#paperback #fiction #relationships #familydrama #darkhumor

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

By the author of the New York Times bestseller, Love Poems for Married People, and the Thurber Prize-winner Truth in Advertising comes a wry yet tenderhearted look at how one man's public fall from grace leads him back to his family, and back to the man he used to be. It's a story that Ted Grayson has reported time and time again in his job as a network TV anchor: the public downfall of those at the top. He just never imagined that it would happen to him. After his profanity-laced tirade is caught on camera, his reputation and career are destroyed, leaving him without a script for the first time in years. While American viewers may have loved and trusted Ted for decades, his family certainly didn't: His years of constant travel and his big-screen persona have frayed all of his important relationships. At the time of his meltdown, Ted is estranged from his wife, Claire, and his adult daughter, Franny, a writer for a popular website. Franny views her father's disgrace with curiosity and perhaps a bit of smug satisfaction, but when her boss suggests that she confront Ted in an interview, she has to decide whether to use his loss as her career gain. And for Ted, this may be a chance to take a hard look at what got him to this place, and to try to find his way back before it's too late. Talk to Me is a sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately warm story about a man who wakes up too late to the mess he's made of his life... and about our capacity for forgiveness and empathy.

Talk to Me

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Howard Jacobson

Dystopian British novel.
In a world in which collective memory has vanished following a catastrophe, Kevern Cohen and Ailinn Solomons' love affair threatens to produce devastating consequences for the human race.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Wisconsin

Two people fall in love in a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited. As they discover where they came from and where they are going, a bigger, more shattering truth is revealed to them. Kevern doesn't know why his father made him put two fingers across his lips whenever he began a word with a J. It wasn't then, and isn't now, the time or place for asking questions. Ailinn, too, has grown up in the dark about who she was and where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn't ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren't sure whether they have fallen in love of their own accord or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

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#hardcover #humor #comedy #darkhumor #irreverent 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Traveling to the wedding of his estranged daughter and left stranded in O'Hare Airport when his flight is cancelled, Bennie Ford begins writing a letter of complaint to the airline that evolves into a painful lament for a life that has gone badly awry.

Dear American Airlines

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Texas

Henry James

New Jersey

Strikingly modern in subject and narrative voice, this 1897 novel centers on a child's view of a bitter divorce. Rather than a gloomy parable of innocence corrupted, it abounds in dark humor.

What Maisie Knew

1423533f-1d94-411f-9185-1f911a76a7c0-1

Jeff Povey

First edition 
Minor wear on dust jacket 

Minnesota

Killing a serial murderer while defending himself against an attack on his life, a man inadvertently enters an exclusive club of murderers who address one another with celebrity names and share a mutual love of 'the hunt, ' an organisation that the protagonist decides to stop by systematically killing off its members

The Serial Killers Club

4a135fa4-0471-42f7-beb9-3ef5b5d9c127-1

Illinois

The Barbarians Are Coming

Jess Kidd

A Novel

""A highly unusual tale set in a highly unusual Irish village full of dark secrets

Himself

5ba40a55-282f-42c4-8a49-1499e322e90e-1

Jessica Knoll

Excellent condition, though a "15" is written along the bottom edge of pages.

Arizona

Grooming herself for an ideal life involving a successful career and a happy marriage, a rising young journalist confronts a violent episode from her past that threatens to unravel everything she has worked to achieve. A first novel.

Luckiest Girl Alive

42bf4ecd-ed64-4da4-b8fd-0d0a82ee1e7a-1

Oklahoma

Daniel Hornsby

Succession meets Bad Blood in this sharp-toothed satire of Silicon Valley and the 1 percent, in which the black-sheep son of an industrial tycoon starts working for a tech pioneer who's running a biomedical startup selling nothing less than immortality, only to uncover the horrifying truth at the heart of her sublime promises. "Exceptional, horrifically hilarious, and deeply original.” —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree. He’s already clipped his name, turning Charles Grossheart, Jr.—son of a billionaire labor exploiter, weapons manufacturer, and climate change denier—into ordinary good-guy Chuck, the “self-made” proprietor of an up-and-coming punk label. But when Daddy threatens to cut him off, Chuck is forced to get a “real job”—and conveniently, an old college friend has just swept back into his life with the perfect opportunity. Famed Harvard dropout and biotech darling Olivia Watts says she is on the verge of totally reinventing the field of medicine, but when Chuck signs on, he soon discovers that things at the vast Kenosis campus are not quite how they appear. Secret labs, vanished employees, and mutated test subjects seem to be as impossible as they are sinister. Is Olivia simply a scammer, or does her technology threaten to usher humanity toward a far bloodier fate? Moreover, does Chuck—who has never accomplished anything without the aid of Daddy’s money—stand a chance of stopping her? Daniel Hornsby hilariously skewers the insatiable hungers of the ultrarich in a novel that no one will be able to resist sinking their teeth into.

Sucker

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Etgar Keret

Nathan Englander

Miriam Shlesinger

Stories

Combines absurd, humorous, and poignant themes that reveal the fierce humanity of characters in surreal situations.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

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Tom Perrotta

Good suspense! Great read ☺️ smoke free environment 

Missouri

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband Richard, who is more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at 9PM. They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen--until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.

Little Children

b4679748-9237-4244-83d9-0462e95bbcc5-1

New York

Annie Proulx

Surprising transformations take place when a newspaperman's elderly aunt and two daughters decide to move back to their family home on the coast of Newfoundland

The Shipping News

af410369-d305-4a80-a406-3c20827a40cc-1

Ma Jian

Flora Drew

Ohio

Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

China Dream

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Danny Evans

Vermont

Why It Takes Balls to Go Nuts

In his early thirties, Danny Evans had a smokin' hot wife, a new baby boy, and the highest paying job he'd ever had. Then, in the span of one week, a sudden layoff and the events of 9/11 plunged Evans into a crushing depression. At turns poignant and uproarious, Rage Against the Meshugenah vividly traces Evans' journey through the minefield of mental illness from a modern man's point-of-view, including his no-holds-barred confrontations with infuriating sexual side effects, self-medication with beer and porn, and a therapist named Neil Diamond.

Danny Evans is here to tell readers the truth about depression, in his own unique style. Skillfully combining self-deprecating humor, absurdly ridiculous insights, and astute pop culture references, Evans reveals his universal struggle to make himself feel happy in a world gone mad, and he's willing to let readers in on his rollercoaster ride of laugher, tears and a whole lot of meshugenah.

Rage Against the Meshugenah

6b33d59d-3a85-4757-a231-d82e92c6b9bb-1

Andrew Ridker

Michigan

A professor at a Midwestern college invites his estranged children to reconcile with him at his St. Louis home, but he is also after the large fortune his ex-wife left the children.

The Altruists

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Succession meets Bad Blood in this sharp-toothed satire of Silicon Valley and the 1 percent • The black-sheep son of an industrial tycoon starts working for a tech pioneer who's running a biomedical startup selling nothing less than immortality, only to uncover the horrifying truth at the heart of her sublime promises. "Exceptional, horrifically hilarious, and deeply original.” —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree. He’s already clipped his name, turning Charles Grossheart, Jr.—son of a billionaire labor exploiter, weapons manufacturer, and climate change denier—into ordinary good-guy Chuck, the “self-made” proprietor of an up-and-coming punk label. But when Daddy threatens to cut him off, Chuck is forced to get a “real job”—and conveniently, an old college friend has just swept back into his life with the perfect opportunity. Famed Harvard dropout and biotech darling Olivia Watts says she is on the verge of totally reinventing the field of medicine, but when Chuck signs on, he soon discovers that things at the vast Kenosis campus are not quite how they appear. Secret labs, vanished employees, and mutated test subjects seem to be as impossible as they are sinister. Is Olivia simply a scammer, or does her technology threaten to usher humanity toward a far bloodier fate? Moreover, does Chuck—who has never accomplished anything without the aid of Daddy’s money—stand a chance of stopping her? Daniel Hornsby hilariously skewers the insatiable hungers of the ultrarich in a novel that no one will be able to resist sinking their teeth into.

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John Kenney

Talk to Me

Howard Jacobson

J

Jonathan Miles

Dear American Airlines

Jonathan Miles

Dear American Airlines

Henry James

What Maisie Knew

Jeff Povey

The Serial Killers Club

David Wong Louie

The Barbarians Are Coming

Jess Kidd

Himself

Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive

Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive

Jess Kidd

Himself

Daniel Hornsby

Sucker

Etgar Keret; Nathan Englander; Miriam Shlesinger

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Tom Perrotta

Little Children

Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive

Annie Proulx

The Shipping News

Ma Jian; Flora Drew

China Dream

Daniel Hornsby

Sucker

Daniel Hornsby

Sucker

Danny Evans

Rage Against the Meshugenah

Andrew Ridker

The Altruists

Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive

Jessica Knoll

Luckiest Girl Alive

Daniel Hornsby

Sucker