Gudrun Eva Minervudottir

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Indiana

A provocative and cinematic tale of isolation, friendship, the uses of sex and the art of finding salvation in the most unexpected of places

The Creator

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Fiona Mozley

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST ELMET Named One of the Most-Anticipated Books of 2021 by: The Millions, BuzzFeed, The Stylist, The Guardian, and more “[An] absurdly good read . . . A rollicking tale of . . . property and posterity.” —The Guardian In the middle of the bustle of London's Soho, among the theaters and sex shops and pubs, sits a building. It isn’t particularly assuming. But it’s a prime piece of real estate, and a young millionaire, Agatha Howard, wants to convert it into luxury condos as soon as she can kick out all the tenants. The problem is, the building in question houses a brothel, and Precious and Tabitha, two of the women who live and work there, are not going to go quietly. And another problem is, just where did Agatha’s fortune come from? The fight over this piece of property also draws in the men who visit, including Robert, a one-time member of a far-right group and enforcer for Agatha’s father; Jackie, a policewoman intent on making London a safer place for all women; Bastian, a rich and dissatisfied party boy who pines for an ex-girlfriend; and a collection of vagabonds and strays who occupy the basement. In this much-anticipated follow-up to Fiona Mozley's brilliant debut, Elmet, as these characters—with surprising hidden connections and shadowy pasts—converge, the fight over the property boils over into a hot stew. Entertaining, sharply funny, and dazzlingly accomplished, Hot Stew confronts questions about wealth and inheritance, gender and power, and the things women must do to survive in an unjust world.

Hot Stew

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Jessica Gross

HYSTERIA follows a hypersexual, self-destructive young woman who becomes convinced, over the course of 48 feverish hours, that her Brooklyn bartender is Sigmund Freud.

Hysteria

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Anthony Briggs

Orlando Figes

Leo Tolstoy

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A stunning clothbound Hardcover Classics edition of Tolstoy's great novel, one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
 
At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes--conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate--with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.
 
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.

War and Peace

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John D. Smith

RARE - out of print

The Mahabharata is the story of two warring factions of cousins - 100 demons in human form against five sons of gods. Woven into this epic martial tale of great and bloody battles are numerous narrative digressions and much religious instruction - including the wisdom of Bhisma, give from a deathbed of arrows, and the legendary Bhagavadgita, spoken by Krsna on the very verge of war. The enactment of eternal conflicts, it is also a vital Hindu text on the nature of dharma - the right way for each person to live his or her life, and the only way to secure an improved lot in future births.

Mahabharata

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Herbert Weiner

9-1/2 Mystics is a treasure hunt for the life secrets of the great mystical tradition of the Kabbala. Herbert Weiner opens up a world rarely accessible to outsiders by introducing us to contemporary representatives of this tradition-some famous, some unknown-and helps us see the connection between their hidden wisdom and problems of contemporary life.

Nine and One-Half Mystics

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Christine Angot

An agonizing turbulence lies just beneath the surface of this skillfully wrought novel by the French phenom who caused a sensation with the publication of her novel Incest. Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.

An Impossible Love

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Heinrich von Kleist

Michael Hofmann

An extraordinary masterpiece of German literature, now in a gripping new English translation

Michael Kohlhaas

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Kathy Acker

Chris Kraus

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight--with a new introduction by Chris Kraus--continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny--her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"--until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

Blood and Guts in High School

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Annie Ernaux

Tanya Leslie

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I Remain in Darkness is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music. A Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999

I Remain in Darkness

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Shalom Auslander

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

An outrageously tasty comedy about identity, tribalism and mothers, from the author of Hope: A Tragedy - 'the funniest novel of the decade' Sunday Times.

Mother for Dinner

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Joan Didion

David Thomson

A Novel

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Play It As It Lays

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Sean Michaels

Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI, named Charlotte Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet’s accomplishments don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at a cost. Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company’s lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a ‘historic partnership’ with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it’s a second chance she can’t resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship. Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time—a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

Do You Remember Being Born?

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An uncorrected galley that I purchased on Abebooks (I didn’t know it was a galley at the time of purchase).

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

As the Wolf Howls at My Door

Alison L. Strayer

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

The diary of one of France's most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying "his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of." She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
 
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Getting Lost

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The Years, by bestselling French author Annie Ernaux, is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries.

The Years

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Linda Coverdale

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her. While each of Ernaux's books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.

A Frozen Woman

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Lewis Carroll

Large hardback with gilded edges and illustrations inside. 

Everything that Lewis Carroll ever published in book form appears in this volume. In addition, at least ten of the shorter pieces have never appeared in print except in their original editions. Included are: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, The Hunting of the Snark and all of the poetry, essays and phantasmagoria along with a substantial collection of his miscellaneous writings. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories is part of Barnes & Noble's series of quality leatherbound volumes. Each title in the series presents a classic work in an attractively designed edition bound in genuine bonded leather, with beautiful illustrations and breathtaking endpapers. These books make elegant additions to any home library.

B&N Alice Adventures Wonderland Leather O/P

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Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

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