How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Publisher Comments Fresh from a failed marriage and unable to complete a feminist play she's been commissioned to write, Sheila, a twentysomething artist, is floundering. How can she write a play about women when everything she's learned about herself is from the men in her life who "wanted to teach her something"? How can she even live in the world without knowing how to be? So when Margaux, a talented painter, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, come into her life, Sheila plunges into a life experiment, treating them as specimens in an investigation about how to live and create. Perhaps in borrowing their best qualities, she can regain her footing in art and in life.
Previously published in Canada to terrific acclaim, How Should a Person Be? brilliantly fuses highbrow with lowbrow into a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum). What begins as curiosity about how to live well, in Sheila Heti's hands becomes an irresistible torn-from-life novel, crafted with transcribed dialogues, along with fiction, nonfiction, e-mails, and more, exploring the eternal questions of why we connect, whom we desire, and how a person should be. Hardcover
|
|
Erasure by Percival Everett
Publisher Comments Percival Everetts blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback Thelonious "Monk" Ellisons writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of Wes Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimers, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his fathers suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkinss bestseller. He doesnt intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel. Your price $17.00 New Trade Paperback
|
|
|
Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones
Synopsis It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton. Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction. And nobody was ever caught. Greenwood just leaned forward into next years work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Some secrets were buried on purpose. Now Stephen's going back the only way he knows how: with a pen. His first time back since he graduated high school. There's questions to be asked, there's stories to be recorded, and pieces of other stories that can be put together. Packed with small-town paranoia, mystery, and more secrets than your average graveyard, Growing Up Dead in Texas is Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel. It's a story about farming. It's a story about Texas. It's a story about finally standing up from the dead, and walking away. And then going back one more time, when it's supposed to have been long enough ago already that you can deal with it as just events, as just facts. In the tradition of Robert McCammon's A Boy's Life and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, Growing up Dead in Texas is a narrative lens onto the past, to see where things started. And where they keep starting again and again. Your price $10.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Nazareth North Dakota by Tommy Zurhellen
Publisher Comments Fiction. Winner of the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the U.S. Midwest Region. This gem of a novel—a splendid recasting and modern retelling of the story of the young messiah—is a fast, quirky, dirt-kicking ride through the Badlands of North Dakota from the early 1980s to the present, complete with feathered locks, KISS cover bands, and fire-and-brimstone preachers. It's an adventurous, irresistible tale about everything from a 31-year-old fugitive mom who escapes a motel shootout with an abandoned newborn to a corrupt sheriff, a kindhearted carpenter, the world's oldest man, and the chosen paths of two hell-raising, miracle-bent cousins. This incandescent debut is an authentic religious allegory connecting Lakota history with scripture. It contains plot twists and undeniable truths as deep and wide as the Little Missouri River, with ideas and messages so big, so earthshaking, so unmistakably divine, they do more than transform the little town of Nazareth. They change the world. Your price $8.50 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Dark Tower 01 Gunslinger by Stephen King
Publisher Comments Eerie, dreamlike, set in a world that is weirdly related to our own, The Gunslinger introduces Roland Deschain of Gilead, of In-World that was, as he pursues his enigmatic antagonist to the mountains that separate the desert from the Western Sea. Roland is a solitary figure, perhaps accursed, who with a strange singlemindedness traverses an exhausted, almost timeless landscape. The people he encounters are left behind, or worse—left dead. At a way station, however, he meets Jake, a boy from a particular time (1977) and a particular place (New York City), and soon the two are joined—khef, ka, and ka-tet. The mountains lie before them. So does the man in black and, somewhere far beyond...the Dark Tower. Your price $14.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Publisher Comments At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Superior, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for the big leagues. Then a routine throw goes disastrously off course and the fates of five people are upended.
Henry's life purpose is called into question. Longtime bachelor Guert Affenlight, the college's president, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes swept up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish to start a new life after escaping an ill-fated marriage.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets, and help one another to discover their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about the bonds of family and friendship and love, and about commitment — to oneself and to others. Your price $10.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Farewell to Arms The Hemingway Library Edition by Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, Sean Hemingway
Publisher Comments Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, andlt;Iandgt;A Farewell to Arms andlt;/Iandgt;is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefieldand#8212;weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertionand#8212;this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. andlt;BRandgt;andlt;BRandgt;Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to andlt;Iandgt;A Farewell to Arms andlt;/Iandgt;thirty-nine times to get the words right. This edition collects all of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingwayand#8217;s craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Featuring Hemingwayand#8217;s own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the authorand#8217;s son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the authorand#8217;s grandson Seand#225;n Hemingway, this edition of andlt;Iandgt;A Farewell to Arms andlt;/Iandgt;is truly a celebration. Your price $30.00 New Hardcover
|
|
Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
Publisher Comments From Lauren Groff, author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Monsters of Templeton, comes Delicate Edible Birds, one of the most striking short fiction debuts in recent years. Here are nine stories of astonishing insight and variety, each revealing a resonant drama within the life of a twentieth-century American woman.
In "Sir Fleeting," a Midwestern farm girl on her honeymoon in Argentina falls into lifelong lust for a French playboy. In "Blythe," an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In "The Wife of the Dictator," that eponymous wife ("brought back... from [the dictator's] last visit to America") grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In "Delicate Edible Birds," a group of war correspondents a lone, high-spirited woman among them falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In "Lucky Chow Fun," Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town.
In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime or several lifetimes.
Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur; they’re in every story love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.
Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds will further Groff's growing reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation. Your price $11.95 Used Hardcover
|
|
Pym by Mat Johnson
Publisher Comments A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation. He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters. Hardcover
|
|