John McPhee

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Iowa

On the Writing Process

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising. Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.

Draft No. 4

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Jessi Klein

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

The eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling debut You'll Grow Out of It.

"Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be, how is this a song that played on the radio?"

In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein's second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife. 

In interconnected essays like "Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City," "Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die," "Eulogy for My Feet," and "An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent," Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness.

Written with Klein's signature candor and humanity, I'll Show Myself Out is an incisive, moving, and often uproarious collection.

I'll Show Myself Out

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Taylor Jenkins Reid

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

A love story about a woman unexpectedly forced to choose between the husband she has long thought dead and the fiancé who has finally brought her back to life

One True Loves

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Walt. Whitman

Zachary Turpin

An Auto-Biography; a Story of New York at the Present Time in Which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters

In 1852, young Walt Whitman was working on two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under a pseudonym and serialized in a newspaper. This is that novel, a short, rollicking story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City.

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

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Paula Hawkins

A Slow Fire Burning

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Alex Michaelides

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Maidens

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Stephen King

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher--for that world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself--and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King's storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy--and his dog--must lead the battle.

Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: "What could you write that would make you happy?"

"As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city--deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn't know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell."

Fairy Tale

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The Snow Hare 

Sarah Blau

For fans of The Perfect Nanny and My Sister, the Serial Killer, a sharp, dark, and propulsive thriller about one woman at the heart of a murder investigation--but is she the next victim, or the primary suspect? As soon as 41-year-old Sheila hears the news, she knows the police will be calling. One of the country's preeminent feminist scholars--and one of Sheila's oldest friends--has been found murdered, a baby doll fixed to her hands. Twenty years before, these women had made a pact, swearing to follow the example of The Others, women the Torah considered childless, but they saw as willingly child-free. But the years have not all been kind to The Others, and now, with her life on the line, Sheila will have to decide who among her shrinking social circle can be trusted--and who wants to make her pay the ultimate price.

The Others

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Niko Wolf

He loved her. He lost her. But he should never have written her off.

'Birthday Girl is a real treat of a book, beautifully written and perfectly paced, slowly revealing secret after secret until you're not sure of anything anymore - only that you have to keep reading' - Elly Griffiths, author of The Ruth Galloway Novels

Jonathan's wife disappeared more than twenty years ago. Now he's seeing her everywhere . . .

New York in the 1990s - impoverished writer Jonathan Dainty takes his wife Maddie out to the beach for her birthday. Hours later he finds himself at the local police precinct trying to explain how on earth he let his wife get into a stranger's car, and allowed it to drive her away.

More than twenty years later, Maddie is presumed dead and Jonathan has channelled his grief into a best-selling series of crime novels. As far as he can, he is living the perfect life.

Then one day he catches a glimpse of his dead wife, moving through a throng of people. Is Maddie alive? Has she come back? And why does no one believe him? As Jonathan attempts to uncover the truth, it soon becomes clear that the people closest to him are hiding something, something that could change everything . . .

The propulsive thriller from debut talent Niko Wolf, perfect for fans of Gone Girl and Blood Orange

Birthday Girl

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Zadie Smith

Brand new and unused, although there is a small tear on the corner of the book jacket. Bought new from the iconic Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, IA.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story—and who deserves to be believed It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . . Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”

The Fraud

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Sara Jane Reads

Sara Jane Reads

@sarajaneandtall

Books Listed

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John McPhee

Draft No. 4

Jessi Klein

I'll Show Myself Out

Taylor Jenkins Reid

One True Loves

Walt. Whitman; Zachary Turpin

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

Paula Hawkins

A Slow Fire Burning

Alex Michaelides

The Maidens

Stephen King

Fairy Tale

Paula Lichtarowicz

The Snow Hare

Sarah Blau

The Others

Niko Wolf

Birthday Girl

Zadie Smith

The Fraud

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John McPhee

Draft No. 4

Jessi Klein

I'll Show Myself Out

Taylor Jenkins Reid

One True Loves

Walt. Whitman; Zachary Turpin

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

Paula Hawkins

A Slow Fire Burning

Alex Michaelides

The Maidens

Stephen King

Fairy Tale

Paula Lichtarowicz

The Snow Hare

Sarah Blau

The Others

Niko Wolf

Birthday Girl

Zadie Smith

The Fraud

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