Alexandra Romanoff

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Alaska

A Modern Romance

A political strategist, tainted by a scandalous ex, finds an unexpected career detour when her teenage boy band crush offers a second chance at the spotlight…and maybe something more. The debut book from 831 Stories, a modern romantic fiction company that prioritizes pleasure reading and the genre’s enthusiastic fans. "It sparkles with wit—pair it with a good glass of prosecco and prepare to get lost in this smart, sexy novel." —Elissa Sussman, bestselling author of Once More with Feeling and Funny You Should Ask Maya was a rising star in the political world until her ex-husband’s high-profile sex scandal nearly derailed her career. Landing a gubernatorial candidate is the fresh start she desperately needs – a chance to focus on meaningful work and leave the drama behind. But then an email from her past sends her world spinning: Charlie, former lead singer of Mischief, the boy band that fueled her teenage obsession, is staging a solo comeback and wants Maya’s help to make it happen. Turns out, she likes the grown-up Charlie and his genuine engagement with the world. Maya’s not about to ditch her political ambitions for a teenage crush, but if she can leverage Charlie to draw attention to the policies she cares about, shouldn’t she give it a try?

Big Fan

7e66bd72-6a3b-422c-8d9c-dce08851fb35-0

Anna Dorn

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

"A brutally funny and observant ride through astrology culture, love, and self-discovery." --NYLON's Most Anticipated Books of 2022




"A depressed Millennial astrologist, a self-hating lesbian with a rage (and drinking) problem, and profound questions of connection and destiny make Exalted an unforgettable read. Clear your schedule and consult your horoscope because Anna Dorn's novel will make you cackle and gasp, and you won't be able to put it down."
--Edan Lepucki



Emily Forrest runs Exalted, the hottest astrology account on Instagram, from her studio apartment in Los Angeles. Burned out on meme-making and listicles, Emily's passion for astrology is waning despite her gift for deciphering the signs, until she comes across a birth-chart that could potentially change her mind. Beau Rubidoux's planets are aligned, each paired with its optimum sign--his chart is exalted. She decides that Beau, a well-connected photographer in Echo Park, could potentially be the love of her life and help her fulfill her true destiny: to be a star.   

  

Meanwhile in Riverside, Dawn Webster has been dumped once again. At 48, she is forced to return to the same restaurant where she started waiting tables at 18. With no girlfriend, no career, and her only son gone to Hollywood, the once-vivacious Dawn is aimless and alone. Persona non-grata at the local gay bar, she guzzles cheap champagne and checks Exalted to feel seen. She is a fiery Leo, and one day she will get her due.

 

Alternating between Emily and Dawn's very different points of view, Exalted is a deliciously dark novel that explores desire, the projection of our need for love, and what we're really searching for when we keep scrolling. Anna Dorn's signature wit and biting social commentary takes readers across Southern California until Emily and Dawn's shocking connection is finally revealed.  

Exalted

5cad4283-2577-424a-a244-26fdadb9611b-1

Emily Mester

Essays on Excess

A tender, critical, and curious window into the American ethos of quantity over quality.

American Bulk *signed*

a374f2b0-b591-43f1-b203-8ed22c2115db-0

Sally Franson

Two creases pages, otherwise in great condition. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

"If you devoured Pippi Longstocking as a kid, you will not be able to turn away from Big in Sweden. Reading this hilarious, heartfelt book was even more fun than watching reality television. I absolutely loved it!" -- Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane A charming, wise, and laugh-out-loud funny novel following an American woman competing on a Swedish reality show in an attempt to discover her roots. Paulie Johansson has never put much stock in the idea of family: she has her long-term boyfriend Declan and beloved best friend Jemma, and that's more than enough for her. Yet one night on a lark, she lets Jemma convince her to audition for Sverige och Mig, a show on Swedish television where Swedish-Americans compete to win the ultimate prize: a reunion with their Swedish relatives. Much to her shock, her drunken submission video wins her a spot on the show, and against Declan's advice Paulie decides to go for it. Armed with her Polaroid camera, a beat-up copy of Pippi Longstocking, and an unquenchable sense of possibility, Paulie hops on a plane to Sweden and launches into the contest with seven other Americans, all under the watchful eye of a camera crew. At first, Paulie is certain that she and her competitors have nothing in common besides their passports and views their bloodthirsty ambitions with suspicion. Yet amid the increasingly absurd challenges--rowing from Denmark to Sweden in the freezing rain, battling through obstacle courses, competing in a pickled herring eating contest--Paulie finds herself rethinking her snap judgments about her fellow countrymen, while her growing attachment to her Swedish roots increases her resolve to win the competition herself. Grappling with long-held notions of family, friendship, and love--not to mention her feelings for the distractingly handsome Swedish cameraman who's been assigned to follow her around--Paulie starts to reconsider her past and rethink what she wants for the future. A fish-out-of-water tale filled with warmth, optimism, and wit, Big in Sweden is at its heart a love story: love for family, friends, country, and--most importantly--oneself.

Big in Sweden

771d2b54-c18d-44f8-b12a-2f0527408ec1-0

Jessica Anthony

From "one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page" (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family's apartment complex one morning and won't come out. It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won't come out. A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

The Most

56eeb30e-3306-4ab8-834b-72d2f9afc926-0

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Misinterpretation (ARC)

Deborah Levy

A new novel from the Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, the celebrated author of The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living. In Athens, a woman named Elsa glimpses her identical double. The other woman is buying two mechanical dancing horses. Elsa spends a month in pursuit of this enigmatic twin—a search that mounts to an uncanny, erotic encounter in a summer rainstorm. Deborah Levy's August Blue is a story of split selves, wayward selves, femininities, sexualities, avatars, shadows, reflections, alter egos, and the twin poles of compassion and cruelty that exist within all of us.

August Blue

f8b9f390-cb11-41a3-82ed-3da0e276d314-1

Christine Lai

An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal. In the English countryside--decimated by heat and drought, earthquakes and floods--Penelope archives what remains of an estate's once notable collection. As she catalogs the library's contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and with its scheduled demolition comes this pressing task of completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending arrival of Aidan's brother, Julian, who will return to have one final look at his childhood home. During a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before, Penelope suffered at the hands of Julian, and as his visit looms, she finds herself unable to suppress the past in her efforts to build a possible, if uncertain, future. In this elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary, Penelope clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning. Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

Landscapes

9f79b0c7-9605-4fdf-aed8-89ebcd8e71bd-0

Bad Animals (ARC)

Please note I purchased this used and the front cover is quite scratched. 

One Woman Show *ARC*

Julius Taranto

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

How I Won a Nobel Prize

d1db2873-2e81-4bc6-863f-5f591a4d00a8-0

Christiane Vadnais

Pablo Strauss

In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature?

A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species - humans included - are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her.

Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.

Fauna, Christiane Vadnais's first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018's best books by Radio-Canada.

Fauna

afefe337-343d-4639-8738-25c8fb39cb42-1

Stephanie Bishop

Novelist J.B. Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Her former professor, Patrick is much older than J.B. but when they met, he seemed somehow ageless, as all new gods appear in the eyes of those who worship them. He is a film director. A cult figure. But now his success is starting to wane and J.B. is on the cusp of winning a major literary prize. Her art has been forever overseen by him, now it may overshadow his. For days they sail in the sun. They lie about drinking, reading, sleeping, having sex. There is nothing but dark water all around them. Then a storm hits and Patrick falls off the ship. J.B. is left alone, as the search for what happened to Patrick - and the truth about their marriage - begins.

The Anniversary

62aa7e9f-7468-4c83-aab0-8181a419ad08-1

Jhumpa Lahiri

A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a decade. Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

Jenny

@always_reading

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Alexandra Romanoff

Big Fan

Anna Dorn

Exalted

Emily Mester

American Bulk signed

Sally Franson

Big in Sweden

Jessica Anthony

The Most

Ledia Xhoga

Misinterpretation (ARC)

Deborah Levy

August Blue

Christine Lai

Landscapes

Sarah Braunstein

Bad Animals (ARC)

Christine Coulson

One Woman Show ARC

Julius Taranto

How I Won a Nobel Prize

Christiane Vadnais; Pablo Strauss

Fauna

Stephanie Bishop

The Anniversary

Jhumpa Lahiri

Whereabouts

Get The App

Browse by categories

Alexandra Romanoff

Big Fan

Anna Dorn

Exalted

Emily Mester

American Bulk *signed*

Sally Franson

Big in Sweden

Jessica Anthony

The Most

Ledia Xhoga

Misinterpretation (ARC)

Deborah Levy

August Blue

Christine Lai

Landscapes

Sarah Braunstein

Bad Animals (ARC)

Christine Coulson

One Woman Show *ARC*

Julius Taranto

How I Won a Nobel Prize

Christiane Vadnais; Pablo Strauss

Fauna

Stephanie Bishop

The Anniversary

Jhumpa Lahiri

Whereabouts

Get The App

American Bulk signed

One Woman Show ARC