Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

North Carolina

A Novel

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “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.

Trust Exercise

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Texas

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Arizona

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
 
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.
 
As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

Fugitive Pieces

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Maine

The Book of Dead Birds

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#hardcover #fiction #adult #literary #prizewinner #nationalbookaward #friendships #acting 

Minnesota

#paperback #fiction #smalltown #prizewinner #americanwest #contemporary

The events of that small-town summer forever alter David Hayden's view of his family: his self-effacing father, a sheriff who never wears his badge; his clear sighted mother; his uncle, a charming war hero and respected doctor; and the Hayden's lively, statuesque Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations are at the heart of the story. It is a tale of love and courage, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.

Montana 1948

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#paperback #nonfiction #prizewinner #prixgoncourt #history #fascism 

Iowa

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Boston Globe, and Literary Hub Winner of the 2017 Goncourt Prize, this behind-the-scenes account of the manipulation, hubris, and greed that together led to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria brilliantly dismantles the myth of an effortless victory and offers a dire warning for our current political crisis. February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi officials is being held in secret in the plush lounge of the Reichstag. They are there to extract funds for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its Chancellor. This opening scene sets a tone of consent that will lead to the worst possible repercussions. March 12, 1938, the annexation of Austria is on the agenda: A grotesque day intended to make history—the newsreels capture a motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But behind Goebbels’s splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria. The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss—a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, and vulgar threats—all reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character or the determination of a people that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff. With this vivid, compelling history, Éric Vuillard warns against the peril of willfully blind acquiescence, and offers a reminder that, ultimately, the worst is not inescapable.

The Order of the Day

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Utah

"The poems in The Falls dive down and emerge with the treasures of a deep interior life. A connection with the idiosyncratic and fiercely passionate poet Charlotte Mew offers a key to Mohn-Slate's appreciation for the wildness that can lurk beneath social oppression, and the necessary freedom of expressive art."
-- APRIL BERNARD, author of Brawl & Jag

"The Falls by Emily Mohn-Slate is a courageous book teeming with honesty and rage. These poems risk writing motherhood in wildly unpopular ways, telling the truth of mother as 'woman, ' mother as 'human.' Mohn-Slate breaks the code of the status quo with slicing precision and line breaks that cut in perfect seams. This feminist voice seethes with desire, like the woman who is drawn to the falls: I wanted/to touch beauty. It was like/a tornado pulled me in. Even while the hand of something immense hangs above, Mohn-Slate breathes a love of all things. She
believes anyway, she forges ahead into the red worlds of her beloved Charlotte Mew, her guide beyond the grave, who tells her: Red is the strangest pain to bear. The skillful restraint in the speaker's voice raises the stakes-
this is pragmatism over a well of fury. We get the details, but we feel the fire beneath. In the midst of all of this living, Mohn-Slate is a fierce romantic--wanting what's right and real, even as she sees the traps and tangles of the prices paid. She's going in--and we, lucky readers, get to follow her."
-- JAN BEATTY, author of The Body Wars

"In The Falls, Mohn-Slate crafts rooms to play out the large-scale tragedies and the seemingly small moments, and is so very good at finding the place where the two meet, sing out, and then part ways again. With lush and precise language, we're repeatedly faced with the question: how do we live alongside others without disappearing from the world ourselves? Her voice is candid, collected, and surprising. It's a balance we desperately need to help make sense of our lives."
-- SARA GELSTON, author of Odette

"If there was ever a book to show us the utility of poems, their tough uses, their possibilities as tools--as knives or needles--it is The Falls by Emily Mohn-Slate. In this book, she shows us how poems organize and define a life, give it shape and meaning, and how poetry has the power to render cataclysm or disappointment into art. Mohn-Slate is a master-describer, and these poems show us how the lived life with its losses, loves, burdens and joys, when contained in the civilizing bounds of verse, becomes graspable, and the poem becomes something to be taken up and used. This is a startling book and an important and memorable debut."
-- MARK WUNDERLICH, author of God of Nothingness

The Falls

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The “volcanically sexy” (USA Today) bestseller about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction.

The Paying Guests

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#paperback #fiction #likenew #omarelakkad #scotiabankgiller #prizewinner

Washington

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War--a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.

"Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." --The New York Times Book Review

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.
 
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir's life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.

What Strange Paradise

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Very good condition #paperback #fiction #small-town #prizewinner #pulitzerprizewinner #pulitzer #anythingispossible #elizabethstrout

New Jersey

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this “compulsively readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout “This book, this writer, are magnificent.”—Ann Patchett Winner of The Story Prize • A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book • One of USA Today’s top 10 books of the year Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.

Anything Is Possible

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Very good condition #paperback #nobelprize #nobelprizewinner #prizewinner #redhairedwoman

The Red-Haired Woman

#paperback #orhanpamuk #nobelprize #nobelprizewinner #prizewinner

A New Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely's beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

The Black Book

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#paperback #translated #mystery #thriller #grief #prizewinner #brageprize #love #death #foreign 

Mississippi

Shortlisted for the 2017 Brage Prize. Fanny, a 17-year-old high school senior, has lost both her parents in a car accident. Granted permission to live independently in the family home located on the outskirts of a small Norwegian town, the days pass by as she performs her daily routine: going to school, maintaining the house, chopping and stacking wood, and keeping the weeds at bay. As Fanny grieves and attempts to come to terms with the sad circumstances of her life, a fairy tale-like world full of new possibilities begins to emerge around her. Written by Rune Christiansen, one of Norway's most exciting literary talents, and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest is a beautiful, poetic portrait of grief, friendship, independence and transgression.

Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest

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#fiction #paperback #girlpower #thepower #dystopian #naomialderman #adult #prizewinner #scifi 

New York

One of the New York Times's Ten Best Books of 2017A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2017One of the Washington Post's Ten Best Books of 2017An NPR Best Book of 2017One of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Books of 2017A Bustle Best Book of 2017A Paste Magazine Best Novel of 2017A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction One of President Obama's favorite reads of 2017 "The Power is our era's The Handmaid's Tale." --Ron Charles, Washington Post "Novels based on premises like the one at the core of The Power can quickly become little more than thought experiments, but Alderman dodges this trap deftly -- her writing is beautiful, and her intelligence seems almost limitless. She also has a pitch-dark sense of humor that she wields perfectly." --Michael Schaub, NPR A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Amazon Best Book of 2017 **WINNER OF THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION** What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power? In THE POWER, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power--they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, THE POWER is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

The Power

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#paperback #annemichaels #fiction #fugitivepieces #prizewinner #womensprize 

Pennsylvania

#paperback #jewish #romance #literature #eveharris #prizewinningbook #prizewinner #themanbookerprize #novel

19-year-old Chani lives in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of North West London. She has never had physical contact with a man, but is bound to marry a stranger. The rabbi's wife teaches her what it means to be a Jewish wife, but Rivka has her own questions to answer. Soon, buried secrets, fear and sexual desire bubble to the surface in a story of liberation and choice.

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

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Hardcover edition of Charming Billy, the National Book Award winner by Alice McDermott. Clean; tight pages; spine not broken; no writing, underlining, or highlighting; not smelly. Dust jacket has a few tiny tears and the award sticker is peeling. See photos. #hardcover #fiction #nationalbookaward #prizewinner #literaryfiction #familystory #irishfamilies #newyork #immigrants #novel 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

When the late Billy Lynch's relatives and friends gather together to keep his memory alive, stories are woven and memories relived detailing his life in the close Irish-American community and the intricate feelings that resurface. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

Charming Billy

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Stories

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena--dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.

In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

e1c7054f-8064-41af-963d-b0bdeeaecf6b-1

#literary #prizewinner #Gilead #family #motherhood #faith #philosophy #America #literature 

Abandoning her homeless existence to become a minister's wife, Lila reflects on her hardscrabble life on the run with a canny young drifter and her efforts to reconcile her painful past with her husband's gentle Christian worldview.

Lila

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#paperback #music #violin #prizewinner #fiddler 

Illinois

The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts... and Other Virtuoso Performances by America's Foremost Feature Writer

GENE WEINGARTEN IS THE O. HENRY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM

Simply the best storyteller around, Weingarten describes the world as you think it is before revealing how it actually is--in narratives that are by turns hilarious, heartwarming, and provocative, but always memorable.

Millions of people know the title piece about violinist Joshua Bell, which originally began as a stunt: What would happen if you put a world-class musician outside a Washington, D.C., subway station to play for spare change? Would anyone even notice? The answer was no. Weingarten's story went viral, becoming a widely referenced lesson about life lived too quickly. Other classic stories--the one about "The Great Zucchini," a wildly popular but personally flawed children's entertainer; the search for the official "Armpit of America"; a profile of the typical American nonvoter--all of them reveal as much about their readers as they do their subjects.

The Fiddler in the Subway

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Florida

NAMED A BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, A BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER OF THE MONTH BY POPSUGAR, AND A MOST ANTICIPATED READ OF THE YEAR BY CRIMEREADS Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight. Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out. In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer. Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay. Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client. Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame. About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.

The Anomaly

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#hardcover #internationalbookerprizewinner #prizewinner #obama #senegal #fiction #internationalbookerprize #bookerprize 

Colorado

Selected by students across France to win the the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

At Night All Blood Is Black

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Virginia

"EXQUISITELY HARROWING . . . . Very strange and brilliantly conceived. . . . A sort of metaphysical murder mystery. . . . The murder will stand among the innumerable murders of modern literature as one of the best and most powerfully rendered." A mysterious and haunting tale of romance and murder, that begins with the marriage of a man and a woman in love. But when he inexplicably mistreats his beloved on the night of the wedding, he is in turn murdered by her brothers, and we are left with a strange sense of inevitability and passions gone terribly awry.

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Anne Michaels

Fugitive Pieces

Gayle Brandeis

The Book of Dead Birds

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Larry Watson

Montana 1948

Eric Vuillard; Mark Polizzotti (Translator)

The Order of the Day

Emily Mohn-Slate

The Falls

Sarah Waters

The Paying Guests

Omar El Akkad

What Strange Paradise

Elizabeth Strout

Anything Is Possible

Orhan Pamuk

The Red-Haired Woman

Orhan Pamuk

The Black Book

Rune Christiansen; Kari Dickson (Translator)

Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest

Naomi Alderman

The Power

Anne Michaels

Fugitive Pieces

Eve Harris

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

Alice McDermott

Charming Billy

Anthony Marra

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Marilynne Robinson

Lila

Gene Weingarten

The Fiddler in the Subway

Hervé Le Tellier; Adriana Hunter (Translator)

The Anomaly

David Diop; Anna Moschovakis (Translator)

At Night All Blood Is Black

Gabriel García Márquez

Chronicle of a Death Foretold