Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

Reading As a Way of Life

Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Readillustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it. Through three sections--Play, Transgression, and Insight--which focus on three ways of thinking about reading, Books Promiscuously Read moves among and considers many poems, novels, stories, and works of nonfiction. The prose is shot through with quotations reflecting the way readers think through the words of others. Books Promiscuously Read is a tribute to the whole lives readers live in their books, and aims to recommit people to those lives. As White writes, "What matters is staying attuned to an ordinary, unflashy, mutely persistent miracle; that all the books to be read, and all the selves to be because we have read them, are still there, still waiting, still undiminished in their power. It is an astonishing joy."

Books Promiscuously Read

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Iowa

A Novel

A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair
 
One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man--a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both.
 
A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year

The Lesser Bohemians

2d074aca-bec5-4226-95bd-81a7a14f6946-1

Hal Lindsey

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

Hal Lindsedy's first novel, Blood Moon, spans the centuries--from Genesis to the 21st century--bringing to life biblical and historical characters and creating fictional heroes and villains you will never forget.

Blood Moon

69a74e51-abea-4078-bcbf-e01beba1a48a-1

Paula Bomer

Arkansas

A woman and her niece are bound together and driven apart by loves, desires, frustrations, and addictions.

East Berlin, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eva, a retired nurse, makes it through her day on a combination of stimulants and sleeping pills, wine and brandy. She finds fleeting joy in American jazz and blues records, and occasional visits from her married lover. Her friendly teenaged neighbor is her closest companion. Then her American niece, Maggie, arrives in Berlin. Eva is thrilled--Maggie is just the companion she's been seeking. But happiness begins to slide from Eva's grasp as Maggie's own fierce drug addiction reveals itself.

Tante Eva is a story that deftly takes in decades of family life and German history, estrangement, joys, and disappointments. It is a portrait of East Berlin in the years after the Wall came down, and of an overlooked woman pursuing happiness and sexual pleasure. It is the finest book yet from Paula Bomer, an author whose work Jonathan Franzen describes as "some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering."

♻️ Tante Eva

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The Bakerton Stories





The bestselling author of Faith and The Condition returns with a collection of unforgettable short stories inspired by a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and the people who call it home.

When her iconic novel Baker Towers was published in 2005, it was hailed as a modern classic--"compassionate and powerful . . . a song of praise for a too-little-praised part of America, for the working families whose toils and constancy have done so much to make the country great" (Chicago Tribune). Its young author, Jennifer Haigh, was "an expert natural storyteller with an acute sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times).

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding--sometimes cruelly--succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming. A solitary middle-aged woman tastes unexpected love when a young man returns to town. With a revolving cast of characters--many familiar to fans of Baker Towers--these stories explore how our roots, the families and places in which we are raised, shape the people we eventually become.

News from Heaven looks unflinchingly at the conflicting human desires for escape and for connection, and explores the enduring hold of home.

News from Heaven

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Mia McKenzie

Michigan

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A woman who’s used to going solo discovers that there’s one relationship she can’t run away from in this “endearing and hilarious” (BuzzFeed) novel, a probing examination of the complexities of family, queerness, race, and community “Razor-sharp and outrageously funny, Skye Falling is an absolute winner.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo When she was twenty-six and broke, Skye didn’t think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye still moves through life entirely—and unrepentantly—on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Maybe her junior high classmates weren’t wrong when they voted her “Most Likely to Be Single” instead of “Most Ride-or-Die Homie,” but at least she’s always been free to do as she pleases. Then a twelve-year-old girl tracks Skye down during one of her brief visits to her hometown of Philadelphia and informs Skye that she’s “her egg.” Skye’s life is thrown into sharp relief and she decides that it might be time to actually try to have a meaningful relationship with another human being. Spoiler alert: It’s not easy. Things get even more complicated when Skye realizes that the woman she tried and failed to pick up the other day is the girl’s aunt, and now it’s awkward. All the while, her brother is trying to get in touch, her mother is being bewilderingly kind, and the West Philly pool halls and hoagie shops of her youth have been replaced by hipster cafés. With its endearingly prickly narrator and a cast of characters willing to both challenge her and catch her when she falls, this novel is a clever, moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.

Skye Falling

b57e99f6-7150-4aab-a5b1-608f55287461-1

Mark Twain

Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land

The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrims' Progress

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Elizabeth Berg

From the beloved bestselling author ofHome SafeandThe Year of Pleasures,comes a wonderful new novel about women and men reconnecting with one another-and themselves-at their fortieth high school reunion.

To each of the men and women inThe Last Time I Saw You, this reunion means something different-a last opportunity to say something long left unsaid, an escape from the bleaker realities of everyday life, a means to save a marriage on the rocks, or an opportunity to bond with a slightly estranged daughter, if only over what her mother should wear.

As the onetime classmates meet up over the course of a weekend, they discover things that will irrevocably affect the rest of their lives. For newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, the reunion brings with it the possibility of finally attracting the attention of the class heartthrob, Pete Decker. For the ever self-reliant, ever left-out Mary Alice Mayhew, it’s a chance to reexamine a painful past. For Lester Heseenpfeffer, a veterinarian and widower, it is the hope of talking shop with a fellow vet-or at least that’s what he tells himself. For Candy Armstrong, the class beauty, it’s the hope of finding friendship before it is too late.

As Dorothy, Mary Alice, Lester, Candy, and the other classmates converge for the reunion dinner, four decades melt away: Desires and personalities from their youth reemerge, and new discoveries are made. For so much has happened to them all. And so much can still happen.

In this beautiful novel, Elizabeth Berg deftly weaves together stories of roads taken and not taken, choices made and opportunities missed, and the possibilities of second chances.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Last Time I Saw You

ae3cc90b-f70b-4b83-b332-acfad0b16a23

New York

A powerful suspense story narrated by a young girl who must fend for herself and her little brother after a brutal bear attack While camping with her family on a remote island, five-year-old Anna awakes in the night to the sound of her mother screaming. A rogue black bear, three hundred pounds of fury, is attacking the family's campsite -- and pouncing on her parents as prey. At her dying mother's faint urging, Anna manages to get her brother into the family's canoe and paddle away. But when the canoe runs aground on the edge of the woods, the sister and brother must battle hunger, the elements, and a wilderness alive with danger. Lost and completely alone, they find that their only hope resides in Anna's heartbreaking love for her family, and her struggle to be brave when nothing in her world seems safe anymore. This is a story with a small narrator and a big heart. Cameron gracefully plumbs Anna's young perspective on family, responsibility, and hope, charting both a tragically premature loss of innocence and a startling evolution as Anna reasons through the impossible situations that confront her. Lean and confident, and told in the innocent and honest voice of a five-year-old, THE BEAR is a transporting tale of loss -- but also a poignant and surprisingly funny adventure about love and the raw instincts that enable us to survive.

The Bear

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#literary #adult #relations #hardcover #fiction 

Massachusetts

Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love. Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD—and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless—one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives. In Want, Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things—and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.

Want

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A Novel 

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist--"one of the United States' finest writers," according to Joshua Ferris, "full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity"--now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children's rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape--as his mentor suspected he could--to spread word about the atrocities? 
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.

The Book of Aron

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #powerful #poetic #fiction 

California

"A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life." --Marlon James

"Highly recommend Brother by David Chariandy--concise and intense, elegiac short novel of devastation and hope." --Joyce Carol Oates, via Twitter

WINNER--Toronto Book Award
WINNER--Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
WINNER--Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction

Esquire Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Best Books of the Year
Guardian Best Books of the Year
New York Public Library Best Books of the Year

Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
PEN Open Book Awards Longlist
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Longlist
The Believer Book Awards Longlist

"Every sentence feels like a polished stone." --Entertainment Weekly

"Elegiac and incendiary" --Boston Globe

"A dwarf star of mourning and regret" --Wall Street Journal

"Elegant, vital, indubitably dope" --Guardian

"An important, vital and groundbreaking book" --Medium

"An absolutely mammoth literary talent" --KIESE LAYMON

"Riveting, composed, charged with feeling" --MADELEINE THIEN

In luminous, incisive prose, a startling new literary talent explores masculinity, race, and sexuality against a backdrop of simmering violence during the summer of 1991.

One sweltering summer in the Park, a housing complex outside of Toronto, Michael and Francis are coming of age and learning to stomach the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. While their Trinidadian single mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home, Francis helps the days pass by inventing games and challenges, bringing Michael to his crew's barbershop hangout, and leading escapes into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves.

Propelled by the beats and styles of hip hop, Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow.

Honest and insightful in its portrayal of kinship, community, and lives cut short, David Chariandy's Brother is an emotional tour de force that marks the arrival of a stunning new literary voice.

Brother

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Richard Russo

The lives of Jack and Joy Griffin always seem to come back to Cape Cod, where they honeymooned, as they experience the ups and downs of life, including the deaths of Jack's parents, the marriage of their daughter, and Jack and Joy's divorce.

That Old Cape Magic

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Returning home for a family reunion, Laura Bartone and her brother, Steve, are stunned by their sister's allegations of shocking behavior on the part of their mother, and must come to terms with the truth and lies within their family.

The Art of Mending

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From the author whose work The New Yorker calls strong and timeless, True to Form tenderly follows a 14-year-old girl's lessons in life after the death of her mother.

True to Form

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#hardcover #fiction #ianmcwan #fiction #historical #romance #mystery #espionage #literary

Sweet Tooth

7df12168-38f5-41a5-98ff-b616649cfad2-1

#hardcover #fiction #la #instagramrecommends #literaryfiction #literary #vera #caroledgarian #threestagesofamazement #earthquake 

North Carolina

New York Times bestselling author Carol Edgarian delivers an astonishing feat of imagination, a grand adventure set in 1906 San Francisco—a city leveled by quake and fire—featuring an indomitable heroine coming of age in the aftermath of catastrophe and her quest for love and reinvention. Meet Vera Johnson, the uncommonly resourceful fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose, notorious proprietor of San Francisco’s most legendary bordello and ally to the city’s corrupt politicians. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds—the madam’s alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the violent, debt ridden domestic life of the family paid to raise her. On the morning of the great quake, Vera’s worlds collide. As the shattered city burns and looters vie with the injured, orphaned, and starving, Vera and her guileless sister, Pie, are cast adrift. Vera disregards societal norms and prejudices and begins to imagine a new kind of life. She collaborates with Tan, her former rival, and forges an unlikely family of survivors. Together they navigate their way beyond disaster. In Vera, Carol Edgarian creates a cinematic, deeply entertaining world, in which honor and fates are tested; notions of sex, class, and justice are turned upside down; and love is hard-won. A ravishing, heartbreaking, and profound affirmation of youth and tenacity, Vera’s story brings to life legendary characters—tenor Enrico Caruso, indicted mayor Eugene Schmitz and boss Abe Ruef, tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels—as well as an unforgettable cast that includes Vera’s young lover, Bobby, protector of the city’s tribe of orphans, and three generations of a Chinese family competing and conspiring with Vera. This richly imagined, timely tale of improbable outcomes and alliances takes hold from the first page, gifting readers with remarkable scenes of devastation, renewal, and joy. Told with unflinching candor and wit, Vera celebrates the audacious fortitude of its young heroine and marks a stunning achievement by an inventive and generous writer.

Vera

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#hardcover #historicalfiction #paris #artfiction #literary
Small stain on the bottom of the book, does not effect the page surfaces. See photos. 

Georgia

Bewitching art experts and enthusiasts alike for centuries, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries hang today in the Cluny Museum in Paris.In each, an elegant lady and a unicorn stand or sit on an island of grass surrounded by a rich background of animals and flowers. Little is known about them except that they were woven toward the end of the fifteenth century and bear the coat of arms of a wealthy family from Lyons.Tracy Chevalier takes readers back to the tapestries’ creation, giving life to the men who designed and made them, as well as the wives, daughters, and servants who exercised subtle (and not so subtle) influences over their men. Like the many different strands of wool and silk that were woven together into one cloth, the lives and fates of these people entwine in complex patterns, crisscrossing as they seek desires sensual and spiritual, temporal and eternal.An extraordinary story exquisitely told, Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicornweaves history and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry that rivals in grace and grandeur the masterpiece that inspired it.

The Lady and the Unicorn

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Vermont

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Colorado

A dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina

A Phenomenal Book Club Pick * "Sometimes you just step into a book and let it wash over you, like you're swimming under a big, sparkling night sky."--Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--The Millions, Electric Lit, Lit Hub, Book Riot

There is one every generation, a seer who keeps the stories.

Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors' origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.

Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine's singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love--filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.

Woman of Light

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One of today's most provocative literary writers--the author of the acclaimed Sunshine State and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star--captures the complicated and confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about love addiction, toxic masculinity, and a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. Nina is a struggling writer, an addict, a cheater, and a liar. After dropping out of college to go to rehab, she wants more than anything to leave her past behind, start her life over, and find love. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a polyamorous lesbian; Odessa, a single parent with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, a sleazy editor whose stories never quite add up; Daniel, a newly sober indie rocker whose tour is over before it starts; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. Nina's quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human--a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in a world where we're fundamentally alone.

True Love

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Paula McLain

Kansas

The Paris Wife

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#hardcover #fiction #bestseller #contemporary #literary 

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen-- Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs-- sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. Their conversations cause them to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles. -- adapted from jacket

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Heather Cass White

Books Promiscuously Read

Eimear McBride

The Lesser Bohemians

Hal Lindsey

Blood Moon

Paula Bomer

♻️ Tante Eva

Jennifer Haigh

News from Heaven

Mia McKenzie

Skye Falling

Mark Twain

The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrims' Progress

Elizabeth Berg

The Last Time I Saw You

Claire Cameron

The Bear

Lynn Steger Strong

Want

Jim Shepard

The Book of Aron

David Chariandy

Brother

Richard Russo

That Old Cape Magic

Elizabeth Berg

The Art of Mending

Elizabeth Berg

True to Form

Ian McEwan

Sweet Tooth

Carol Edgarian

Vera

Tracy Chevalier

The Lady and the Unicorn

Mia McKenzie

Skye Falling

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Woman of Light

Sarah Gerard

True Love

Paula McLain

The Paris Wife

Kevin Barry

Night Boat to Tangier

J. M. Coetzee

The Schooldays of Jesus