Carina Chocano

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Oklahoma

On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, and Other Mixed Messages

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY



"If Hollywood's treatment of women leaves you wanting, you'll find good, heady company inYou Play the Girl."--ELLE



As a kid in the 1970s and 80s, Carina Chocano was confused by the mixed messages all around her; messages that told her who she could be--and who she couldn't. Dutifully absorbing all the conflicting information the culture has to offer on how to be a woman, Chocano grappled with sexed up sidekicks, princesses waiting to be saved, and morally infallible angels who seemed to have no opinions of their own. She learned that "the girl" is not a person,but a man's idea of what a woman should be--she's whatever the hero needs her to be in order to become himself. It wasn't until she spent five years as a movie critic, and was laid off just after her daughter was born, however, that she really came to understand how the stories the culture tells us about what it means to be a girl limit our lives and shape our destinies. She resolved to rewrite her own story.



InYou Play the Girl, Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. Moving from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, from Flashdance to Frozen, from the progressive '70s through the backlash '80s, the glib '90s, and the pornified aughts--and at stops in between--she explains how growing up in the shadow of "the girl" taught her to think about herself and the world and what it means to raise a daughter in the face of these contorted reflections. In the tradition of Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Susan Sontag, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more fluid than wethink, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.

You Play the Girl

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David Sedaris

Florida

A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of "Naked", presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. A number one national bestseller now in paperback.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

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Louisiana

Jen Lancaster

One Narcissist's Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pi e Is Not the Answer

A hilarious, refreshingly honest new memoir by the author of Bitter Is the New Black and Bright Lights, Big Ass sheds new light on the subject of surly neighbors, marriage, urban life, beauty, the fitness craze, and other idiosyncrasies of the modern world. Original.

Such a Pretty Fat

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Paul Loeb

A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear

In The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a phrase borrowed from Billie Holliday, the editor of Soul of a Citizen brings together fifty stories and essays that range across nations, eras, wars, and political movements. Danusha Goska, an Indiana activist with a paralyzing physical disability, writes about overcoming political immobilization, drawing on her history with the Peace Corps and Mother Teresa. Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, finds value in seemingly doomed or futile actions taken by oppressed peoples. Rosemarie Freeney Harding recalls the music that sustained the civil rights movement, and Paxus Calta-Star recounts the powerful vignette of an 18-year-old who launched the overthrow of Bulgaria's dictatorship. Many of the essays are new, others classic works that continue to inspire. Together, these writers explore a path of heartfelt community involvement that leads beyond despair to compassion and hope. The voices collected in The Impossible Will Take a Little While will help keep us all working for a better world despite the obstacles.

The Impossible Will Take a Little While

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Nora Ephron

And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

A collection of essays offers a humorous look at the ups and downs of being a woman of a certain age, discussing the tribulations of maintenance and trying to stop the clock, menopause, and empty nests.

I Feel Bad about My Neck

d80ed9cd-c8d7-4b6c-9e4f-c85ad3927a4a-1

Aminatou Sow

Ann Friedman

Never read. Dust jacket shows very minor shelving marks (mainly on back) 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Maryland

How We Keep Each Other Close

A close friendship is one of the most influential and important relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that! But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for the long haul. Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls. Aminatou and Ann define Big Friendship as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts. And they should know: the two have had moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration, of profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga. Through interviews with friends and experts, they have come to understand that their struggles are not unique. And that the most important part of a Big Friendship is making the decision to invest in one another again and again. An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.

Big Friendship

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Ann Patchett

Washington

Offering an invitation into her personal life, the noted author shares the stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

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#paperback #humor #motherhood #essays #shortstories

Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words





"Kimberly Harrington deftly and hilariously uncovers all of the lies and bullshit women are told about motherhood. This book made me laugh, sure, but it also made me feel seen."  -- Jennifer Romolini, chief content officer at Shondaland.com and author of Weird in a World That's Not

An emotionally honest, arresting, and funny collection of essays about motherhood and adulthood.

"Being a mother is a gift."

Where's my receipt

Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington's poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It's a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure ("PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. CON: They're really crappy.") With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways, highlighting this time in the middle--midlife, the middle years of childhood, how women are stuck in the middle of so much. It's a place of elation, exhaustion, and time whipping past at warp speed. Finally, it's a quiet space to consider the girl you were, the mother you are, and the woman you are always becoming.

Amateur Hour

2928371b-2298-4aa3-87e0-3c6994ed08fd-1

#hardcover #nonfiction #humor #comedy #amypoehler #autobiography #biography #essays 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

In a perfect world . . . We'd get to hang out with Amy Poehler, watching dumb movies, listening to music, and swapping tales about our coworkers and difficult childhoods. Because in a perfect world, we'd all be friends with Amy—someone who seems so fun, is full of interesting stories, tells great jokes, and offers plenty of advice and wisdom (the useful kind, not the annoying kind you didn't ask for, anyway). Unfortunately, between her Golden Globe-winning role on Parks and Recreation, work as a producer and director, place as one of the most beloved SNL alumni and cofounder of the Upright Citizens' Brigade, involvement with the website Smart Girls at the Party, frequent turns as acting double for Meryl Streep, and her other gig as the mom of two young sons, she's not available for movie night. Luckily we have the next best thing: Yes Please, Amy's hilarious and candid book. A collection of stories, thoughts, ideas, lists, and haikus from the mind of one of our most beloved entertainers, Yes Please offers Amy's thoughts on everything from her "too safe" childhood outside of Boston to her early days in New York City, her ideas about Hollywood and "the biz," the demon that looks back at all of us in the mirror, and her joy at being told she has a "face for wigs." Yes Please is chock-full of words and wisdom to live by.

Yes Please

a20c676c-0246-4e30-a47f-8fbc6c62604f

Richard Reynolds

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

West Virginia

Stories, Poems, Essays

On Doctoring

1ba6fa2e-fc84-4e54-b166-733667965492-1

#comedy #hardcover #autobiography #memoir #amypoehler #funny  #snl #essays #humor #nonfiction 

Indiana

Lena Dunham

Minnesota

A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Includes two new essays! NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, AND LIBRARY JOURNAL For readers of Nora Ephron, Tina Fey, and David Sedaris, this hilarious, wise, and fiercely candid collection of personal essays establishes Lena Dunham--the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO's Girls--as one of the most original young talents writing today. In Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one's way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told. "Take My Virginity (No Really, Take It)" is the account of Dunham's first time, and how her expectations of sex didn't quite live up to the actual event ("No floodgate had been opened, no vault of true womanhood unlocked"); "Girls & Jerks" explores her former attraction to less-than-nice guys--guys who had perfected the "dynamic of disrespect" she found so intriguing; "Is This Even Real?" is a meditation on her lifelong obsession with death and dying--what she calls her "genetically predestined morbidity." And in "I Didn't F*** Them, but They Yelled at Me," she imagines the tell-all she will write when she is eighty and past caring, able to reflect honestly on the sexism and condescension she has encountered in Hollywood, where women are "treated like the paper thingies that protect glasses in hotel bathrooms--necessary but infinitely disposable." Exuberant, moving, and keenly observed, Not That Kind of Girl is a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle that is growing up. "I'm already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you," Dunham writes. "But if I can take what I've learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine will have been worthwhile." Praise for Not That Kind of Girl "The gifted Ms. Dunham not only writes with observant precision, but also brings a measure of perspective, nostalgia and an older person's sort of wisdom to her portrait of her (not all that much) younger self and her world. . . . As acute and heartfelt as it is funny."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "It's not Lena Dunham's candor that makes me gasp. Rather, it's her writing--which is full of surprises where you least expect them. A fine, subversive book."--David Sedaris "This book should be required reading for anyone who thinks they understand the experience of being a young woman in our culture. I thought I knew the author rather well, and I found many (not altogether welcome) surprises."--Carroll Dunham "Witty, illuminating, maddening, bracingly bleak . . . [Dunham] is a genuine artist, and a disturber of the order."--The Atlantic

Not That Kind of Girl

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Trevor Noah

Red dot at the bottom of book shown in picture

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Hawaii

Stories from a South African Childhood (Adapted for Young Readers)

The host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, shares his personal story and the injustices he faced while growing up half black, half white in South Africa under and after apartheid in this New York Times bestselling young readers' adaptation of his adult memoir.
 
"A piercing reminder that every mad life--even yours--could end up a masterpiece." --JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling author

We do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. . . . We don't see them as people.

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist--and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government.

In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself thanks to his mom's unwavering love and indomitable will.
 
This honest and poignant memoir adapted from the #1 New York Times bestseller Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood will astound and inspire readers as well as offer a fascinating perspective on South Africa's tumultuous racial history.
 
BORN A CRIME IS SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING OSCAR WINNER LUPITA NYONG'O!

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime

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Marina Keegan

Anne Fadiman

Pennsylvania

Essays and Stories

"An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her deeply affecting last essay for The Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. Even though she was just twenty-two years old when she died, Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, capture the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. Her short story, "Cold Pastoral," was published in NewYorker.com just months after her death. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories, which, like The Last Lecture, articulate the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be, and how we harness our talents to impact the world"--

The Opposite of Loneliness

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"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book.
Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).

Praise for When You Are Engulfed in Flames:

"Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris...defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life." --Kirkus Reviews

This latest collection proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he's also getting better....Sedaris's best stuff will still--after all this time--move, surprise, and entertain." --Booklist

Table of Contents:

It's Catching
Keeping Up
The Understudy
This Old House
Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?
Road Trips
What I Learned
That's Amore
The Monster Mash
In the Waiting Room
Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle
Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool
Memento Mori
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need
Town and Country
Aerial
The Man in the Hut
Of Mice and Men
April in Paris
Crybaby
Old Faithful
The Smoking Section

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

6ac2fb41-9837-4ff8-9d46-e3330d80ecab-1

Richard Greenberg

Never read so no spin crease. No dust sleeve. 

Nebraska

Causes and Causeries

In Rules for Others to Live By, Pulitzer finalist and Tony Award winning playwright Richard Greenberg shares stories from his life. Here are observations from two decades of residence on a three-block stretch of New York City and musings from his brilliant, if not a little unusual, mind. Spanning a range of conversational topics from friendship to writing, urban life to visiting parents, health crises to hypochondria and other paranoid tendencies, Greenberg's distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and idiosyncrasies.

Rules for Others to Live By

7b29262b-8673-49f5-9d0c-10140d8ef7c8-1

#hardcover #jonathanfranzen #essays #nonfiction 

California

Essays

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like "a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them." For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.

Franzen's great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one's prejudices, he writes, literature "invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you." Whatever his subject, Franzen's essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He's frank about birds, too (they kill "everything imaginable"), but his reporting and reflections on them--on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica--are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.

Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

The End of the End of the Earth

6bdb7f1e-645c-4818-80ee-51e780dc03c5-1

#hardcover #botm #india #memoir 
#fiction #nonfiction #soldout #essays #fiction 

One Day None of this Will Matter

Lee Gutkind

Connecticut

True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

Collects the stories of nurses at all stages of their careers as they discuss their experiences and their profession.

I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

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The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.  

"The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to grips with the power of struggles, failures, and triumphs alike." —Publisher's Weekly

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. 

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. 

A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. 

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books (author of The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

Michigan

The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. "Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self." When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks' short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman--Tom's brilliant assistant Sooki--with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer's eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo's children's books (author of the upcoming The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz's Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author's grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark--and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

These Precious Days

0fd0a0f5-39df-4d11-bd68-63b315c8119d-1

Texas

How the French Talk about Love--Photographs and Stories

From award-winning journalist and filmmaker Stefania Rousselle, a stunning collection of photographs and essays that seek to understand the universality of love

Journalist and filmmaker Stefania Rousselle found herself overwhelmed and dejected with the horrors of the news after covering terrorist attacks, human trafficking, and the rise of extremism. To renew her faith in humanity, she took off on a solo road trip across France, determined to see if love still exists. Traveling from village to village, farming towns to industrial cities, heart to heart, Rousselle sought out ordinary women and men, all to ask them one question, What is love?

Collecting more than 90 personal testimonies, each one moving and beautiful in its own way, alongside over 100 intimate photographs, Rousselle reveals the many facets of love, and discovers that love can still be found even in the darkest of places. From a baker in Normandy to a shepherd in the Pyrenees, from a tree trimmer in Martinique to a mail woman in the Alps, Amour is a visual testament to love in all its many forms.

Amour

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David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn't it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives -- a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.

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Carina Chocano

You Play the Girl

David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Jen Lancaster

Such a Pretty Fat

Paul Loeb

The Impossible Will Take a Little While

Nora Ephron

I Feel Bad about My Neck

David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Aminatou Sow; Ann Friedman

Big Friendship

Ann Patchett

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Kimberly Harrington

Amateur Hour

Amy Poehler

Yes Please

Richard Reynolds and John Stone

On Doctoring

Amy Poehler

Yes Please

Lena Dunham

Not That Kind of Girl

Trevor Noah

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime

Marina Keegan; Anne Fadiman

The Opposite of Loneliness

David Sedaris

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Richard Greenberg

Rules for Others to Live By

Jonathan Franzen

The End of the End of the Earth

Scaachi Koul

One Day None of this Will Matter

Lee Gutkind

I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

Ann Patchett

These Precious Days

Stefania Rousselle

Amour

David Sedaris

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim