Mary Morris

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New Hampshire

A Novel

In 1492, two history-altering events occurred: the Jews and Muslims of Spain were expelled, and Columbus set sail for the New World. Many Spanish Jews chose not to flee and instead became Christian in name only, maintaining their religious traditions in secret. Among them was Luis de Torres, who accompanied Columbus as an interpreter. Over the centuries, de Torres' descendants traveled across North America, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Now, some five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres, a young amateur astronomer, finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in: Entrada de la Luna, or Gateway to the Moon.

Poor health and poverty are the norm in Entrada, and luck is rare. So when Miguel sees an ad for a babysitting job in Santa Fe, he jumps at the opportunity. The family for whom he works, the Rothsteins, are Jewish, and Miguel is surprised to find many of their customs similar to those his own family kept but never understood. Braided throughout the present-day narrative are the powerful stories of the ancestors of Entrada's residents, portraying both the horrors of the Inquisition and the resilience of families. Moving and unforgettable, Gateway to the Moon beautifully weaves the journeys of the converso Jews into the larger American story.

Gateway to the Moon

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Georgi Gospodinov

Angela Rodel

WINNER OF THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE New Yorker - Best Books of 2022 An award-winning international sensation--with a second-act dystopian twist--Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets.

Time Shelter

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Paul Bowles

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A landmark of twentieth-century literature. Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.

A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

 

Sheltering Sky

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Katherine Anne Porter

Three Short Novels

The classic 1939 collection of three short novels, including the famous title story set during the flu epidemic of 1918. From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers evoke such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This sharp collection of three short novels includes "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," Porter's most celebrated story, where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her boyfriend on his way to war. Also included is "Noon Wine," a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas, and "Old Mortality," a story of discovering family truths and self-discovery. Pale Horse, Pale Rider unites the finest work from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

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Lyndsay Faye

Joining the newly formed NYPD in 1845, Timothy reluctantly assumes his duties near the notorious Five Points slum, where in the middle of the night he hears a little girl's claim that dozens of bodies have been buried in a local forest.

The Gods of Gotham

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Claire Vaye Watkins

Stories

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Battleborn

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Patrick deWitt

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet's plain facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure, of true love found and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in vocation, and the ultimate acceptance of a life lived to the side of the masses. The Librarianist is a wide-ranging and ambitious homage to the life lived through and for literature. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, deWitt celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity"--

The Librarianist

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Waverley Root

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Culinary Guidebook

In this thoroughly comprehensive, utterly captivating culinary guidebook, acclaimed food writer Waverley Root traverses Italy from Lombardy to Sicily, and across 3,000 years of invasions. An exhaustive catalog of the country’s gastronomic legacy, The Food of Italy explains the regional delicacies, the traditions, and the history that define the way Italians eat. From the legally enforced frugality of the Renaissance table to the enduring Saracen luxury of Sicilian desserts, from the lasagna of Bologna to the saltimbocca of Rome, Root explores the secrets and customs of a cuisine so nuanced that even the basic ragu Bolognese has some two hundred variations. A culinary adventurer who made his mark decades before Anthony Bourdain appeared on the scene, Root shares the stories of an elephant forced to spend the winter of 1551 in the South Tyrol and the dishes named after him, the proper way to bottle Chianti, and the mysteries surrounding the origin of tortellini. Essential reading for travelers—of the armchair and ticketed variety, alike—The Food of Italy, which features decorative maps (that may not be legible for all readers) and illustrations, brings the subtleties of the Italian palate into any home.

The Food of Italy

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John Hodgman

True Stories from Painful Beaches

Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn't seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.

Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth- John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses- the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them.

Vacationland collects these real life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.

Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.

Vacationland

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Oliver Sacks

Awakenings--which inspired the major motion picture--is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

Awakenings

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Edmund de Waal

A Hidden Inheritance

Traces the parallel stories of 19th-century art patron Charles Ephrussi and his unique collection of 264 miniature netsuke Japanese ivory carvings, documenting Ephrussi's relationship with Marcel Proust and the impact of the Holocaust on his cosmopolitan family. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

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Lucia Berlin

Selected Stories

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015
One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.

With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.

"Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis

A Manual for Cleaning Women

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Peter Guralnick

The Rise of Elvis Presley

Last Train to Memphis

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Tess Gunty

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • The standout literary debut that everyone is talking about • "Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny."—The Guardian A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, People Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents — neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom. "Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies―the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations."—Raven Leilani, author of Luster

The Rabbit Hutch

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Sarah Beth Martin

In this lush, emotional, "What happened?" novel, a young women seeks to connect the secrets of her family's hometown.

The One True Ocean

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Eldonna Edwards

While trying to deal with her depressed mother and her pious father in a small Midwest town in the 1960s, eleven-year-old Grace struggles with inherited psychic powers that her aunt calls "The Knowing."

This I Know

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Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

NOW A MOTION PICTURE NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS--Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay--Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, and Dakota Johnson

Another penetrating Neapolitan story from New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults

Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina's family in this "arresting" novel by the author of the New York Times-bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series (Publishers Weekly).

"Although much of the drama takes place in [Leda's] head, Ferrante's gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral."--The New Yorker

"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret."--Publishers Weekly

The Lost Daughter

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Maggie Leffler

"Estranged from her family since just after World War II, Mary Browning has spent her entire adult life hiding from her Jewish heritage. Now eighty-seven years old and a widow, she is haunted by a lifetime of secrets and fading memories of the family she left behind. Her one outlet is the writing group she's presided over for a decade, but when a new member walks in--a fifteen year old girl who reminds her so much of her beloved sister Sarah--Mary is certain fate delivered Elyse Strickler to her for a reason. She hires the serious-eyed teenager to type up her story of a daring female pilot during WWII who gambled everything for her dreams--and both their lives take flight in unexpected ways. At times laugh-out-loud funny and at others heart-wrenching, this is a story of identity, betrayal, love, hope, and forgiveness"--

The Secrets of Flight

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Suzette D. Harrison

The dust cloud rolls in from nowhere, stinging our eyes and muddling our senses. I reach for my baby sister and pull her small body close to me. When the sky clears, we are alone on an empty road with no clue which way to go... Oklahoma, 1935: Fifteen-year-old Faith Wilson takes her little sister Hope's hand. In worn-down shoes, they walk through the choking heat of the Dust Bowl towards a new life in California. But when a storm blows in, the girls are separated from their parents. How will they survive in a place where just the color of their skin puts them in terrible danger? Starving and forced to sleep on the streets, Faith thinks a room in a small boarding house will keep her sister safe. But the glare in the landlady's eye as Faith leaves in search of their parents has her wondering if she's made a dangerous mistake. Who is this woman, and what does she want with sweet little Hope? Trapped, will the sisters ever find their way back to their family? California, present day: Reeling from her divorce and grieving the child she lost, Zoe Edwards feels completely alone in the world. Throwing herself into work cataloguing old photos for an exhibition, she sees an image of a teenage girl who looks exactly like her, and a shiver grips her. Could this girl be a long-lost relation, someone to finally explain the holes in Zoe's family history? Diving into the secrets in her past, Zoe unravels this young girl's heartbreaking story of bravery and sacrifice. But will anything prepare her for the truth about who she is...?

The Dust Bowl Orphans

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Colleen Hoover

A "sublimely creepy" psychological thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover (Tarryn Fisher, New York Times bestselling author). Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.

Verity

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Susan Elia MacNeal

A Maggie Hope Mystery

Returning as a teacher to her former training camp after a traumatic undercover mission, Maggie investigates a series of poisonings and Churchill's growing stockpile of biological weapons in anticipation of a Nazi invasion. By the Edgar Award-nominated author of Princess Elizabeth's Spy. Original. 35,000 first printing.

The Prime Minister's Secret Agent

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Michael Pollan

Book has been read once, bought new. One highlighted passage inside (shown in picture).

The Architecture of Daydreams

"A glorious piece of prose . . . Pollan leads readers on his adventure with humor and grace." --Chicago Tribune

A captivating personal inquiry into the art of architecture, the craft of building, and the meaning of modern work

"A room of one's own: Is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape?"

When Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. In A Place of My Own, he turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property--a place in which he hoped to read, write, and daydream, built with his own two unhandy hands.

Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences--whether eating, gardening, or building--and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own--a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams"--built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

A Place of My Own

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Iain Pears

Cover has some surface lines. Pages inside in good condition. 

From the author of the international best seller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Arcadia is an astonishing work of imagination. 

In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape--remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about. There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision--one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.

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