Virginie Despentes

Frank Wynne

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Indiana

A Novel

"Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read. Everything about it is contemporary, right down to the fearless woman author who doesn't think of herself as a feminist and gives an impression at least in interviews of habitually killing rapists . . . [It] has dupes and assholes and racists and the people they hate and a stunning diversity of internal monologues and trans true love. Like the last decade, it searches for a happy ending that isn't merely personal and can't find it . . . These novels with their depth and detail kick TV's sorry ass." --Nell Zink, Bustle, "The Best Books Of The 2010s"

From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed trilogy of novels, Vernon Subutex--short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. But who is Vernon Subutex?

Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly drops dead of a drug overdose, Subutex finds himself launched on an epic saga of couch-surfing, boozing, and coke-snorting before finally winding up homeless. Just as he resigns himself to life as a panhandler, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook takes the internet by storm.

The word is out: Subutex is lugging around a bunch of VHS tapes shot by that same dead rock musician--his last recordings on this earth. Soon a crowd of wild characters, from screen writers to social media groupies, from porn stars to failed musicians to random misfits, are hot on Vernon's trail . . . but Vernon is none the wiser.

Vernon Subutex 1

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Yu Miri

Morgan Giles

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Tokyo Ueno Station

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Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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Rana Foroohar

The Case Against Big Tech

A penetrating indictment of how today’s largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds—from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND EVENING STANDARD “Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth—while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don’t Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul—and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access—won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology—she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology. Praise for Don’t Be Evil “At first sight, Don’t Be Evil looks like it’s doing for Google what muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell did for Standard Oil over a century ago. But this whip-smart, highly readable book’s scope turns out to be much broader. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump’s election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed.”—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of The Square and the Tower

Don't Be Evil

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Djuna Barnes

T. S. Eliot

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.

Nightwood

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Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim survives capture by the Gemans in World War II, the Dresden bombings, and the struggle for financial success only to be kidnapped in a flying saucer and taken to the planet Tralfamadore.

Slaughterhouse-Five

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Alison Bechdel

Has an inscription inside from the previous owner

A Family Tragicomic

A memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father--a funeral home director, high school English teacher, and closeted homosexual.

Fun Home

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Eileen Myles

A groundbreaking and candid novel-in-real-time, considered a cult classic, from one of America's most celebrated poets In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed "lesbianity," and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern tale of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the chains of the rigid cultural identity meant to define her.

Chelsea Girls

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Carol Shields

From her birth in rural Manitoba, to her journey with her father to southern Indiana, to her years as a wife, mother, and widow, to her old age, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to find a place for herself in her own life

The Stone Diaries

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Felix Salten

Damion Searls

Paul Reitter

Newly retranslated, this elemental novel about danger, loss, and coming of age in the natural world was the source material for the classic Disney animated film. Bambi first came out in Vienna a hundred years ago, the work of Felix Salten, a Viennese litterateur, journalist, and man about town, and was an immediate success with readers. An English translation soon appeared with an introduction by the Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy and was widely and well reviewed. Later Walt Disney made his famous movie of the book, and as a consequence Salten’s intimate, delicate, poetic, and gripping tale of forest life, a book that captures both the calm and the disquiet of the animal world, has come to be thought of as a children’s book. Bambi is certainly a book that children can enjoy, but it is also a moving and lasting contribution to the literature of the natural world. In Damion Searls’s new translation the fawn Bambi and his mother, the groves and thickets of the forest, the open and dangerous space of the great field, the ever-present threat of the human—the whole intricate weave of life and death that Salten handles so deftly—all come alive for a new generation of readers. Paul Reitter’s afterword discusses the surprising political readings to which Salten’s fable of the woods was subjected.

Bambi

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Jean Kyoung Frazier

"Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways. Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world"--

Pizza Girl

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Elizabeth Pich

Sexually explicit content, Tzine from the strand NYC

Fungirl is back in this sensational, sopping wet one-shot! With Becky away at college, Fungirl and Peter are left to their own devices. Suddenly, a mysterious renter appears in search of a room and charms our lust-ridden heroine. Is this blossoming connection too good to be true?

Fungirl: You Are Revolting

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Tavi Gevinson

Book on romance, friendship, & self care from the beloved rookie mag writers and celebrity guest writers

Rookie Mag

Collects articles, interviews, poems, and stories on romance, friendship, and self-care from the online magazine.

Rookie on Love

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Anne Griffin

One of Goodreads' 43 Most Anticipated Reads of 2019 “Beautiful. Intimate. Tearful. Aching and lyrical. So simply and beautifully told.” –Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author "I'm here to remember–all that I have been and all that I will never be again." If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said? At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He’s alone, as usual - though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening, he will raise five toasts to the five people who have meant the most to him. Through these stories - of unspoken joy and regret, a secret tragedy kept hidden, a fierce love that never found its voice - the life of one man will be powerful and poignantly laid bare. Beautifully heart-warming and powerfully felt, the voice of Maurice Hannigan will stay with you long after all is said and done.

Rachel

@rachel181499

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Virginie Despentes; Frank Wynne

Vernon Subutex 1

Yu Miri; Morgan Giles

Tokyo Ueno Station

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Rana Foroohar

Don't Be Evil

Djuna Barnes; T. S. Eliot

Nightwood

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

Alison Bechdel

Fun Home

Eileen Myles

Chelsea Girls

Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries

Felix Salten; Damion Searls; Paul Reitter

Bambi

Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl

Elizabeth Pich

Fungirl: You Are Revolting

Tavi Gevinson, Janet Mock, John Green, Florence Welch, Alessia Cara

Rookie on Love

Anne Griffin

When All Is Said

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Browse by categories

Virginie Despentes; Frank Wynne

Vernon Subutex 1

Yu Miri; Morgan Giles

Tokyo Ueno Station

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Rana Foroohar

Don't Be Evil

Djuna Barnes; T. S. Eliot

Nightwood

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

Alison Bechdel

Fun Home

Eileen Myles

Chelsea Girls

Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries

Felix Salten; Damion Searls; Paul Reitter

Bambi

Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl

Elizabeth Pich

Fungirl: You Are Revolting

Tavi Gevinson, Janet Mock, John Green, Florence Welch, Alessia Cara

Rookie on Love

Anne Griffin

When All Is Said

Get The App