Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

Smart, darkly funny, and life-affirming, How Not to Die Alone is the bighearted debut novel we all need, for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, it's a story about love, loneliness, and the importance of taking a chance when we feel we have the most to lose.

"Off-beat and winning...Gives resiliency and the triumph of the human spirit a good name." --The Wall Street Journal

All Andrew wants is to be normal. That's why his coworkers believe he has the perfect wife and two children waiting at home for him after a long day. But the truth is, his life isn't exactly as people think . . . and his little white lie is about to catch up with him. Because in all of Andrew's efforts to fit in, he's forgotten one important thing: how to really live. And maybe, it's finally time for him to start.

"Roper illuminates Andrew's interior life to reveal not what an odd duck he is, but what odd ducks we all are." --The New York Times Book Review

How Not to Die Alone

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Kentucky

Settling in the swamps of early-nineteenth-century Ohio, the Goodenough family establish an apple orchard that begins a long family battle, and years later, as their youngest son wanders through Gold Rush California, his family's past makes an unexpected appearance.

At the Edge of the Orchard

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Lucky Girls

#hardcover #art #litfic #womenintranslation #travel 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

A Novel

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian | The Millions

An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter

In Maylis de Kerangal's Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she's painting--replicating a wood's essence or a marble's wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.

With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula's apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world's most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.

An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

Painting Time

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#hardcover #fiction #botm #stephsbargainbooks #litfic #richardroper #drama #life #romance 

Georgia

Sisterland

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#hardcover #ianmccewan #atonement #litfic

The Children Act

From bestselling authors, Bodie and Brock Thoene, comes this compelling portrait of an American dustbowl family. Shiloh Autumn transports readers to the Great Depression to experience Depression-era life, from possum hunts to mass migration, Penny Auctions to the Veteran's March on Washington.

Shiloh Autumn

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#hardcover #contemporaryfiction #fiction #literaryfiction #litfic #shortstories #Alarcon #theauroras #latinamerica

Minnesota

Stories

LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles. Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal." And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

The King Is Always above the People

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#paperback #fiction #feminism #youngadult #megwolitzer #bestseller #new #litfic #literaryfiction #womensfiction

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Ohio

A New York Times Bestseller “A powerful coming-of-age story that looks at ambition, friendship, identity, desire, and power from the much-needed female lens." —Bustle “Ultra-readable.” —Vogue From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Interestings, comes an electric novel not just about who we want to be with, but who we want to be. To be admired by someone we admire—we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world. Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined. Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.

The Female Persuasion

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#paperback #fiction #breakfastattiffanys #classic #modernclassic #litfic 

Alabama

One of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century by a writer of neverending interest, newly available in a 50th anniversary edition.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

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#hardcover #fiction #botm #litfic #richardroper #drama #life 

North Carolina

#hardcover #fiction #awardwinningauthor #jesmynward #literaryfiction #litfic 

Texas

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey through Mississippi's past and present"--

Sing, Unburied, Sing

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#hardcover #fiction #gritlit #litfic #woodrell ex library book but otherwise great condition

In 1929, Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the maid for a prominent family in Missouri, chases down justice after her younger sister is one of forty-two people killed in a mysterious explosion at a local dance hall.

The Maid's Version

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Unsheltered

#hardcover #fiction #botm #stephsbargainbooks #richardroper #drama #life #litfic 

Illinois

Small remainder mark on bottom of spine, normak shelf wear to dust jacket, like new. #fiction #hardcover #general #literaryfiction #litfic #mystery #suspense #comingofage #literary #agoraphobia 

If I Fall, If I Die

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#paperback #fiction #love #bookclub #emotional #familystory #drama #litfic 

The triumphant New York Times Bestseller * The Tonight Show Summer Reads Pick * Named one of the best books of the year by People, Vogue, Parade, NPR, and Elle “This is one beautiful book. I was wowed by Keane’s writing and narrative skill—and by what she knows about trouble.” —Stephen King How much can a family forgive? Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, rookie NYPD cops, are neighbors in the suburbs. What happens behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the explosive events to come. In Mary Beth Keane's extraordinary novel, a lifelong friendship and love blossoms between Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born six months apart. One shocking night their loyalties are divided, and their bond will be tested again and again over the next thirty years. Heartbreaking and redemptive, Ask Again, Yes is a gorgeous and generous portrait of the daily intimacies of marriage and the power of forgiveness.

Ask Again, Yes

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 #bookclub #litfic #popular #clubpick #bookclub #mentalhealth #contemporaryfiction #bookstagram #bookrec For similar 🔖Bookmark Journey 📚 titles, click #bookmarkjourneyfiction 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Place at the Table

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#hardcover #action #litfic #regional #kentucky #gritlit

A new collection of stories by the acclaimed author of Kentucky Straight, whom Tobias Wolff has deemed one of the best writers of short fiction in his--or any--generation.

Out of the Woods

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"With his first two novels, David Payne earned the rare combination of critical and commercial success, and established himself as one of our most gifted young novelists." "Now, in Ruin Creek, Payne travels deep into the soul of a troubled and unforgettable family and, along the way, establishes his rightful place in the legion of great Southern writers who know that we can neither escape nor recapture the past." "It is 1954 in Killdeer, North Carolina, and May Tilley, a beautiful young debutante, decides that she wants "a different life from what Mamma and Daddy had." She finds it, in spades, with Jimmy Madden, a former high school basketball hero with the dangerous combination of good looks, a smooth tongue and big, secret dreams." "Soon May finds herself pregnant, and after some serious soul-searching she and Jimmy decide to get married. But times are tough, as Jimmy enters medical school and struggles with his studies, while May adjusts to the strange new worlds of marriage and motherhood. Day-to-day life gets in the way of the couple's dreams, and they gradually realize that love and passion aren't always enough to preserve a failing marriage. Yet they stay together for more than a decade, and it is their son Joey who suffers the most as he watches his parents drift further apart. As he tries to cope with the devastation of his family life, Joey turns to his grandfather, Pa, for advice on how to move away from his troubled family and into the world of men - how to see his parents as they are, instead of how he desperately wants them to be." "Conscious at every moment of the bonds and burdens of family, David Payne has written Ruin Creek with the mature authority of a writer who knows the human heart in all its fragility and glory. No reader will come away from this novel unmoved."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ruin Creek

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#hardcover #fiction #litfic #mystery #contemporary #historicalfiction #literaryfiction 

Florida

"From the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, a stunning novel about the disappearance of a Sri Lankan nanny and how the most vulnerable people find their voices. "It began with a crunch of leaves and earth. So early, so cold, the branches shone with ice. I'd returned to collect the songbirds. They are worth more than their weight in gold." Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works on the island as a nanny and maid--having left her native Sri Lanka to try to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind and raised by relatives. But Nisha has vanished; one evening, she steps out on a mysterious errand and doesn't return. The police write off her disappearance as just another runaway domestic worker, so her employer, Petra, undertakes the investigation. Petra's unravelling of Nisha's last days in Cyprus lead her to Nisha's friends--other maids in the neighborhood--and to the darker side of a migrant's life, where impossible choices leave them vulnerable, captive, and worse. Based on the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus, Christy Lefteri has crafted a poignant, deeply empathetic narrative of the human stories behind the headlines. With infinite tenderness and skill, Songbirds offers a triumphant story of the fight for truth and justice, and of women reclaiming their lost voices"--

Songbirds

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#paperback #fiction #nobelprizewinner #allegory #blindness #nobelprize #bestseller #josesaramago #nytbestseller #litfic 

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" whose victims are confined to a vacant mental hospital, while a single eyewitness to the nightmare guides seven oddly assorted strangers through the barren urban landscape

Blindness

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#paperback #fiction #literaryfiction #trustexercise #comingofage #contemporary #litfic #aapiauthor 

Pennsylvania

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Richard Roper

How Not to Die Alone

Tracy Chevalier

At the Edge of the Orchard

Nell Freudenberger

Lucky Girls

Maylis de Kerangal; Jessica Moore (Translator)

Painting Time

Richard Roper

How Not to Die Alone

Curtis Sittenfeld

Sisterland

Ian McEwan

The Children Act

Bodie Thoene; Brock Thoene

Shiloh Autumn

Daniel Alarcón

The King Is Always above the People

Meg Wolitzer

The Female Persuasion

Truman Capote

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Richard Roper

How Not to Die Alone

Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Daniel Woodrell

The Maid's Version

Barbara Kingsolver

Unsheltered

Richard Roper

How Not to Die Alone

Michael Christie

If I Fall, If I Die

Mary Beth Keane

Ask Again, Yes

Susan Rebecca White

A Place at the Table

Chris Offutt

Out of the Woods

David Payne

Ruin Creek

Christy Lefteri

Songbirds

José Saramago; Giovanni Pontiero (Translator)

Blindness

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise