Deborah Willis

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Idaho

A Novel

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize One of Scientific American's Best Staff Reads of 2023 A funny, poignant, and page-turning debut novel that skewers billionaire-funded space travel in a love story of interplanetary proportions.

Girlfriend on Mars

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Tom Chivers

Journeys in the Deep City

__________________ London Clay explores the hidden layers that make up this city. Armed with just his tattered Streetfinder map, Chivers leads his reader down forgotten waterways into abandoned catacombs and buried stations, exploring the nooks and crannies of a forgotten city. His network of journeys combine together to produce a compelling interrogation of London's past. In a route that covers much of his own personal history, this is a bold exploration of the city's secrets and asks us also to consider important questions about its future.

London Clay

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Zach Williams

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Stories

From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor and Wallace Stegner Fellow Zach Williams comes a staggering debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life's broken promises. Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their infant remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of a UFO, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window. In each of Williams' ten stories, time is as fallible as the characters, and reality is witnessed through the gauzy folds of a dream--or a nightmare. Bucolic scenes devolve into harrowing exercises in abandonment; the quotidian nature of office life raises serious questions of existential fortitude. Williams is keenly aware of the insidiousness lurking in the shadows of the everyday, ably spiking it with humor. He depicts the divided self of the parent, the distances necessary to protect our children, and the fallout of our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to recognize the impact--and beauty--of time's relentless movement. With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.

Beautiful Days

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Stephen King

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Two years after losing her husband of twenty-five years, Lisey looks back at the sometimes frightening intimacy that marked their marriage, her husband's successes as an award-winning novelist, and his secretive nature that established Lisey's supernatural belief systems, on which she eventually comes to depend for survival. 1,250,000 first printing.

Lisey's Story

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Julia Whelan





From the author of My Oxford Year, Julia Whelan's uplifting novel tells the story of a former actress turned successful audiobook narrator--who has lost sight of her dreams after a tragic accident--and her journey of self-discovery, love, and acceptance when she agrees to narrate one last romance novel.



For Sewanee Chester, being an audiobook narrator is a long way from her old dreams, but the days of being a star on film sets are long behind her. She's found success and satisfaction from the inside of a sound booth and it allows her to care for her beloved, ailing grandmother. When she arrives in Las Vegas last-minute for a book convention, Sewanee unexpectedly spends a whirlwind night with a charming stranger. 

On her return home, Sewanee discovers one of the world's most beloved romance novelists wanted her to perform her last book--with Brock McNight, the industry's hottest, most secretive voice. Sewanee doesn't buy what romance novels are selling--not after her own dreams were tragically cut short--and she stopped narrating them years ago. But her admiration of the late author, and the opportunity to get her grandmother more help, makes her decision for her. 

As Sewanee begins work on the book, resurrecting her old romance pseudonym, she and Brock forge a real connection, hidden behind the comfort of anonymity. Soon, she is dreaming again, but secrets are revealed, and the realities of life come crashing down around her once more.

If she can learn to risk everything for desires she has long buried, she will discover a world of intimacy and acceptance she never believed would be hers.

Thank You for Listening

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#paperback #fiction #drama #newyork #awardwinner #nationalbookaward #historicalfiction 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal. Praise for Let the Great World Spin “This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it’s a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There’s so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”—Dave Eggers “Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families—the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.”—USA Today “The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air.”—Esquire “Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCann’s marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down.”—The Seattle Times “Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCann’s heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow.”—Entertainment Weekly “An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Let the Great World Spin

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Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college. There was Sam, an unabashed collector of other people's stories; Carlotta, a troubled free spirit; and Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating and sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn's ode to her time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. It is filled with the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.

Toad

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#paperback #fiction #sci-fi #seananmcguire 

When her sister Patty died, Jenna blamed herself. When Jenna died, she blamed herself for that, too. Unfortunately Jenna died too soon. Living or dead, every soul is promised a certain amount of time, and when Jenna passed she found a heavy debt of time in her record. Unwilling to simply steal that time from the living, Jenna earns every day she leeches with volunteer work at a suicide prevention hotline. But something has come for the ghosts of New York, something beyond reason, beyond death, beyond hope; something that can bind ghosts to mirrors and make them do its bidding. Only Jenna stands in its way. Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day is a new standalone urban fantasy novella from New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire.

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

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Working as a quality control inspector at a toy factory in Rhode Island, friendless alcoholic Smithy Ide considers himself a loser until a tragic event prompts him to set off on an epic cross-country bicycle journey that promises him a final chance to become the man he has always wanted to be. 300,000 first printing.

The Memory of Running

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#hardcover #fiction #family #literary-fiction #crossroads 

Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. It’s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has veered into the era’s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the center. By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.

Crossroads

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#paperback #fiction #africanamericanauthors #classic #literature #zoranealehurston 

Their Eyes Were Watching God

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SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE In a country ruled by fear, no one is innocent. Stalin's Soviet Union is an official paradise, where citizens live free from crime and fear only one thing: the all-powerful state. Defending this system is idealistic security officer Leo Demidov, a war hero who believes in the iron fist of the law. But when a murderer starts to kill at will and Leo dares to investigate, the State's obedient servant finds himself demoted and exiled. Now, with only his wife at his side, Leo must fight to uncover shocking truths about a killer-and a country where "crime" doesn't exist.

Child 44

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#hardcover #fiction #drama #relationships #contemporary #marriageplot #eugenides #familyportrait 

Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

The Marriage Plot

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When Riley causes an accident that costs a show dog his leg, he's determined to adopt the dog and show his father that being different doesn't make something, or someone, worthwhile.

Champ

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History

Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power

Chosen as one of the ten best academic books of the 1990s by Lingua Franca readers "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king."—Elizabeth I Whether this sentence is an accurate transcription of Elizabeth's speech at Tilbury in 1588, it does characterize some of the struggles, contradictions, and cultural anxieties that dominated the collective consciousness of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In The Heart and Stomach of a King, Carole Levin explores contemporary representations of the unmarried, childless Elizabeth and focuses on the ways in which members of her court, foreign ambassadors, and a motley—and sometimes delusional—collection of subjects responded to her. Throughout, Levin's purpose is to explore how gender constructions, role expectations, and beliefs about sexuality influenced both Elizabeth's self-presentation and others' perceptions of her as a female, and Protestant, ruler.

The Heart and Stomach of a King

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Seeking to escape her brutal boyfriend and hoping to introduce her daughter, Griff, to the grandfather she has never met, widow Jean Gilkyson seeks refuge in her late husband's Wyoming hometown with her estranged father-in-law, who blames her for his son's death. Reader's Guide available. 75,000 first printing.

An Unfinished Life

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#hardcover #nonfiction #illustrated #cooking #drinks #cocktails #neverread 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Cocktails with a Literary Twist

Features 65 drink recipes inspired by history's most loved novels.

Tequila Mockingbird

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Fuel Your Epic

Morgan Sjogren is living the dream: She runs, backpacks, and rappels through the canyon country of the American Southwest, living out of a sunshine yellow Jeep Wrangler. She travels the West with nothing but a backpack of thrift-store clothing, her running shoes, some ultralight backpacking gear, and a dream to make the outdoors her home. Known to her followers on Instagram as the "Running Bum," Sjogren devotes her days to adventure in places like Sedona, Bears Ears, Durango, and Yosemite. She shares her lifestyle in incredible photos and essays about her thrills and spills in Outlandish: Fuel Your Epic. In Outlandish, this running bum's attitude toward adventure will inspire you to find your epic while her recipes for simple living (and burritos!) will show you the path to your own adventure life.

Outlandish

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New York Times bestseller An NPR pick for Best Books of 2018 An O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Book of 2018 A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2018 One of Christian Science Monitor's best fiction reads of 2018 One of Newsweek's Best Books of the year The New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a timely novel that interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.

Browse by categories

Deborah Willis

Girlfriend on Mars

Tom Chivers

London Clay

Zach Williams

Beautiful Days

Stephen King

Lisey's Story

Julia Whelan

Thank You for Listening

Colum McCann

Let the Great World Spin

Katherine Dunn

Toad

Seanan McGuire

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

Ron McLarty

The Memory of Running

Jonathan Franzen

Crossroads

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Tom Rob Smith

Child 44

Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage Plot

Marcia Thornton Jones

Champ

Carole Levin

The Heart and Stomach of a King

Mark Spragg

An Unfinished Life

Tim Federle

Tequila Mockingbird

Morgan Sjogren

Outlandish

Barbara Kingsolver

Unsheltered

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