Debra Dean

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

A Novel

Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .

The Madonnas of Leningrad

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Ward Just

Michigan

"A master American novelist." --Vanity Fair



"One of the most astute writers of American fiction" (New York Times Book Review) delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senator's son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose émigré gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War -- a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent. At the center of the novel is Alec's unforeseen reckoning with Lucia's long-absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duran's career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alec's is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things -- "terrible things, terrible things" -- happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all.

 Once again, "Ward Just writes the kind of books they say no one writes anymore: smart, well-crafted narratives -- wise to the ways of the world -- that use fiction to show us how we live" (Joseph Kanon, Los Angeles Times).

Exiles in the Garden

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Lee Matalone

California

"An intricate exploration of family and home, of mother and child, of friends, of women and written with both precision and style."--Weike Wang, author of Chemistry From a talented, powerful new voice in fiction comes a stunning novel about the intersection of three lives coming to grips with identity, family legacy, and what it means to make a house a true home. Cybil is a war child--the result of a brief affair between a young Japanese woman and a French soldier--who at a young age is transplanted to Tucson, Arizona, and raised by an American officer and his rigid wife. After a rebellious adolescence, she grows up to become a successful ob-gyn. Chloe, Cybil's daughter, is adrift in an empty house in the hills of Virginia. Her marriage has fallen apart, and her estranged husband is dying of cancer. Room by room, Chloe makes her new house into a home, grappling always with the real and imagined boundaries that limit her as a single, childless woman in contemporary America. Beau, Chloe's closest friend, is in love with a man he's only met on the internet, who lives across the country. Shepherding Chloe through her grief, he is often called back to his loud, humid, chaotic childhood in Southwest Louisiana, where he first reckoned with the intricate ties between queerness, loneliness, and place. Through each of these characters Matalone weaves a moving, beautiful narrative of home, identity, and belonging. Home Making is a somber, yet hopeful, ode to the stories we tell ourselves in order to make a family.

Home Making

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Reid Lance Rosenthal

Brand new book ready for your reading pleasure. 

An American Saga

"Book One - the #1 bestselling Threads West-winner of eight national awards in the categories of Historical Fiction, Romance and Western. This is the namesake novel of the sweeping Threads West, An American Saga multi-era series compared by reviewers and authors to Lonesome Dove, Centennial, and Louis L'Amour. Called by some The " Gone With The Wind of the West" and applauded by others as "rings true and poignant, as authentic and moving as Dances with Wolves." The tale bursts with the adventure, romance and promise of historical America and the West. You will recognize the characters who live in these pages. They are the ancestors of your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, and your family. They are you. They are us. This is not only their story. It is our story. The epic saga of Threads West, An American Saga begins in 1854 with the first of five, richly textured, complex generations of unforgettable, multicultural characters. The separate lives of these driven men and independent women from Europe and America are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West. Swept into the dangerous currents of the far-distant frontier by the mysterious rivers of fate, the power of the land and the American spirit, their journeys are turbulent quests intertwined with romance and adversity, passions and pathos, despair and triumph. One thousand miles to the west of St. Louis lies the lawless untamed spine of the continent, the Rocky Mountains. Their energy draws this vanguard of generations to love and struggle in the beautifully vibrant but unforgiving landscape of the West. The personal conflicts inherent to these brave, passion-filled characters are exacerbated by a nation in transition, the budding enmity between North and South, broken treaties with Native Americans and the accelerating melting pot of diverse cultures that marks this magical moment in American history. The touchstones of the past are the guideposts to the future. This is the first novel of this epic saga-the tale of America, set in the West-the stirring story of many threads of uncommon cultures, differing origins and competing ambitions that entwine into the American spirit. Lives and generations are woven on the loom of history, propelled by fate and freedom to form the tapestry that becomes the whole cloth of the nation. It is uniquely American, this meld of the mosaic. In Book Two, Maps of Fate, the heroic but conflicted men and women of Threads West continue their dangerous journeys, pushing relentlessly westward, their paths intersecting with the trails of others, setting in motion generational liaisons that cannot be foreseen. Momentous change will continue, igniting further greed and compassion, courage and treachery, rugged independence, torrid passions and fierce loyalties. The decades of the Maps of Fate era novels of Threads West, An American Saga book series become the crucible of the souls of generations, the building of the heart of the nation, the destiny of a people, and the relentless energy and beauty of the western landscape. This is the ongoing story of us. Set in authentic locations on three continents and in the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the life threads of the characters -- whose personalities are forged on the anvil of the land and shaped by the spirit of America -- live, love, struggle, die, fail and succeed. They have neither country nor culture in common -- but the textured, complex and conflicted lives of these independent men and women become part of the fabric of the undulating landscape of the West, and are woven into the rich and adventurous tapestry of an emerging nation and the ever evolving American spirit. The adventure and romance of America, her people and her spirit and the West. This is not only their story. It is our story. It is Threads West, An American Saga."

Threads West

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Leslie Parry

Texas

A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.

Church of Marvels

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Cory Doctorow

Former Library edition - never circulated there in some slight damage to inside boards where library wrapping was removed. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Illinois

“Is Doctorow’s fictional utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our hands. Walkaway reminds us the world we choose to build is the one we’ll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we’re going to have to fight for it.”—Edward Snowden

Walkaway

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Merritt Tierce

Florida

"Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology." --Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist

Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It's a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive.

Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.  

Love Me Back

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Utah

Michael Kowalewski

Hardcover in dust jacket. Both in excellent condition. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Indiana

Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction

"Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous," writes Michael Kowalewski. "They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful." In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging from scalpings and torture in The Deerslayer to fish feeding off human viscera in To Have and Have Not, to show how highly charged descriptive passages bear on major issues concerning a writer's craft. Instead of focusing on violence as a socio-cultural phenomenon, he explores how writers including Cooper, Poe, Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Pynchon draw on violence in the realistic imagining of their works and how their respective styles sustain or counteract this imagining. Kowalewski begins by offering a new definition of realism, or realistic imagining, and the rhetorical imagination that seems to oppose it. Then for each author he investigates how scenes of violence exemplify the stylistic imperatives more generally at work in that writer's fiction. Using violence as the critical occasion for exploring the distinctive qualities of authorial voice, Deadly Musings addresses the question of what literary criticism is and ought to be, and how it might apply more usefully to the dynamics of verbal performance.

Deadly Musings

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The Madonnas of Leningrad *FREE BOOK*

E. L. Doctorow

Massachusetts

Billy Bathgate

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Jillian Cantor

A "historical novel of love and survival inspired by real resistance workers during World War II in Austria, and the mysterious love letter that connects generations of Jewish families"--Dust jacket flap.

The Lost Letter

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T. J. Stiles

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Life on the Frontier of a New America 

Custer’s Trials

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This is one of the RNL books that comes with personalized comments and an invitation to a conversation. 

Rabbit is Rich

Kate Manning

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Arizona

In the early 1900s, Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family's Colorado mountain cabin to start work at a wealthy mine-owner's manor house and is fascinated by he luxury around her until she discovers the family's philosophy is at odds with the unfair labor practices that built their fortune.

Gilded Mountain

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Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill’s first novel! No writing/highlighting, bindings/covers/spines are strong & intact. There’s a crease on the cover sleeve on the top of the front cover, but it is minor. Slight shelf wear. 

Grace Davitt, a young girl living with her family in a small lakeside Vermont town, is drawn ever deeper into her mother's bizarre world of obsession and myth, despite the efforts of her father, a dedicated rationalist. A first novel. Tour.

Last Things

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Willa Cather

Alaska

A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them. 

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic: a woman whose charm is intertwined with a terrifying vulnerability.

A Lost Lady

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Deborah Treisman

Collection of short stories. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jonathan Safran Foer, ZZ Packer

Pennsylvania

Stories from the New Yorker

A collection of twenty stories by North American writers under the age of forty who the editors of the New Yorker felt were, or soon would be, standouts in contemporary fiction.

20 Under 40

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The Winter of Our Discontent 

Intruder in the Dust

Chad Harbach

Virginia

The Two Cultures of American Fiction

Bringing together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors and agents, this must-read for aspiring writers and anyone interested in the present and future of American letters reveals the ways writers make--or fail to make--a living. Original. 15,000 first printing.

MFA vs NYC

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Roxane Gay

Heidi Pitlor

Alabama

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year's Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay brings her "signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth" (Harper's Bazaar) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2018.

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Debra Dean

The Madonnas of Leningrad

Ward Just; Ward Just

Exiles in the Garden

Lee Matalone

Home Making

Reid Lance Rosenthal

Threads West

Leslie Parry

Church of Marvels

Cory Doctorow

Walkaway

Merritt Tierce

Love Me Back

Debra Dean

The Madonnas of Leningrad

Michael Kowalewski

Deadly Musings

Debra Dean

The Madonnas of Leningrad *FREE BOOK*

E. L. Doctorow

Billy Bathgate

Jillian Cantor

The Lost Letter

T. J. Stiles

Custer’s Trials

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich

Kate Manning

Gilded Mountain

Jenny Offill

Last Things

Willa Cather

A Lost Lady

Deborah Treisman

20 Under 40

John Steinbeck

The Winter of Our Discontent

William Faulkner

Intruder in the Dust

Chad Harbach

MFA vs NYC

Roxane Gay; Heidi Pitlor

The Best American Short Stories 2018

Debra Dean

The Madonnas of Leningrad

Willa Cather

One of Ours

The Madonnas of Leningrad FREE BOOK