Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Minnesota

Stress-eating after a breakup?
Frustrated by the cost of a good cocktail?
Stymied by the weirdness of abstract art?
These penguins share your pain.

The "random penguins" are a lineup of quirky, lovable weirdos with minds of their own. They understand the agony of social awkwardness, the power of the perfect smoky eye, and the arm- (or wing)-flapping terror of having a bee in the car. In fact, these winged characters get into the same sticky situations we all do. They are Penguins with People Problems.

So meet your favorite new flightless friends. They're brutally honest (except when they're lying), comically insecure, and totally relatable.

Penguins with People Problems

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#paperback #fiction #scifi #space #sci-fi #action #sciencefiction #andyweir #mars

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

Stranded on Mars by a dust storm that compromised his space suit and forced his crew to leave him behind, astronaut Watney struggles to survive in spite of minimal supplies and harsh environmental challenges that test his ingenuity in unique ways. A first novel.

The Martian

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More Adventures at the Table

The national bestseller that picks up where Tender at the Bone left off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts Reichl's transformation from chef to food writer, a process that leads her from New York to China in pursuit of good food and good company.

Comfort Me with Apples

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#paperback #fiction #juliaalvarez #contemporary #romance 

Eagerly embracing their new American culture in Miami, the four Garcia women iron their hair, smoke cigarettes, date American men, forget their Spanish, and lose their accents all in their journey toward adulthood. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

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#paperback #nonfiction #relationships #love #selfhelp #lovegoals #fiction 

The Secret to Love That Lasts

Outlines five expressions of love--quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch--and explains how to identify and communicate effectively in a spouse's "love language."

The 5 Love Languages

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#paperback #kerouac #ontheroad #beatgeneration

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

On the Road

#paperback #nonfiction #biography #readinglolitaintehran #fiction #anguished #courage #historical 

A Memoir in Books

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Reading Lolita in Tehran

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#paperback #history #americanhistory #learning #nonfiction #pulitzerprize 

The Revolutionary Generation

The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's discussion of Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation . We hope they will enrich your experience of this Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

Founding Brothers

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#paperback #fiction #thekiterunner #historical #historicalfiction #socialscience #afghanistan #general 

Traces the unlikely friendship of Amir, a wealthy Afghanistani youth, and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of the nation's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

The Kite Runner

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#paperback #fiction #classics #backtoschool #literature 

Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years, on the day of her husband's funeral. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Love in the Time of Cholera

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#paperback #fiction #relationships #drama #historicalfiction #newyorktimesbestseller #amytan #adultfiction 

“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

The Joy Luck Club

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#paperback #internationallaw #IR #politicalscience

Courts, Politics, Rights

A compelling new look at the role of today's international courts

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. The New Terrain of International Law charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics.

The New Terrain of International Law presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, Karen Alter argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. Alter explains how this limited power--the power to speak the law--translates into political influence, and she considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.

The New Terrain of International Law

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#paperback #middlegrade #youngadultfiction #classic 

Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.

The Giver

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#paperback #activism #humanrights #socialmovement

Conflict and Change among Transnational Activists

U.S. human rights advocacy has long focused on civil and political rights-issues such as torture, censorship, and lack of democratic freedoms abroad. In the 1990s a series of high-profile anti-sweatshop and fair-trade campaigns shifted the spotlight to labor issues. But as human rights activists in the United States and elsewhere take up the cause of economic exploitation, they don't always agree on the nature of the problem, or on what should be done to address it. What is more, they do not necessarily have the final say: in many cases, the focus of a campaign will shift when local activists make their voices heard or when the imported aims of nongovernmental organizations conflict with the goals of the people they intend to help.

Shareen Hertel explores the dramatic negotiations within cross-border human rights campaigns. Activists on the receiving end of such campaigns do much more than seek the help of powerful allies beyond their borders. They often also challenge outsiders' understandings of basic human rights--in some cases, directly (by "blocking" campaigns intended to help them) and in other cases, indirectly (by employing "backdoor moves" aimed at more subtly introducing new human rights norms). Hertel looks closely at struggles for human rights in two contexts: Bangladesh, where activists challenged the understanding of human rights central to an international campaign to prevent child labor in that country, and Mexico, where activists sought to broaden the scope of efforts to prevent discrimination against pregnant workers in their country. Hertel connects these unexpected challenges to a new wave of international advocacy, and thereby illuminates democratic struggles in the new global economy.

Unexpected Power

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Inside a European Foreign Ministry

The 2010 WikiLeaks release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables has made it eminently clear that there is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. In At Home with the Diplomats, Iver B. Neumann offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry. Neumann worked for several years at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he had an up-close view of how diplomats conduct their business and how they perceive their own practices. In this book he shows us how diplomacy is conducted on a day-to-day basis.

Approaching contemporary diplomacy from an anthropological perspective, Neumann examines the various aspects of diplomatic work and practice, including immunity, permanent representation, diplomatic sociability, accreditation, and issues of gender equality. Neumann shows that the diplomat working abroad and the diplomat at home are engaged in two different modes of knowledge production. Diplomats in the field focus primarily on gathering and processing information. In contrast, the diplomat based in his or her home capital is caught up in the seemingly endless production of texts: reports, speeches, position papers, and the like. Neumann leaves the reader with a keen sense of the practices of diplomacy: relations with foreign ministries, mediating between other people's positions while integrating personal and professional into a cohesive whole, adherence to compulsory routines and agendas, and, above all, the generation of knowledge. Yet even as they come to master such quotidian tasks, diplomats are regularly called upon to do exceptional things, such as negotiating peace.

At Home with the Diplomats

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#paperback #fiction #kurtv #literaryfiction #classic #college #blackhumor #comedy 

"A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!"--The New York Times 

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of the twentieth century's most important works--and Vonnegut at his very best.

"[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist."--Harper's Magazine

"Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense."--Atlantic Monthly

Cat's Cradle

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#paperback #japanhistory #arthurgolden #fiction #history #japan #memoriesofageisha 

Seductive, evocative, exquisite - intimate memoirs spanning half a century of Japanese history, revealing a closed world.

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.

Memoirs of a Geisha

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#paperback #fiction #classic #romance #annakarenina #classics #leotolstoy 

Presents the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel in which a young woman is destroyed when she attempts to live outside the moral law of her society.

Anna Karenina (Barnes and Noble Classics Series)

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#paperback #historical #fantasyfiction #fiction #historicalfiction #bernhardschlink #thereader #bestseller 

At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime

The Reader

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#paperback #adaptation #fiction #bestseller #dystopian #classic #postapocalyptic #massmarket 

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

The Road

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Irvine Welsh's first short-story collection since his debut work The Acid House presents five extraordinary stories, which remind us that he is a master of the short form, a brilliant storyteller, and--unarguably--one of today's funniest and most subversive writers. In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker--an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava--tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters.In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

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International Organizations in Global Politics

Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators.

Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.

Rules for the World

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Constructing Authority in the European Union

How do political authorities build support for themselves and their rule? Doing so is key to accruing power, but it can be a complicated affair. The European Union, as a novel political entity, faces a particularly difficult set of challenges. The Politics of Everyday Europe argues that thelegitimation of EU authority rests in part on a transformation in the symbols and practices of everyday life in Europe.The Single Market and the Euro, European citizenship and the dismantling of borders within Europe, EU public architecture, arts and popular entertainment, and EU diplomacy and foreign policy are important not only for their material effects but for how they change peoples' day-to-day experiences andnaturalize European governance. The modern nation-state has long used similar strategies to legitimize its political power. But the EU's cultural infrastructure is unique, as it navigates national identities with a particularly banality, framing the EU as complementary to, rather than in competitionwith, the nation-states. These underlying social processes have supported the surprising political development of the EU, but they do so in a way that makes EU authority inherently fragile.As economic and political crises have stretched European social solidarity to the breaking point, this book offers a clear theoretical framework for understanding both the power of everyday culture, and its limits, in legitimating the EU

The Politics of Everyday Europe

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Land Rights and the Structure of Politics

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and 'nationalization' of political competition.

Browse by categories

Mary Laura Philpott

Penguins with People Problems

Andy Weir

The Martian

Ruth Reichl

Comfort Me with Apples

Julia Alvarez

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Gary Chapman

The 5 Love Languages

Jack Kerouac

On the Road

Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Joseph J. Ellis

Founding Brothers

Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner

Gabriel García Márquez; Edith Grossman (Translator)

Love in the Time of Cholera

Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club

Karen J. Alter

The New Terrain of International Law

Lois Lowry

The Giver

Shareen Hertel

Unexpected Power

Iver B. Neumann

At Home with the Diplomats

Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle

Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha

Leo Tolstoy; Amy Mandelker (Introduction by, Introductions and notes by); Constance Garnett (Translator)

Anna Karenina (Barnes and Noble Classics Series)

Bernhard Schlink

The Reader

Cormac McCarthy

The Road

Irvine Welsh

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

Michael Barnett; Martha Finnemore

Rules for the World

Kathleen R. McNamara

The Politics of Everyday Europe

Catherine Boone

Property and Political Order in Africa

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