Ellen Meister

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Michigan

"The acid-tongued Dorothy Parker is back and once again haunting the halls of the Algonquin with her piercing wit and unexpectedly tender wisdom"--

Dorothy Parker Drank Here

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Nicole Krauss

Mississippi

A Novel

ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE.

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book...Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).

History of Love

35808268-45d6-47cf-933f-381c7d247586-1

Heidi W. Durrow

Minnesota

After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. A first novel. Reprint.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

5e841e55-f6b6-4eaa-8aa9-427fca937d6f-1

Michel Faber

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

Yearning to escape her life of prostitution in 1870s London, Sugar finds her fate entangled in the complicated family life of patron William Rackham, an egotistical perfume magnate. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

The Crimson Petal and the White

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#hardcover #fiction #bookstagram #davidsantosdonaldson #debut #greenland #lgbtq #literary 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York





A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl--in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story - and then Mohammed himself - begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

Greenland

1e8a150a-1283-4c3f-a570-a43cae8eacb6-1

Susie Yang

New Jersey

"White Ivy begins as many coming-to-America stories do: Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant, grows up in a low-income apartment complex in Massachusetts desperate to assimilate with her American peers. She develops a crush on the golden boy Gideon Speyer, whose patrician New England family is the paragon of the WASP ideal. Ivy's mother is a Tiger Mom, berating Ivy regularly when she disapproves of her grades, her looks, her attitude. But that's where the familiar story ends. Because Ivy has a mentor-her grandmother Meifeng- from whom she learns to shoplift to get the things she needs. Ivy develops a taste for winning and for wealth. Years later, when she bumps into Gideon's father, Ivy believes it's destiny. She's worked long and hard to be the right woman for Gideon. But just as they begin dating, another man from Ivy's past appears, and he has his own set of rules. Ivy soon has a foot in two vastly different worlds. The question is: Which will she choose? A coming-of-age story, a love triangle, an exploration of class and race and identity" -- Front jacket flap.

White Ivy

90897e95-a1a5-45d7-8107-055801e24f21-1

#hardcover #fiction #historicalfiction #literary #hemingway #ernesthemingway #novel 

Louisiana

The Paris Wife

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Ethan Hawke

Some dusty scuffing marks to front and back of dust jacket. 

The blistering story of a young man making his Broadway debut in Henry IV just as his marriage implodes--an utterly transfixing book about art and love, fame and heartbreak from the acclaimed actor/writer/director. Hawke's first novel in nearly twenty years is a bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked in rage and sex, longing and despair; and a passionate love letter to the world of theater. A Bright Ray of Darkness showcases Ethan Hawke's gifts as a novelist as never before. Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half-hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying--and narcissistic--Falstaff's of all time. Searing and raw, A Bright Ray of Darkness is a novel about shame and beauty and faith, and the moral power of art.

A Bright Ray of Darkness *First Edition*

f9d20028-7165-4888-bf99-eee491a53e26-1

Mia McKenzie

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

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

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John Banville

Delaware

Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.

The Sea

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#paperback #charlesbaxter #fiction #fiction #contemporary #love #shortstories #literary #romance #adult

Utah

A collection of vignettes set in a coffee shop explores the subtle movements of love between ordinary people. By the author of Believers and Harmony of the World. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

The Feast of Love

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Lorrie Moore

Bestseller
Award Finalist
Solid condition. No tears. Spine intact with no creasing. Light to moderate shelf wear on cover edges. Outside page edges clean. Noticed one dog eared page that has been straightened. Several passages have been underlined throughout the book but not excessively so (see photo examples). Always interesting to see what previous reader(s) think is important enough, interesting enough and/or anything that grabs their attention enough that they might want to refer back to. 

In the Midwest just after the September 11 attacks, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin comes of age amid such challenges as racism, the War on Terror, and cruelty in the name of love, as she leaves her family's farm to attend college and takes a part-time job as a nanny.

A Gate at the Stairs

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Chang-rae Lee

Iowa

His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent.A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community--and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.

A Gesture Life

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Jeff Deutsch

Oregon

From a devoted reader and lifelong bookseller, an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of bookstores

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts--perhaps audaciously--a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations.

In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing--since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection.

In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them.

In Praise of Good Bookstores

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Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar—but you’d never know it by looking at her.

Raised outside of Boston, Ivy’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen—and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.

Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable—it feels like fate.

Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

Kathlene Suzan Sharpe

Poems

Kathlene's poems are like flowers, each carefully grown into a powerful scene with strong nature images and a deep connection to our human experience. "She Planted Her Own Flowers" is a personal tribute to her four years spent in therapy to heal from post traumatic stress disorder. Turn the page and step into this magical world of growth and healing.

She Planted Her Own Flowers

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Lisa Ko

FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth Lisa Ko’s powerful debut, The Leavers, is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. Told from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.

The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist)

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Toni Morrison

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith--in an evocative novel set against late seventeenth-century America, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved. 300,000 first printing.

A Mercy

22f3a409-8bd2-4810-a1e2-aec6f820e2e5-1

Laura van den Berg

P former library book has plastic cover on it and stickers clean pages 

Stories

One of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of O, the Oprah Magazine's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of the BBC's Ten Books to Read in 2020, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020 An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves. In “Lizards,” a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a La Croix–like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and violent consequences, while in “Karolina,” a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what’s left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too close. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of “Slumberland," “that border between magic and annihilation,” and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

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#paperback #fiction #literary #unireading 

Kentucky

A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement.

Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham's intelligence work--tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow--offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening--a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

Don't miss Ian McEwan's new novel, Lessons, coming in September!

The Innocent

5400a062-8f1a-47be-ac4d-3a12cfcfec02-1

Hal Lindsey

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

North Carolina

Specializing in a rare disease that causes children to age drastically, Dr. Henry Moss is confronted with an ethical dilemma when he meets a family whose two children are affected in dramatically different ways by the same disease.

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Ellen Meister

Dorothy Parker Drank Here

Nicole Krauss

History of Love

Heidi W. Durrow

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

Michel Faber

The Crimson Petal and the White

David Santos Donaldson

Greenland

Susie Yang

White Ivy

Paula McLain

The Paris Wife

Ethan Hawke

A Bright Ray of Darkness *First Edition*

Mia McKenzie

Skye Falling

John Banville

The Sea

Charles Baxter

The Feast of Love

Lorrie Moore

A Gate at the Stairs

Chang-rae Lee

A Gesture Life

Jeff Deutsch

In Praise of Good Bookstores

Susie Yang

White Ivy

Kathlene Suzan Sharpe

She Planted Her Own Flowers

Lisa Ko

The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist)

Toni Morrison

A Mercy

Laura van den Berg

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

Ian McEwan

The Innocent

Hal Lindsey

Blood Moon

Nicole Krauss

History of Love

Michael Byers

Long for This World

Nicole Krauss

History of Love

A Bright Ray of Darkness First Edition