A. S. Byatt

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

"A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable readers have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in POSSESSION - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published seperately. Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings. The title story, 'The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye', a long story about an Englishwoman in Turkey who unwittingly releases a genie from his bottle, is a reflection on women's lives, on magic and on the power of storytelling itself."

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

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Florida

Beautiful cover

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure -- the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.

We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.

Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Babel Tower  (new cover )NEW 

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Strong spine; clean pages; previous owner’s name written on first page

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

While an independent young woman struggles with a personal crisis, her friends and family become caught up in the clashing politics, ideals, shifting sexual roles, and upheaval of the early 1960s. By the author of Possession. 100,000 first printing. Tour.

Babel Tower

A.S. Byatt

Bernardine Evaristo

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Nebraska

A Novel

From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity among an interconnected group of Black British women

Girl, Woman, Other

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#paperback #fiction #bernardineevaristo #africanamericanwomen #bookerprize

California

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Arizona

With her historic Booker win, Bernardine Evaristo is the author everyone is talking about. The standout book of 2019, Girl, Woman, Other is the number book you need to read this year. ***WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER This is Britain as you've never read it. This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl Woman Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . . 'Masterful . . . A choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain' Elle 'Exceptional. Ambitious, flowing and all-encompassing, an offbeat narrative that'll leave your mind in an invigorated whirl... [It] unites poetry, social history, women's voices and beyond. You have to order it right now' Stylist 'Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life' Ali Smith, author of How to be both 'Sparkling, inventive' Sunday Times 'Funny, sad, tender and true, deserves to win awards' Red 'Brims with vitality' Financial Times SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019

Girl, Woman, Other (SIGNED)

Booker Prize Nominated

Library copy. Pages are in great condition. I really enjoyed this book focused on the women of a modern housing development.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Mississippi

Arlington Park 

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Deborah Levy TBR

Joan Didion

Alaska

An incisive compilation of political essays, originally written for The New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2000, explores the nature of American politics and political figures and the role of the media in transforming the American political landscape. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Political Fictions

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Twelve early pieces never before collected offer an illuminating glimpse intothe mind and process of the bestselling author.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

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Essays

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

The White Album

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Didion

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Michigan

Diver Thrift Edition 2004

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to 4 years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp. Years later, he developed this semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to penal servitude for murdering his wife. This haunting and remarkable work ranks amoung Dostoyevsky's greatest masterpieces.

The House of the Dead

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A compulsive gambler himself at a certain period of his life, Dostoyevsky wrote this novel with real authority. Set in the appropriately named Roulettenburg, a German spa with a casino and an international clientele, it concerns the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers, and other characters.

The Gambler

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Ronald Meyer

South Carolina

Based on a St Petersburg news report, Dostoyevsky's searing tale of a man who drives his wife to suicide.

I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.'In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide.Introducing Little Black Classics- 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Dostoyevsky's works available in Penguin Classics are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Double, The Gambler and Other Stories, The Grand Inquisitor, Notes From The Underground, Netochka Nezvanova, The House of The Dead, The Brothers Karamazov and The Village of Stepanchikovo.

The Meek One

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Dostoevsky

Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

Colorado

A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend. Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape.

The Lying Life of Adults

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * O, The Oprah Magazine * TIME Magazine * NPR * Financial Times * New York Post * Kirkus Reviews * Harper's Bazaar AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A NATIONAL INDIE BESTELLER In this powerful novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, fourteen-year-old Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which wears a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity, where her guide is the unforgettable Aunt Vittoria. With this new novel about the passage from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante gives her readers another gripping, highly addictive, Neapolitan story. "Another spellbinding coming-of-age tale from a master."--People Magazine

Ferrante

#paperback #jmcoetzee #youth #memoir #scenesfromaprovinciallife #nonfiction

Ohio

Scenes from Provincial Life II

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been plotting an escape-from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

Youth

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Washington

Boyhood, Youth, Summertime

The Nobel Prize-winning author's brilliant trilogy of fictionalized memoirs--now available in one volume for the first time.

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 


Few writers have won as much critical acclaim and as many admirers in the literary world as J. M. Coetzee. Yet the celebrated author rarely spoke of himself until the 1997 arrival of Boyhood, a masterly and evocative tale of a young writer's beginnings. Continuing with the fiercely tender Youth and the innovative Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.

Scenes from Provincial Life

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J. M. Coetzee

From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Life and Times of Michael K

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James McBride

Pennsylvania

Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the real James Brownand his surprising journey illuminates not only our understanding of the Godfather of Soul but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Browns legacy.

Kill 'Em and Leave

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Fleeing her violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. By the best-selling author of The Color of Water.

The Good Lord Bird

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James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff

Missouri

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today “An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine “Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine “[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

Matrix

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#laurengroff #historicalfiction #matrix #freeshippingon25

Connecticut

"Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets ... At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but ... things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed"--

Fates and Furies

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Lauren Groff TBR

Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

While explaining to her sons why their fish is dead, the author relates stories of memorable animals in her life.

The Woman Who Killed the Fish

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Sheila Heti

Stefan Tobler

A love story by the great Clarice Lispector that asks: Just how might two people be joined?

The Apprenticeship, or the Book of Pleasures

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Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O'Farrell

Louisiana

"I am more than happy to welcome a newcomer, Maggie O'Farrell, who, to quote Yeats, 'has learnt her trade.' After You'd Gone is beautifully written contemporary fiction." --Edna O'Brien, Sunday TimesA young woman named Alice Raikes boards a train to Scotland to visit her family. But when she arrives, she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London that very minute. Only a few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt.With Alice's life hanging in the balance, her family gathers at her bedside. As they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions rise to the surface. The more they talk, the more, it seems, they conceal from each other. Alice, meanwhile, sliding between different levels of consciousness, recalls her past and a recent love affair. Skipping around in time, knitting together the different points of view with astonishing dexterity and beautiful prose, Maggie O'Farrell has created a story of love and family relationships that is reminiscent of the very best of Edna O'Brien and Mary Gordon. With one of the most heart-stopping openings in modern fiction, After You'd Gone is a work of extraordinary psychological depth and impressive maturity.

After You'd Gone

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Alice Raikes boards a train at King’s Cross to visit her sisters in Scotland. Hours later, she steps into traffic on a busy London road and is taken to hospital in a coma. Who or what did she see in Edinburgh that made her return to London so suddenly? Was the accident a suicide attempt? And what exactly do her family, waiting at her bedside, have to hide? Sliding between different levels of consciousness, Alice listens to the conversations around her, and begins sifting through recollections of her past and a recently curtailed love affair.

Nevada

Gripping, insightful, and deft, The Distance Between Us by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.

The Distance Between Us

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Maggie O’Farrell

Günter Grass

Iowa

A German art historian and a Polish art restorer find adventure and love in the cemetery business. Their vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Line drawings by the Author. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book


The Call of the Toad

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Gao Xingjian

"Painting starts where words fail or are inadequate in expressing what one wants to express." -- Gao Xingjian, Harvard University Gazette In December 2000, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to having produced an impressive body of work in several genres -- fiction, plays, and essays -- this prolific artist has also distinguished himself as a painter. A collection of more than a hundred paintings, Return to Painting was first published in France for a major exhibition of his work in Avignon. The paintings -- India ink on rice paper -- span the artist's career from the 1960s until the present day. This book also includes an important essay by Gao, who is considered an artistic innovator in his native China, both in the visual arts and in literature.

Return to Painting

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Louise Gluck

Poems

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place: All the roads in the village unite at the fountain. Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees— The fountain rises at the center of the plaza; on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub. —from "tributaries" Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

A Village Life

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Nobel Prize Award for Literature

Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Beautiful World, Where Are You

50537667-39b4-44c2-a3b5-637299667bcc-1

Alabama

Ali Smith

From the acclaimed, award-winning author: Why are books so very powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives--our own personal libraries--make of us? What does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries, so hard-won but now in jeopardy, say about us?

The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.

Woven between the stories are conversations with writers and readers reflecting on the essential role that libraries have played in their lives. At a time when public libraries around the world face threats of cuts and closures, this collection stands as a work of literary activism--and as a wonderful read from one of our finest authors.

Public Library and Other Stories

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Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith's gorgeous canon.

Award-winning author Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel grounded both in the contemporary era and in the uncannily familiar era of the Black Plague. Companion Piece stands apart from her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times.

"A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom." --The New York Times Book Review

"Lyrical and timely . . . Smith's novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don't want to."
--TIME

"A story is never an answer. A story is always a question."

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?
 
What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?
 
"Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting."

Companion Piece

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New Hampshire

From the acclaimed, award-winning author comes a sparkling, surprising collection of the writing she loves best--and without which she would not have become a writer.

The Book Lover is a treasure trove of what Ali Smith has loved over the course of her reading life, in her twenties, as a teenager, as a child. Full of pieces from amazing writers like Sylvia Plath, Muriel Spark, Grace Paley, and Margaret Atwood, it also has a wonderful selection of lesser-known authors like Joseph Roth, only just gaining proper status now, and Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian genius who's far too underpublished. From surprising figures like Beryl the Peril, Billie Holliday, and Lee Miller to unusual selections from the most prominent writers in history, The Book Lover is an intimate, personal anthology that gives readers a glimpse of how writers develop their craft--by reading other writers.

The Book Lover

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Smith,Ali

New Jersey

Classic 1984 edition

Though Resurrection is much less widely known and honored than Tolstoy's earlier great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, it still is infused with the Tolstoy magic. Many of its scenes seem not like fiction but like windows opening into the real world. And the scenes of young love are as beautiful, poignant, and honest as anything Tolstoy ever wrote. Resurrection was an immense success when first published in 1899. A rich visual record of the vices of petty officialdom, Tolstoy's poignant study of spiritual regeneration provides a panoramic view of Russian social life at the end of the nineteenth century, while articulating his contempt for the social injustices of the world in which he lived. Book jacket.

Resurrection

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#russian #tolstoy #literature #fiction #paperback 

And Other Short Stories

"The Kreutzer Sonata" portrays an intense conflict between sexual desire and moral constraint. "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" is a simple, moving tale of peasant life with a moral lesson; the hero of "The Death of Ivan Ilych," after a lifetime of struggle, finds faith and love only as he faces death. Explanatory footnotes.

The Kreutzer Sonata

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Leo Tolstoy

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Offers new translations of the writer's most significant works of short fiction with autobiographical and moral themes, including "Hadji Murat" and "The Devil."

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

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Tolstoy

Susan Jane Gilman

In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street. Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, "The Ice Cream Queen" -- doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality. Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has spent her life building is at stake.

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

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Elizabeth Taylor

Caleb Crain

Haunted by unspoken tensions and stifled ardor, two lovers navigate shifting expectations and societal changes in inter-war England--a decade-spanning love story from an author who is "the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike" (The Independent)
 
The mid-twentieth century British novelist Elizabeth Taylor numbered among her admirers Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Kingsley Amis. She also regularly published stories in The New Yorker for close to two decades. For all that, her work, as steely as it is delicate, remains the secret of a small number of intensely devoted readers.

The publication of her finest novel, A Game of Hide and Seek, long unavailable in the United States, should help to change that. This is an unabashed love story, capturing all the uncertainty and inevitability and deceptiveness of true love, tracking the shifting currents of emotional life, and never yielding to melodrama. Set in Britain between the wars--a time of transition between old convention and new ways--the book's heroine is Harriet, the only child of a suffragette, whom we meet as a shy and domestic and not especially smart or pretty girl. At eighteen she falls in love with Vesey, but after Vesey must go away, she marries another man, Charles, and bears a child. Then Vesey returns.

Love is at the center of the book, but so too is Taylor's extraordinary knack for depicting characters. The minor figures in the book--from Harriet's mother's friend Caroline, with her progressive politics, to Charles, his coworkers, and his mother, to Betsy with her schoolgirl crush on her Greek teacher--are as memorable as the passion and heartache of Harriet and Vesey.

A Game of Hide and Seek

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Megan Hunter

The #1 Indie Next Selection for November 2017, a Summer/Fall 2017 Indies Introduce Selection, a Fall 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Amazon Best of the Month in Literature & Fiction


"The End We Start From is strange and powerful, and very apt for these uncertain times. I was moved, terrified, uplifted--sometimes all three at once. It takes skill to manage that, and Hunter has a poet's understanding of how to make each word count."--Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring 

Preempted by publishers around the world within days of the 2016 London Book Fair, The End We Start From heralds the arrival of Megan Hunter, a dazzling and unique literary talent. Hunter's debut is a searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that's familiar.

As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. The story traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.

The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book--a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change.


"In elegiac lines, Hunter tells a love story through the eyes of a new mother, who witnesses the death of an old life and the start of a new one...a perfect portrait of rebirth the final testament that time, and life, do go on, despite our best efforts."--Cotton Codinha, Elle Magazine


Shelves by Valerie Kulpit

Valerie Kulpit

A.S. Byatt

Booker Prize Nominated

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Deborah Levy TBR

Didion

Dostoevsky

Ferrante

J. M. Coetzee

James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff TBR

Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O’Farrell

Nobel Prize Award for Literature

Sally Rooney

Smith,Ali

Tolstoy

Wishlist

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Shelves by Valerie Kulpit

Valerie Kulpit

A.S. Byatt

Booker Prize Nominated

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Deborah Levy TBR

Didion

Dostoevsky

Ferrante

J. M. Coetzee

James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff TBR

Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O’Farrell

Nobel Prize Award for Literature

Sally Rooney

Smith,Ali

Tolstoy

Wishlist