Susan Choi

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

A Novel

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Trust Exercise

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Oklahoma

#paperback #fiction #smalltown #prizewinner #americanwest #contemporary

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Minnesota

The events of that small-town summer forever alter David Hayden's view of his family: his self-effacing father, a sheriff who never wears his badge; his clear sighted mother; his uncle, a charming war hero and respected doctor; and the Hayden's lively, statuesque Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations are at the heart of the story. It is a tale of love and courage, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.

Montana 1948

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Tennessee

Texas

IN
an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarefied bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When, within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed - or untoyed with- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls-until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true -though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place- revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

California

Kentucky

Arizona

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
 
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.
 
As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.

Fugitive Pieces

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William Finnegan

Florida

A Surfing Life

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

Barbarian Days

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Ali Smith

The ghost of Sara Wilby, a chambermaid who falls to her death in the hotel dumbwaiter, brings together four other women--Lise, a disgruntled receptionist; Else, a homeless woman; Penny, a journalist; and Clare, Sara's distraught sister. Original. 30,000 first printing.

Hotel World

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Harper Lee

Virginia

Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South--and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father--a crusading local lawyer--risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

To Kill a Mockingbird

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#hardcover #fiction #adult #literary #prizewinner #nationalbookaward #friendships #acting 

Maryland

Utah

"The poems in The Falls dive down and emerge with the treasures of a deep interior life. A connection with the idiosyncratic and fiercely passionate poet Charlotte Mew offers a key to Mohn-Slate's appreciation for the wildness that can lurk beneath social oppression, and the necessary freedom of expressive art."
-- APRIL BERNARD, author of Brawl & Jag

"The Falls by Emily Mohn-Slate is a courageous book teeming with honesty and rage. These poems risk writing motherhood in wildly unpopular ways, telling the truth of mother as 'woman, ' mother as 'human.' Mohn-Slate breaks the code of the status quo with slicing precision and line breaks that cut in perfect seams. This feminist voice seethes with desire, like the woman who is drawn to the falls: I wanted/to touch beauty. It was like/a tornado pulled me in. Even while the hand of something immense hangs above, Mohn-Slate breathes a love of all things. She
believes anyway, she forges ahead into the red worlds of her beloved Charlotte Mew, her guide beyond the grave, who tells her: Red is the strangest pain to bear. The skillful restraint in the speaker's voice raises the stakes-
this is pragmatism over a well of fury. We get the details, but we feel the fire beneath. In the midst of all of this living, Mohn-Slate is a fierce romantic--wanting what's right and real, even as she sees the traps and tangles of the prices paid. She's going in--and we, lucky readers, get to follow her."
-- JAN BEATTY, author of The Body Wars

"In The Falls, Mohn-Slate crafts rooms to play out the large-scale tragedies and the seemingly small moments, and is so very good at finding the place where the two meet, sing out, and then part ways again. With lush and precise language, we're repeatedly faced with the question: how do we live alongside others without disappearing from the world ourselves? Her voice is candid, collected, and surprising. It's a balance we desperately need to help make sense of our lives."
-- SARA GELSTON, author of Odette

"If there was ever a book to show us the utility of poems, their tough uses, their possibilities as tools--as knives or needles--it is The Falls by Emily Mohn-Slate. In this book, she shows us how poems organize and define a life, give it shape and meaning, and how poetry has the power to render cataclysm or disappointment into art. Mohn-Slate is a master-describer, and these poems show us how the lived life with its losses, loves, burdens and joys, when contained in the civilizing bounds of verse, becomes graspable, and the poem becomes something to be taken up and used. This is a startling book and an important and memorable debut."
-- MARK WUNDERLICH, author of God of Nothingness

The Falls

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

North Carolina

The “volcanically sexy” (USA Today) bestseller about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction.

The Paying Guests

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Very good condition #paperback #fiction #small-town #prizewinner #pulitzerprizewinner #pulitzer #anythingispossible #elizabethstrout

New Jersey

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this “compulsively readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout “This book, this writer, are magnificent.”—Ann Patchett Winner of The Story Prize • A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book • One of USA Today’s top 10 books of the year Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.

Anything Is Possible

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Very good condition #paperback #nobelprize #nobelprizewinner #prizewinner #redhairedwoman

The Red-Haired Woman

#paperback #orhanpamuk #nobelprize #nobelprizewinner #prizewinner

A New Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely's beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

The Black Book

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#paperback #translated #mystery #thriller #grief #prizewinner #brageprize #love #death #foreign 

Mississippi

Shortlisted for the 2017 Brage Prize. Fanny, a 17-year-old high school senior, has lost both her parents in a car accident. Granted permission to live independently in the family home located on the outskirts of a small Norwegian town, the days pass by as she performs her daily routine: going to school, maintaining the house, chopping and stacking wood, and keeping the weeds at bay. As Fanny grieves and attempts to come to terms with the sad circumstances of her life, a fairy tale-like world full of new possibilities begins to emerge around her. Written by Rune Christiansen, one of Norway's most exciting literary talents, and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest is a beautiful, poetic portrait of grief, friendship, independence and transgression.

Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest

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Neal Shusterman

Illinois

Two teens must learn the “art of killing” in this Printz Honor–winning book, the first in a chilling new series from Neal Shusterman, author of the New York Times bestselling Unwind dystology. A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own. Scythe is the first novel of a thrilling new series by National Book Award–winning author Neal Shusterman in which Citra and Rowan learn that a perfect world comes only with a heavy price.

Scythe

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David Guterson

Massachusetts

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * PEN/Faulkner Award Winner *  A gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric masterpiece of courtroom suspense--one that leaves us shaken and changed. 

"Haunting .... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper." --Los Angeles Times

San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies.  But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. 
 
In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.

Snow Falling on Cedars

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#fiction #paperback #girlpower #thepower #dystopian #naomialderman #adult #prizewinner #scifi 

One of the New York Times's Ten Best Books of 2017A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2017One of the Washington Post's Ten Best Books of 2017An NPR Best Book of 2017One of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Books of 2017A Bustle Best Book of 2017A Paste Magazine Best Novel of 2017A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction One of President Obama's favorite reads of 2017 "The Power is our era's The Handmaid's Tale." --Ron Charles, Washington Post "Novels based on premises like the one at the core of The Power can quickly become little more than thought experiments, but Alderman dodges this trap deftly -- her writing is beautiful, and her intelligence seems almost limitless. She also has a pitch-dark sense of humor that she wields perfectly." --Michael Schaub, NPR A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Amazon Best Book of 2017 **WINNER OF THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION** What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power? In THE POWER, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power--they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, THE POWER is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

The Power

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Amin Maalouf

Inscription on inside cover. Oates in great shape.

The story of Samarkand is woven around the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, from its creation by the poet and sage in eleventh-century Persia to its loss when the Titanic sank in 1912. Unwittingly involved in a brawl on the streets of Samarkand, Omar Khayyam is brought before a local judge who recognizes his genius as a poet and gives him a blank book in which to inscribe his verses. Thus the head of a great poet is saved and the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam is born. The threads of his life become interwoven with the designs of the vizier, Nizam al Mulk, and of Hassan Sabbah, the founder of the Order of the Assassins who later hides the precious manuscript in his famous mountain fortress. At the end of the nineteenth century the poems fire the imagination of the West in Edward Fitzgerald's evocative translation. An American scholar learns of the manuscript's survival and recovers it with the help of a Persian princess. Together they take it on the fateful voyage of the Titanic.

Save this search

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Larry Watson

Montana 1948

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Anne Michaels

Fugitive Pieces

William Finnegan

Barbarian Days

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Ali Smith

Hotel World

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

Emily Mohn-Slate

The Falls

Sarah Waters

The Paying Guests

Elizabeth Strout

Anything Is Possible

Orhan Pamuk

The Red-Haired Woman

Orhan Pamuk

The Black Book

Rune Christiansen; Kari Dickson (Translator)

Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest

Neal Shusterman

Scythe

David Guterson

Snow Falling on Cedars

Naomi Alderman

The Power

Amin Maalouf

Samarkand