John Steinbeck

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

California

A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors, in a deluxe Centennial edition In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century. This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translato

East of Eden

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Official price guide to watches tenth edition 

The illustrated encyclopedia of world religions 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Paris Review Winter 2022

Georges Simenon

Ros Schwartz

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré When an innocent young man is accused of murder, Maigret is forced to question the blind justice of the law In this thrilling courtroom drama, inspector Maigret comes to the defense of Gaston Meurant, a quiet Parisian picture framer accused of slitting his aunt’s throat for money and smothering a small child. Maigret can’t reconcile the violent portrait the court is painting with the man his investigations have revealed. But in order to save an innocent life from the gallows, Maigret must expose some dark secrets about Meurant, secrets that may expose him to a whole other kind of danger. With a high-stakes courtroom setting that brings out a side of Maigret’s brilliant mind rarely before seen, Maigret in Court is a painful story of an oppressive domestic tragedy and the compassionate insight of a remarkable detective.

Maigret in Court

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Ayn Rand

Leonard Peikoff

Equality 7-2521 dares to defy the ideals of collectivism in a futuristic state

Anthem

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Richardo Romo

History of a Barrio

This is the story of the largest Mexican-American community in the United States, the city within a city known as "East Los Angeles." How did this barrio of over one million men and women—occupying an area greater than Manhattan or Washington D.C.—come to be? Although promoted early in this century as a workers' paradise, Los Angeles fared poorly in attracting European immigrants and American blue-collar workers. Wages were low, and these workers were understandably reluctant to come to a city which was also troubled by labor strife. Mexicans made up the difference, arriving in the city in massive numbers. Who these Mexicans were and the conditions that caused them to leave their own country are revealed in East Los Angeles. The author examines how they adjusted to life in one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, how they fared in this country's labor market, and the problems of segregation and prejudice they confronted. Ricardo Romo is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

East Los Angeles

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Mike Davis

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

The hidden story of L.A. Mike davis shows us where the city's money comes form and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

City of Quartz

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Saki

The Best of Saki

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Anne Kraatz

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Seduction of Lace

Solstiss

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Haruki Murakami

Alfred Birnbaum

In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table. As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

Dance Dance Dance

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Sonny Barger

The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club

Narrated by the visionary founding member, Hell's Angel provides a fascinating all-access pass to the secret world of the notorious Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sonny Barger recounts the birth of the original Oakland Hell's Angels and the four turbulent decades that followed. Hell's Angel also chronicles the way the HAMC revolutionized the look of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and built what has become a worldwide bike-riding fraternity, a beacon for freedom-seekers the world over. Dozens of photos, including many from private collections and from noted photographers, provide visual documentation to this extraordinary tale. Never simply a story about motorcycles, colorful characters, and high-speed thrills, Hell's Angel is the ultimate outlaw's tale of loyalty and betrayal, subcultures and brotherhood, and the real price of freedom.

Hell's Angel

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Albert. Murray

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The legendary study of the blues by one of America's premier writers and critics.

Stomping the Blues

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Allan A. Schoenherr

C. Robert Feldmeth

A book on California's islands that deals with their natural history and geology as well as the history of human habitation.

Natural History of the Islands of California

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Maria Popova

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE AND BOOKPAGE Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries--beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists--mostly women, mostly queer--whose public contribution have risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson. Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman--and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

Figuring

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Hunter S. Thompson

Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Brings together a selection of the legendary American journalist's articles on subjects ranging from the Super Bowl to Watergate, from Hemingway to Brando, and from sharks to drugs.

The Great Shark Hunt

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Gavan Daws

A History of the Hawaiian Islands

The arrival of Captain Cook and the debates concerning the territory's admission to statehood are given equal attention in this detailed history

Shoal of Time

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Karl Ove Knausgaard

Don Bartlett

A Man in Love

"[Book 2] sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist [who] wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence." --James Wood, The New Yorker

In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply.

My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story--the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel.

It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.

My Struggle: Book 2

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Eudora Welty

All forty-one stories published by the distinguished writer are brought together, displaying her insights into the American South and including her most famous work, "Death of a Traveling Salesman"

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

80209e97-57f6-4d5e-8790-d2f51409140a-1

Kurt Vonnegut

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The ghost of a shipbuilder tells the story of an ill-fated cruise to the Galapagos Islands.

Galapagos

900f359e-cddb-42a9-abf6-e325a8c5e6d9-1

Irvine Welsh

Explores the life of a group of rude boys, junkies, and nutters in Edinburgh

Trainspotting

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Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man

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Susan Shillinglaw

Steinbeck’s tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society, dependant on one another for both physical and emotional survival A Penguin Classic Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In her introduction, Susan Shillinglaw shows how the novel expresses, both in style and theme, much that is essentially Steinbeck: “Scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and depressed . . . and, at the darkest level . . . the terror of isolation and nothingness.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Cannery Row

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Herman. Melville

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'.

Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.

Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:

in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

Moby Dick

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Carson Lancaster

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