-11c0-4cd2-8a33-737cd1b11730-1

Josef Centeno

Betty Hallock

Dylan James Ho

overall great condition, some signs of wear and tear on cover, and some water damage on a page that you can’t see but makes for a stiff page halfway through the book 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Vivid Recipes from the Heart of Los Angeles (California Cookbook, Tex Mex Cookbook, Street Food Cookbook)

130 recipes that redefine the way we think about flavor. Visually stunning and conceptually fresh, this is the cookbook of the season from Josef Centeno, the chef credited with capturing the myriad tastes of Los Angeles on the plate. Recipes span from simple to show stopping, exploring sauces, soups, mains, salads, and desserts, too. More than 130 vivid photographs convey the beauty and excitement of Chef Centeno's extraordinary cooking. Josef Centeno is the chef and owner of Bäco Mercat, Bar Amá, Orsa & Winston, Ledlow, and P.Y.T. In Bäco, he draws on his multicultural heritage, formal training in top-notch restaurants such as Manresa and Daniel, a lifelong obsession with cookbooks, and his insatiable curiosity. Centeno's cooking layers textures and explores how spices and sauces can be used to transform the most basic vegetables.

Baco

bd1a00be-e57e-4a55-8704-764063f1a215-0

Nick Fauchald

Kaitlyn Goalen

Overall great condition but some wear on the binding and one of the first pages (see photo) is loose. 

Browse by categories

Edith Grossman; Gabriel García Márquez