Jenny Offill

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

A Novel

From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Weather

71165def-ec9f-4cb7-906c-54549c3f4408-1

Jennifer Egan

South Carolina

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished"--

Manhattan Beach

a15b5311-bdf1-4073-95fe-31cb6aac6859-1

Michigan

Syed M. Masood

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

"Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 90s through to San Francisco in 2016, a comic novel about being Muslim immigrants in modern America"--

The Bad Muslim Discount

22148d55-ae86-4d00-88d1-479ac8542fe7-1

New Jersey

A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany, Wolf Wondratschek "is eccentric, monomaniacal, romantic--his texts areimbued with a wonderful, reckless nonchalance."* Now, hetells a story of a man looking back on his life in an honest Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

Vienna is an uncanny, magical, and sometimes brutally alienating city. The past lives on in the cafes where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone glories of the twentieth century--or maybe just a recent love affair. Here, in one of these cafes, an anonymous narrator meets a strange character, "like someone out of a novel": a decrepit old Russian named Suvorin.

A Soviet pianist of international renown, Suvorin committed career suicide when he developed a violent distaste for the sound of applause. This eccentric gentleman--sometimes charming, sometimes sulky, sometimes disconcertingly frank--knows the end of his life is approaching, and allows himself to be convinced to tell his life story. Over a series of coffee dates, punctuated by confessions, anecdotes, and rages--and by the narrator's schemes to keep his quarry talking--a strained friendship develops between the two men, and it soon becomes difficult to tell who is more dependent on whom.

Rhapsodic and melancholic, with shades of Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Hans Keilson, and Thomas Bernhard, Wolf Wondratschek'sSelf-Portrait with Russian Piano is a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty, music, and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make for them.

"A romantic in a madhouse. To let Wondratschek's voice be drowned in the babble of today's literature would be a colossal mistake." --*Patrick Süskind, international bestselling author ofPerfume: The Story of a Murderer

Self-Portrait with Russian Piano

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Oregon

Ship of Fools 

Diane Cook

Delaware

Helen Phillips meets Miranda July in this daring and imaginative debut novel that explores a moving mother-daughter relationship in a world ravaged by climate change and overpopulation, a suspenseful second book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City--an over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives--is destroying her lungs. But what can Bea do? No one leaves the City anymore, because there is nowhere else to go. But across the country lies the Wilderness State, the last swath of open, protected land left. Here forests and desert plains are inhabited solely by wildlife. People are forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace. As the group slowly learns to live and survive on the unpredictable and often dangerous land, its members battle for power and control and betray and save each other. The farther they roam, the closer they come to their animal soul. To her dismay, Bea discovers that, in fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes, she is losing her in a different way. Agnes is growing wilder and closer to the land, while Bea cannot shake her urban past. As she and Agnes grow further apart, the bonds between mother and daughter are tested in surprising and heartbreaking ways. Yet just as these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, its future is threatened when the Government discovers a new use for the land. Now the migrants must choose to stay and fight for their place in the wilderness, their home, or trust the Rangers and their promises of a better tomorrow elsewhere.

The New Wilderness

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Rómulo Gallegos is best known for being Venezuela's first democratically elected president. But in his native land he is equally famous as a writer responsible for one of Venezuela's literary treasures, the novel Doña Barbara. Published in 1929 and all but forgotten by Anglophone readers, Doña Barbara is one of the first examples of magical realism, laying the groundwork for later authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Following the epic struggle between two cousins for an estate in Venezuela, Doña Barbara is an examination of the conflict between town and country, violence and intellect, male and female. Doña Barbara is a beautiful and mysterious woman--rumored to be a witch--with a ferocious power over men. When her cousin Santos Luzardo returns to the plains in order to reclaim his land and cattle, he reluctantly faces off against Doña Barbara, and their battle becomes simultaneously one of violence and seduction. All of the action is set against the stunning backdrop of the Venezuelan prairie, described in loving detail. Gallegos's plains are filled with dangerous ranchers, intrepid cowboys, and damsels in distress, all broadly and vividly drawn. A masterful novel with an important role in the inception of magical realism, Doña Barbara is a suspenseful tale that blends fantasy, adventure, and romance.

Hailed as "the Bovary of the llano" by Larry McMurtry in his new foreword to this book, Doña Barbarais a magnetic and memorable heroine, who has inspired numerous adaptations on the big and small screens, including a recent television show that aired on Telemundo.

Doña Barbara

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian (London), Kirkus Reviews, and People The Way Things Were opens with the death of Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, a Sanskritist who has not set foot in India for two decades. It falls to his son, Skanda, to return Toby’s body to his birthplace, “a tin-pot kingdom” not worth “one air-gun salute.” This journey takes him halfway around the world and returns him to his family, the drawing-room elite of Delhi, whose narcissism and infighting he has worked hard to escape. It also forces him to reckon with his parents’ marriage, a turbulent love affair that began in passion but ended in pain and futility. The novel takes its title from the Sanskrit word for history, itihasa, whose literal translation is “the way things indeed were.” The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer is both an intimate portrait of a family and a panoramic vision of the last half century of life in Delhi, with Sanskrit woven in as central metaphor and chorus. Through one man’s struggle with his inheritance, it explores the cultural schizophrenia of modern India and the difficulty of building honestly on the past.

The Way Things Were

1aacbeb7-b22d-42e0-9941-74bd4a90cbdc-1

#fiction #mystery #hardcover #thriller #charlesdickens #literature 

Georgia

a novel

The Last Dickens

a4928150-8a0e-409c-b685-c081d617f251-1

#hardcover #fiction #literature #jonathanlethem #mystery #suspense

Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn “One of America’s greatest storytellers.” —Washington Post Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble—caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe’s trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous. . . . Jonathan Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.

The Feral Detective

9c45f7cd-b7ce-4417-ba70-066084f01e2d-1

Tristan Egolf

First edition. Spine not cracked and never read.

Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt

A manic, inventive, and painfully funny debut novel about a town's dirty laundry--and a garbagemen's strike that lets it all hang out.

Lord of the Barn Yard (First Edition HC NEW)

5749bb49-75d5-4582-b6e1-4dca84a4115b-1

#hardcover #contemporary #literature #novel #bestseller #fiction #womensfiction

Kate Klein-Morgan, a successful, thirty-year-old actress with a handsome if controlling manager husband, suddenly finds herself in charge of her own life when her husband leaves her for Sapphire Rose, an outrageously demanding fellow actress on her hit TV series, and questions her role in an industry that values money, fame, and beauty over everything else. A first novel. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Outside In

83f67bb7-dfcb-4ae8-b706-e7a48ff383a0-1

Pennsylvania

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

da49c891-647c-4bbb-9af0-ad2af8998bf2-1

#hardcover #nonfiction #fiction #shortstories #nativeamericanliterature #teaching #education #literature #ela #english

Glencoe's new collection of ethnic anthologies gives students access to a wealth of literature written by some of the best classic authors and the finest contemporary voices. Each anthology, organized thematically into five relevant themes, combines literature and art as powerful expressions of the group's cultural story. Glencoe Native American Literature features the works of writers like William Least Heat-Moon, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Dorris, N. Scott Momaday, and many more!

Glencoe Native American Literature

e8415057-3131-4f97-bc33-dddd793e390e-1

José Saramago

A moving and eloquent fable from the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature offers a unique blend of love and philosophy as a man petitions a boat from the king, finds a crew to volunteer, and sets sail.

The Tale of the Unknown Island

5344b975-e396-452d-9870-a5e4262a1361-1

Robert Louis Stevenson

Colorado

The discovery of a treasure map in Captain Flint's sea chest plunges Jim into a series of adventures as sudden and unexpected as the Captain's arrival at the Admiral Benbow Inn. For Jim, life will never be quite the same again.

Treasure Island

8634412c-ba91-4bf5-96a2-7a661f4c18bb-1

e. e. cummings

Minnesota

Lyrical verses span the career of a twentieth-century American poet, and illuminate his concern for the future of humanity

100 Selected Poems

04376bcd-e5ee-4850-a3a3-6a1a7ddf7a4c-1

James A. Michener

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

Writer Lucas Yoder, editor Shirley Marmelstein, critic and would-be author Karl Streibert, and reader Jane Garland, who treasures the written word, play key roles in a study of the people who create, publish, critique, and enjoy books

The Novel

ec318897-2920-417b-82d8-9a1fae476c00-1

ARC copy in excellent condition, never been read. The wear on the cover is part of the cover design and isn’t actual wear on the book. The cover and all pages are unbent and unmarked. 

Ohio

The Heap ARC

6e9d9110-c78d-49f9-b7c3-614a0c071267-1

Iowa

And Mark, the Match Boy

The beginning of the series of stories about poor boys who rose from rags to riches. Little ragged Dick overcomes povery and scorn to win success as the distinguished Richard Hunter. He in turn, becomes the protector of Mark, the Match boy.

Ragged Dick

f75c545f-22f4-40cc-b430-b856358bfb14-1

Kate Chopin

Rachel Adams

A reprint of the 1899 novel about Edna Pontellier, a Victorian-era wife and mother who is awakened to the full force of her desire for love and freedom when she becomes enamored with Robert LeBrun, a young man she meets while on vacation. Also includes the short stories: Beyond the bayou -- Ma'ame Pelagle -- Desiree's baby -- A Respectable woman -- The Kiss -- A Pair of silk stockings -- The Locket -- A Reflection.

The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction

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#hardcover #fiction #suspensethrillers #jenniferegan #brooklyn #bookofthemonth #literature 

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Jenny Offill

Weather

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Syed M. Masood

The Bad Muslim Discount

Wolf Wondratschek; Marshall Yarbrough (Translator)

Self-Portrait with Russian Piano

Katherine Ann Porter

Ship of Fools

Diane Cook

The New Wilderness

Rómulo Gallegos; Robert Malloy (Translator); Larry McMurtry (Foreword by)

Doña Barbara

Aatish Taseer

The Way Things Were

Matthew Pearl

The Last Dickens

Jonathan Lethem

The Feral Detective

Tristan Egolf

Lord of the Barn Yard (First Edition HC NEW)

Courtney Thorne-Smith

Outside In

Marilynne Robinson

Lila

Glencoe McGraw-Hill Staff (Created by)

Glencoe Native American Literature

José Saramago

The Tale of the Unknown Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island

e. e. cummings

100 Selected Poems

James A. Michener

The Novel

Sean Adams

The Heap ARC

Horatio Alger

Ragged Dick

Kate Chopin; Rachel Adams

The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Jonathan Lethem

The Feral Detective