Paula Bomer

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Arkansas

A woman and her niece are bound together and driven apart by loves, desires, frustrations, and addictions.

East Berlin, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eva, a retired nurse, makes it through her day on a combination of stimulants and sleeping pills, wine and brandy. She finds fleeting joy in American jazz and blues records, and occasional visits from her married lover. Her friendly teenaged neighbor is her closest companion. Then her American niece, Maggie, arrives in Berlin. Eva is thrilled--Maggie is just the companion she's been seeking. But happiness begins to slide from Eva's grasp as Maggie's own fierce drug addiction reveals itself.

Tante Eva is a story that deftly takes in decades of family life and German history, estrangement, joys, and disappointments. It is a portrait of East Berlin in the years after the Wall came down, and of an overlooked woman pursuing happiness and sexual pleasure. It is the finest book yet from Paula Bomer, an author whose work Jonathan Franzen describes as "some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering."

♻️ Tante Eva

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#hardcover #german #oprahsbookclub #translated #fiction #thereader

Oklahoma

At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime

The Reader

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

A comic experiment in sociology and self-absorption, the award-winning author Thomas Clerc's autobiographical Interior is a unique invitation into a professor's preoccupations and possessions within the rooms of a small Parisian apartment. Composed of bite-size vignettes, remembrances, and digressions, and filled with lighthearted transitions from pure description to quirky reminiscence and back, this meticulous tour through the rooms of Clerc's home reveals fascinating insights into the author's obsessions, desires, and frustrations. Each space is described in painstaking detail, sometimes down to the centimeter, and the history of every object and appliance is fully excavated with self-deprecating wit. From the ideal varieties of bathroom reading material to the color of his dish rack to the chaos of his sock drawer, Clerc happily and shamelessly guides us through the most intimate crannies of his home, as well as through all the strata of his existence as a bourgeois city dweller approaching middle age. Playful and irreverent, as well as a sly commentary on materialism, Interior finds drama in the domestic and dark humor in every doomed attempt to express individuality through the things that we own.

Interior

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#hardcover #ya #africa #translated #french #novel

Okapi Fever

Sandro Veronesi

Elena Pala

Texas

A Novel

"The Hummingbird is a remarkable accomplishment, a true gift to the world." --Michael Cunningham "Long considered one of Italy's leading writers, Sandro Veronesi has re-written the family saga. Ardent, gripping, and inventive to the core, it has already been hailed a classic."--Jhumpa Lahiri The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy.--Ian McEwan The #1 international sensation from a master of European literature--winner of Italy's Premio Strega--a saga of a Florentine family from the 1960s to the present that brilliantly captures the power of history and the multi-faceted experience of life itself as it explores how we contend with uncontrollable forces that both buffet and buoy us. Marco Carrera is "the hummingbird," a man with an almost supernatural ability to remain still amid the chaos of an ever-changing world. Though his life is rife with emotional challenges--suffering the death of his sister and the absence of his brother; caring for his elderly parents; raising his granddaughter when her mother, Marco's own child, is no longer capable; loving an enigmatic woman--Marco carries on with a noble stoicism that belies an intensity for living. As the years pass and the arc of his life bends, Marco finds himself filled with joy for the future as the baton passes from him to the next generation. A beautiful and compelling journey through time told in myriad narrative styles, The Hummingbird is a story of suffering, happiness, loss, love, and hope--of a man who embodies the quiet heroism that defines daily life for countless ordinary folk. A thrilling novel about the need to look to the future with hope and live with intensity to the very end, Sandro Veronesi's masterpiece--eminently readable, rich in insight, and filled with interesting twists and revelations--is a portrait of human existence, the vicissitudes and vagaries that propel and ultimately define us Translated from the Italian by Elena Pala A great novel, vibrating with life and death, happiness and pain, nostalgia and hope for the future. --Vanity Fair

The Hummingbird

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A. B. Yehoshua

Stuart Schoffman

Florida

From the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Israeli author, a stunning novel that brilliantly illuminates a young girl's crisis of faith and coming of age in Padua, Italy.

Rachele Luzzato is twelve years old when she learns her father is gravely ill. While her family plans for her upcoming Bat-Mitzvah, Rachele finds herself cast as the Madonna in her school's Christmas play. Caught between spiritual poles, struggling to cope with her father's mortality, Rachele feels as if the threads of her everyday life are unravelling.

A diverse circle of adults are there to guide young Rachele as she faces the difficult passing of childhood, including her charismatic Jewish grandfather, her maternal Catholic grandparents, and even an old teacher who believes the young girl might find solace in a nineteenth-century novel. These spiritual tributaries ultimately converge in Rachele's imagination, creating a fantasy that transcends the microcosm of her daily life with one simple hope: an end to the loneliness felt by an only daughter.

In this wondrous story that combines the piercing wisdom of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, the poignancy of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend; and the magical flight of Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, A. B. Yehoshua paints a warm and subtle portrait of a young girl at the cusp of her journey into adulthood.

The Only Daughter - New!

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Gabriela Wiener

Julia Sanches

"Wiener has rescued an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent, with her trademark intelligence and irreverent humor. Her prose, sober and forward, is fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting."--Valeria Luiselli, author of The Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends An award-winning Peruvian journalist and international writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough work, blending fact and fiction in a genre-bending story of love, desire, heritage, and racism haunted by the specter of colonialism and absent fathers. In 1878, the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener prepares to be heralded by the scientific community at the Exposition Universelle. The magnificent fair of "technological advances" numbers among its attractions a human zoo; it is ultimately a display of the peak of scientific racism and the European imperialist project. Wiener's exhibited pedigree: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a child. A century and half later, when Gabriela Wiener visits the museum that houses the Wiener collection, she recognizes herself in the brown faces of the ceramic vessels her great-great-grandfather pillaged. Distraught over converging personal crises--the discovery of her bastard lineage, the death of her father, and the revelation of his second secret family--Gabriela embarks on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago and hopefully make it whole again. Her quest leads her to trace the footprints of her family's founder, an illegitimate family lineage shared by many others, and to confront the inheritance of identity itself. Written in the spirit of haunting emotional works of reckoning by Carmen Maria Machado and Ayad Ahktar, Undiscovered is a culminating labor for our age, an earnest attempt to decolonize one's own desire. Translated by Julia Sanches

Undiscovered - New!

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Adrian Nathan West

K. Ferrari

Indiana

"This novel should come not with blurbs but with a hazardous-material warning:There's bone and gristle here, be ready for that taste in your mouth you can't spit out. First words to last, it's strong stuff." --James Sallis, author ofDrive

The first novel to appear in English by the "subway janitor by night, novelist by day," who began his writing career while an undocumented immigrant in the United States,Like Flies from Afarwill demonstrate why K. Ferrari is already an award-winning star of international crime fiction. A hardboiled noir thriller, a whodunit, a black comedy, and a filthy catalog of the excesses of wealth, this is a Jim Thompson novel for the globalized world.

Mr. Luis Machi is an unforgettably loathsome and hilarious Argentinian oligarch who made his fortune collaborating with the worst elements of society--parasites, pushers, and secret policemen. He has a cocaine habit, a collection of three hundred ties, ten million dollars in the bank, and a bloody corpse in the trunk of his BMW . . . but as far as the body goes, he's completely innocent. He has no idea who the victim could be, or who among his many, many enemies might be trying to frame himfor murder, and he doesn't have much time to find out . . .

The profane and uproariousLike Flies from Afar follows Machi through twenty-four hours of his eventful life--one full day in which to solve this mystery, or at least to make sure he isn't the one to take the fall.

Like Flies from Afar

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

Brick By Brick

Sagwa Kim

Sunhee Jeong

Ohio

"When outcasts b and Rang's friendship ends they are completely alone until a mysterious man, Book, introduces them to the part of town where lunatics live--the End."--

B, Book, and Me

8fe8970a-292b-4583-96aa-96d06492bd64-0

Ola Larsmo

Tiina Nunnally

Former library book with stickers, stamps and markings. In otherwise, very good condition.

Colorado

"Swedish novelist Ola Larsmo's historical novel Swede Hollow follows a group of Swedish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and their experiences trying to forge a life for their families in Swede Hollow, a collection of shacks in a wooded ravine on the edge of the emerging industrial city of St. Paul"--

Swede Hollow

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California

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Kentucky

Olga 

J. M Lee

Watanabe Yuichi, a young guard with a passion for reading, is ordered to investigate. The victim, Sugiyama, also a guard, was feared and despised throughout the prison and inquiries have barely begun when a powerful inmate confesses. But Watanbe is unconvinced; and as he interrogates both the suspect and Yun Dong-ju, a talented Korean poet, he starts to realize that the fearsome guard was not all he appeared to be...As Watanbe unravels Sugiyama's final months, he begins to discover what is really going on inside this dark and violent institution, which few inmates survive: a man who will stop at nothing to dig his way to freedom; a governor whose greed knows no bounds; a little girl whose kite finds an unlikely friend. And Yun Dong-ju—the poet whose works hold such beauty the can break the hardest of hearts. As the war moves towards its devastating close and bombs rain down upon the prison, Watanbe realizes that he must find a way to protect Yun Dong-ju, no matter what it takes. As he digs further and further in to his investigation, the young guard discovers a devastating truth.At once a captivating mystery and an epic lament for lost freedom and humanity, The Investigation, inspired by a true story, is a sweeping and gripping tale by an international literary star.

The Investigation

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Maria Gainza

Thomas Bunstead

New Jersey

New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger. In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico? On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us “not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates . . . My techniques are those of the impressionist.” Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

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Patricio Pron

Mara Faye Lethem

From the acclaimed Argentine writer, one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists: a bold, ambitious new novel about how art became politics and politics became crime during the cataclysm of the Second World War. Pinerolo, Italy; April 1945. At a conference in support of Fascism, a writer disappears and is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Thirty years later, a young man--a political activist or a terrorist, depending on your perspective--interviews survivors from the conference, to try to uncover the truth about what happened and its consequences. Who was the writer? What did he believe in? Why, shortly before his death, did he save a man who could have killed him? Where is his lost work? And what does any of this have to do with a teenager in contemporary Milan involved in a violent confrontation with the police? Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is a razor-sharp, completely original exploration of our most timeless concerns--guilt, betrayal, the legacy of earlier generations--and probes the question of what literature is: how it explains our times and irrevocably changes our lives.

Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

e51dcdb5-1cec-486c-a221-a788903d6c18-1

Georgia

This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in the Japan: “Pressingly real . . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us” (Japan Times). Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own. Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including the female body, the roles women are assigned by society, and the bullying and social pressures that leave young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.

So We Look to the Sky

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Yan Ge

Stories

From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary career. “A bewitching collection of stories that will leave you awestruck, shaken, and wanting to reach for it again and again.” —Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese, working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape. The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style—and with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a new medium. A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all Yan Ge’s protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement—physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration, or exile. Brilliant and irresistibly readable, Elsewhere explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian, and spectacular. This highly anticipated collection is further proof that Yan Ge is a generational literary talent, to be watched closely for decades to come.

Elsewhere

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Lisa Harding

South Carolina

"Shocking--and shockingly good. It is thought-provoking, anger-provoking, guilt-provoking, and--most importantly--it is a brilliantly written novel."--Roddy Doyle 

Thrown together by a harrowing twist of fate, two girls will find hope and redemption in friendship in this award-winning, emotional gut punch of a novel from the author of Bright Burning Things.

Sassy, streetwise Sammy is a teenage girl who is falling through the cracks. Neglected by an alcoholic mother, the problems she endures at school and home lead her into the hands of adults who don't have her best interests in mind. Failed by them at every turn, Sammy acts out, seeking attention from boys, then men, when what she wants most is protection.

Meanwhile, in a small village in Eastern Europe, preternaturally beautiful and naïve Nico is about to turn thirteen and as her family falls upon desperate times, her father is approached to marry her off. Her family knows that the nice life this stranger seems to be offering Nico is too good to be true, but they and Nico hope for the best as she's shuttled across the border into Ireland, where she and Sammy find one another in their new home, a suburban brothel.

As Nico and Sammy journey into this dark underbelly and out the other side, their friendship--and the unexpected acts of kindness they give and receive--form a potent bond.

Heartbreaking and breathtakingly beautiful, Cloud Girls exposes the failings of polite society and the cruelty that exists beneath its surface, yet reminds us that goodness and love can flourish in the darkest times.

Cloud Girls

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Antony Shugaar

Marco Videtta

Massimo Carlotto

A dark action story out of Italy, fighting the systems in place. Underlines and annotated inside (seen in pictures).

Maryland

This bestselling noir novel features murder, moral ambiguity, and a protagonist who is hardly heroic. In this thriller, however, the killer is not an individual but an entire system.

Poisonville

0368a89c-a7b1-4660-bace-669b5bdeafde-0

Book is New, never read. No frayed pages, no dog eared corners, no markings, clean cover. 

Illinois

#paperback #fiction #fantasy #magicalrealism #translated 

Arizona

In this riveting debut, prize-winning artist and filmmaker Miquel Reina maps out ambitious and fantastical new territory in a novel about a couple holding on for dear life as their world takes an extraordinary fall... On the highest point of an island, in a house clinging to the edge of a cliff, live Mary Rose and Harold Grapes, a retired couple still mourning the death of their son thirty-five years before. Weighed down by decades of grief and memories, the Grapeses have never moved past the tragedy. Then, on the eve of eviction from the most beautiful and dangerously unstable perch in the area, they're uprooted by a violent storm. The disbelieving Grapeses and their home take a free-fall slide into the whitecapped sea and float away. As the past that once moored them recedes and disappears, Mary Rose and Harold are delivered from decades of sorrow by the ebb and flow of the waves. Ahead of them, a light shimmers on the horizon, guiding them toward a revelatory and cathartic new engagement with life, and all its wonder. Wildly imaginative, deeply poignant, and entirely unexpected, Lights on the Sea sweeps readers away on a journey of fate, acceptance, redemption, and survival against the most rewarding of odds.

Lights on the Sea

de53f004-157c-47c3-85a7-d6b5e99cfaa0-1

Oliver Pötzsch

Minnesota

A follow-up to the internationally best-selling The Hangman's Daughter traces the 1648 investigation by hangman Jakob Kuisl, his headstrong daughter and the town physician into the poisoning murder of a priest whose demise is precariously linked to the Crusades and the Knights Templar treasure. Original. 100,000 first printing.

The Dark Monk

60b20828-5018-449b-bef8-9f933b56f558-1

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.

Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

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Paula Bomer

♻️ Tante Eva

Bernhard Schlink; Carol Brown Janeway (Translator)

The Reader

Thomas Clerc

Interior

Philippe Diole

Okapi Fever

Sandro Veronesi; Elena Pala

The Hummingbird

A. B. Yehoshua; Stuart Schoffman

The Only Daughter - New!

Gabriela Wiener; Julia Sanches

Undiscovered - New!

Adrian Nathan West; K. Ferrari

Like Flies from Afar

Heidi Woodward Sheffield

Brick By Brick

Sagwa Kim; Sunhee Jeong

B, Book, and Me

Ola Larsmo; Tiina Nunnally

Swede Hollow

Marie Kondo

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Bernhard Schlink

Olga

J. M Lee

The Investigation

Maria Gainza; Thomas Bunstead

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Patricio Pron; Mara Faye Lethem

Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

Misumi Kubo

So We Look to the Sky

Yan Ge

Elsewhere

Lisa Harding

Cloud Girls

Antony Shugaar; Marco Videtta; Massimo Carlotto

Poisonville

Yan Ge

Elsewhere

Miquel Reina; Catherine E. Nelson (Translator)

Lights on the Sea

Oliver Pötzsch; Oliver Pötzsch

The Dark Monk

Milan Kundera

Slowness