Literary
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Arcadia Falls
$6.99 Add to cartBONUS: This edition contains an Arcadia Falls discussion guide.
Financial straits and a desire for a fresh start take recently widowed Meg Rosenthal and her aloof teenage daughter, Sally, to Arcadia Falls, a tucked-away hamlet in upstate New York where Meg has accepted a teaching position at a boarding school. The creaky, neglected cottage they’ll be calling home feels like an ill omen, but Meg is determined to make the best of it. Then a shocking crisis strikes: During Arcadia’s First Night bonfire, one of Meg’s folklore students plunges to her death in a campus gorge. Sheriff Callum Reade finds the presumed accident suspicious, but then, he is a man with a dark past himself. Meg is unnerved by Reade’s interest in the girl’s death, and as long-buried secrets emerge, she must face down her own demons and the danger threatening to envelop Sally. As the past clings tight to the present, the shadows, as if in a terrifying fairy tale, grow longer and deadlier.
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Apologize, Apologize!
$9.99 Add to cartA dazzling debut novel about the family that puts the personality in disorder.
Apologize, Apologize! takes us into the perversely charmed world of the Flanagans and their son, Collie (who has the questionable good fortune to be named after a breed of dog). Coming of age on Martha’s Vineyard, he struggles to find his place within his wildly wealthy, hyper-articulate, resolutely crazy Irish-Catholic family: a philandering father, incorrigible brother, pigeon-racing uncle, radical activist mother, and domineering media mogul grandfather (accused of being a murderer by Collie’s mother). It is a world where chaos is exhilaratingly constant, where money is of no object. And yet it is a world where the things Collie wants-understanding, stability, a sense of belonging-cannot be bought for any price. Through his travails, we realize what it really means to grow up and also to grow into one’s family: finding to find ways to see them anew, to forgive them, and to be forgiven in turn.In prose that is lively, humorous, and brilliant throughout, Elizabeth Kelly gives us the dysfunctional-family novel to end all dysfunctional-family novels, finding the comedy and pathos in her characters’ struggles, and showing beautifully how a family’s love can be as trying as it is true.
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Ancestor
$13.99 Add to cart“A lushly written, dream-like modern gothic with as many dark turns and twists as the Montebianco family tree has branches. Welcome to the family.” – Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of Survivor Song
After a DNA test reveals that Alberta “Bert” Monte is the sole heir of a wealthy noble family in the Italian Alps, she leaves New York to visit the family estate: Montebianco Castle, a centuries-old compound isolated in the mountains. What appeared to be a fairy tale inheritance, however, soon turns into a nightmare as Bert begins to uncover the dark legacy of her family: the truth about the abandoned village at the base of the castle; the whispers of stolen children; and the rumors of a legendary monster in the mountains. As Bert unravels the truth, she learns that her true inheritance lies not in a noble title or ancestral treasures, but in her very genes, and now she must choose between preserving a secret centuries in the keeping or abandoning it forever.
“Vivid and uncanny…makes the most of Trussoni’s signature blend of science, myth, and mystery.” —Deborah Harkness, bestselling author of A Discovery of Witches
“Inventive and entertaining.” — People
“A Gothic Extravaganza.” —Kirkus
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And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
$12.49 Add to cartIn the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.
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As Cool as I Am
$11.99 Add to cartNOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CLAIRE DANES, JAMES MARSDEN AND SARAH BOLGER As Cool As I Am “… packs an emotional punch that sneaks up from behind… Fromm creates an engrossing coming-of-age saga that cuts to the essence and shines.”(Seattle Times). As a teenager pretty much left to raise herself, Lucy Diamond is a narrator with a radiant yet guarded heart. As she races at breakneck pace toward womanhood, everything is at stake for her, producing an urgency and dread that she holds at bay with humor and grace. But while Lucy charges ahead, her mother’s youth is fading. Simultaneously embracing and resisting their similarities, Pete Fromm reveals both women’s emotional vulnerabilities and their deep mutual need. Conveyed through dialogue that is both laugh-aloud-funny and true, Lucy stands out in contemporary literature for her large heart and inimitable grit. A Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book of the Year
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Anthropology of an American Girl
$10.99 Add to cartThis is what it’s like to be a high-school-age girl.
To forsake the boyfriend you once adored.
To meet the love of your life, who just happens to be your teacher.
To discover for the first time the power of your body and mind.
This is what it’s like to be a college-age woman.
To live through heartbreak.
To suffer the consequences of your choices.
To depend on others for survival but to have no one to trust but yourself.
This is Anthropology of an American Girl.
A literary sensation, this extraordinarily candid novel about the experience of growing up female in America will strike a nerve in readers of all ages.BONUS: This edition contains an Anthropology of an American Girl discussion guide.
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1968: Eye Hotel
$2.99 Add to cartThe first of ten novellas in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era. Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s epic are each devoted to a single year in one of America’s most transformative decades. This multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins a kaleidoscopic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights, all played out among Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs. In 1968: Eye Hotel, the residents of I-Hotel live through some of the most significant changes of the mid-twentieth century as they try to make sense of their own lives. It’s the Year of the Monkey, and as every kid in Chinatown seems to be orphaned, survival means everything from protest gatherings to a late-night quest for the city’s best bowl of noodles.
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2 A.M. In Little America
$10.49 Add to cartAn Esquire “Best Book of Spring 2022” selection
A Publishers Weekly “Best Book of Summer 2022”
A Kirkus “Best Book of May 2022”
A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2022” selection
A San Francisco Chronicle “Most Anticipated Novel of 2022” selectionFrom “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.
One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he has had in years—a mysterious migrant named Marlise, who bears a striking resemblance to a onetime classmate.
Nearly a decade later—after anti-migrant sentiment has put their whirlwind intimacy and asylum to an end—Ron is living in “Little America,” an enclave of migrants in one of the few countries still willing to accept them. Here, among reminders of his past life, he again begins to feel that he may have found a home. Ron adopts a stray dog, observes his neighbors, and lands a repairman job that allows him to move through the city quietly. But this newfound security, too, is quickly jeopardized, as resurgent political divisions threaten the fabric of Little America. Tapped as an informant against the rise of militant gangs and contending with the appearance of a strangely familiar woman, Ron is suddenly on dangerous and uncertain ground.
Brimming with mystery, suspense, and Kalfus’s distinctive comic irony, 2 A.M. in Little America poses several questions vital to the current moment: What happens when privilege is reversed? Who is watching and why? How do tribalized politics disrupt our ability to distinguish what is true and what is not? This is a story for our time—gripping, unsettling, prescient—by one of our most acclaimed novelists. -
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American Music
$7.99 Add to cartFrom the author of I Was Amelia Earhart, a luminous love story that winds through several generations—told in Jane Mendelsohn’s distinctive mesmerizing style.
At its center are Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq War confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist, a former dancer. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.
As Milo’s treatment progresses, the images begin to weave together into an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories. There are Joe and Pearl, a husband and wife in the 1930s whose marriage is tested by Pearl’s bewitching artistic cousin, Vivian. There is the heartrending story of a woman photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life’s work. The picaresque life of a woman who has a child too young and finds herself always on the move from job to job and man to man. And the story of a man and a woman in seventeenth-century Turkey—a eunuch and a sultan’s concubine—whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America’s endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo’s own love.
A beautiful mystery and a meditation on love—its power and its limitations—American Music is a brilliantly original novel.
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Aleph
$12.99 Add to cartTransform your life. Rewrite your destiny.
In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him.
Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before—and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do?
Some books are read. Aleph is lived.
This eBook edition includes an excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s Manuscript Found in Accra and a Reading Group Guide!
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American Supernatural Tales
$9.99 Add to cartAs Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course—Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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After Hannibal
$5.99 Add to cartGolden Umbria is home to breathtaking scenery and great art; it is also where Hannibal and his invading band of Carthaginians ambushed and slaughtered a Roman legion, and where the local place-names still speak of that bloodshed.
Unsworth’s contemporary invaders include the Greens, a retired American couple seeking serenity among the Umbrian hills, who are bilked out of their savings by the corrupt English “building expert” Stan Blemish; the Chapmans, a British property speculator and his wife, whose dispute with their neighbors over a wall escalates into a feud of nearly medieval proportions; Anders Ritter, a German haunted by the part his father played in a mass killing of Italian hostages in Rome during the Second World War; and Fabio and Arturo, a gay couple who, searching for peace and self-sufficiency, find treachery instead. And at the center of all these webs of deceit and greed is the cunning lawyer Mancini, happy to aid the disputants–and to exploit to the fullest the faith that these “innocents abroad” have placed in him.
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Allah’s Spacious Earth
$17.49 Add to cartAllah’s Spacious Earth is a stunningly fresh and timely political dystopia that depicts the tragic yet very real consequences of tensions between majority populations and Muslim minorities in the Western world. The novel is set in an imagined future where anti-Muslim sentiment and political pressure lead to a community being cut off from the rest of society. Told from the perspective of Nasim, a young Muslim living in the Zone-an urban area within one of the states forming the Pan-European Federation-the story follows his journey as he struggles with the restrictions imposed upon him along with the expectations of his community. In the tradition of Michel Houellbecq’s Submission, Allah’s Spacious Earth is a powerful novel of ideas that brilliantly captures a growing fear in Western societies and its devastating fallout.