Paul Bowles

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

A Novel

Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures—recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings—The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Spider's House

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Javier Marías

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

When Marta, the woman with whom he was about to begin an affair, suddenly dies in his arms, Vâictor first considers walking away but is unable to resist delving into Marta's dark secrets.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

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Willa Cather

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York lawyer Jim Burden reminiscences about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly memories of a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, and ponders the assimilation of immigrants into American life.

My Antonia

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Theodore Weesner

Alex Housman, who lives in Detroit with his alcoholic father, turns to car theft as an expression of his feelings of rage and helplessness

The Car Thief

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Jeffery Renard Allen

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.

Song of the Shank

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Marianne Wiggins

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Shadow Catcher is a journey through time, a story-within-a-story that seamlessly interweaves the nineteenth-century life of renowned photographer of the Native American peoples Edward S. Curtis with the present-day story of an unlikely father-daughter reunion from beyond the grave. Told in the first person by a fictional character named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Los Angeles, where Hollywood is in pursuit of the manuscript for The Shadow Catcher, about the photographer's self-proclaimed mission to document a vanishing race. 'This is the perfect project', the film producers gush. 'It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element.' This surface reading of Curtis's biography (the one popularly held today) sets in motion a journey into the American past, where his complex emotional life bore no resemblance to his esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation. In reality, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. This is where Marianne's father, John Wiggins, comes in. Fuelled by the great American passions for love and land and family, The Shadow Catcher chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

The Shadow Catcher

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Zadie Smith

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half-century follows two families--the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire--as they make their way in modern England. A first novel. 50,000 first printing.

White Teeth

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Simon Schama

Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

A noted historian explores a little-known event in American history where thousands of slaves escaped Southern slavery to give their allegiance to King George during the Revolution, only to be betrayed by the Crown.

Rough Crossings

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Daniel Alarcon

"Daniel Alarcon writes about subterfuge, lies, and the arbitrary recreation of history with a masterful clarity. By accepting the premise that war is senseless, he goes on to make sense of the lives that are destroyed in its wake. Lost City Radio is both ambitious and resonant." -- Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House

In his critically acclaimed debut novel, award winning author Daniel Alarcón vividly portrays an anonymous nation searching for its identity at the end of a war with no clear right or wrong.

For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios--a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared--those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decade long bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change--thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on society to the emotional scarring each survivor carries for years after. 

Lost City Radio

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Emma Cline

THE INSTANT BESTSELLER • An indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Financial Times • Esquire • Newsweek • Vogue • Glamour • People • The Huffington Post • Elle • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out • BookPage • Publishers Weekly • Slate Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award • Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Emma Cline—One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists Praise for The Girls “Spellbinding . . . a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story.”—The New York Times Book Review “Extraordinary . . . Debut novels like this are rare, indeed.”—The Washington Post “Hypnotic.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gorgeous.”—Los Angeles Times “Savage.”—The Guardian “Astonishing.”—The Boston Globe “Superbly written.”—James Wood, The New Yorker “Intensely consuming.”—Richard Ford “A spectacular achievement.”—Lucy Atkins, The Times “Thrilling.”—Jennifer Egan “Compelling and startling.”—The Economist

The Girls - Signed Edition, 2nd Printing

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Dana Spiotta

From "a major, unnervingly intelligent writer" (Joy Williams)..."rich, funny, learned, and tonally fresh" (Jeffrey Eugenides), comes a novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.

Dana Spiotta's new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common--except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.

Spiotta is "a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today" (The New York Times). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel--wise, artful, and beautiful.

Innocents and Others - First Edition, First Printing

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Carlos Fuentes

Kristina Cordero

The year is 2020. In a fit of ill-advised independence, the Mexican president has incurred the double wrath of the United States by calling for the removal of US troops from Columbia and demanding higher prices for Mexico's oil. Unfortunately for him, the country's satellite communications system is controlled through a shell company in Miami. Unsurprisingly, the system goes down. At a stroke Mexico is deprived of phone, fax and email. In a country where politicians never put anything in writing, letters are now the only way to communicate, leaving the private lives and true feelings of all brutally exposed. Especially regarding the hot topic of the day: Who will be the next president, the next to ascent the Eagle's Throne? As the characters jockey for position in the race to identify and ally themselves to the new president, the letters fly ever faster, wittier and more mendacious. Who will it be? Glamorous Maria del Rosario's protege and would-be lover, the handsome Nicolas Valdivia? Her bitter rival, the balding satyr Tacito de la Canal? Or the 'unsavoury' ex-president Cesar Leon? How will the bets be placed when the punters include some of the runners? And who has the most to lose? These and many other questions must be answered before the last letter is sent. The Eagle's Throneis a novel of high artifice, a story that mixes concealed emotions and dark secrets with political intrigue to make Machiavelli blush. Carlos Fuentes has never written better.

The Eagle's Throne - First UK Edition, First Printing, Rare 

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DeMisty D. Bellinger

"New to Liberty is a marvel. I was enraptured by DeMisty Bellinger's portrait of a gothic, gritty countryside. This atmospheric novel traces, with great sincerity, sensitivity, and crystal-clear prose, the dynamics of love and courtship, even as it explores lives lived in the haunting aftermath of violence. Bellinger's is a major, exciting new voice in fiction." --Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief




One of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2022: "Watch for this book on every 'best of' list for 2022."




Three women, decades apart from each other, fight for love and agency in a rural Kansas community seemingly frozen in time:

 

1966: Sissily is driving cross-country with a much older man called Ezzy. On their way to California to begin a life together, he insists on stopping at his family ranch outside Liberty, Kansas visit his mother, Mrs. Svoboda. This family reunion is a painful reminder for Sissily of the rumors about the scandal that led to her running away from home, but while Mrs. Svoboda is a domineering figure, Sissily sees a woman who harbors secrets of her own.

 

1947: Nella's family relocates to Liberty from Milwaukee, and during the summer before her senior year, begins an interracial relationship with a white man called Lucky. They can only meet in secret, or as Lucky is in a wheelchair sometimes Nella pretends to be his nurse. When three white men stumble upon "Nurse Nella" one catastrophic afternoon, the violence of a racist society forces Nella to face the harsh reality of her love affair.

 

1933: Greta finds love with a woman from the neighboring farm during the height of the Dust Bowl and brutal jackrabbit roundups. Surrounded by violence and starvation, their clandestine encounters are unsustainable, and yet the implications of their relationship will find a way to endure for generations.

 

A novel told in three parts, New to Liberty showcases the growth and strength of three unforgettable women as they evolve in a society that refuses to. In lustrous prose, DeMisty Bellinger brings the quiet but treacherous landscape to life, offering a vivid snapshot of mid-century America and keeping readers guessing until the end as to how these three women are connected.

New to Liberty - Signed First Edition, First Printing

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Marco Rafalà

A dark secret born out of World War II lies at the heart of a Sicilian American family in this emotional and sweeping saga of guilt, revenge, and, ultimately, redemption. After soldiers vacate the Sicilian hillside town of Melilli in the summer of 1943, the locals celebrate, giving thanks to their patron saint, Sebastian. Amid the revelry, all it takes is one fateful moment for the destiny of nine-year-old Salvatore Vassallo to change forever. When his twin brothers are killed playing with an unexploded mortar shell, Salvatore's faith is destroyed. As the family unravels, and fear ignites among their neighbors that the Vassallo name is cursed, one tragedy begets another. Desperate to escape this haunting legacy, Salvatore accepts the help of an Italian soldier with fascist ties who ushers him and his sister, Nella, into a new beginning in America. In Middletown, Connecticut, in the immigrant neighborhood known as Little Melilli, these three struggle to build new lives for themselves. But a dangerous choice to keep their secrets hidden erupts in violence decades later. When Salvatore loses his inquisitive American-born son, David, they all learn too late the price sons pay for their fathers' wars. Written with elegiac prose, How Fires End delves into the secret wars of men; the sins they cannot bury; and a life lived in fear of who will reveal them, who will survive them, and who will forgive them.

How Fires End - First Edition, First Printing

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Ron Rash

Traveling to the mountains of 1929 North Carolina to forge a timber business with her new husband, Serena Pemberton champions her mastery of harsh natural and working conditions but turns murderous when she learns she cannot bear children. 25,000 first printing.

Serena

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Jacques Poulin

Sheila Fischman

A heartfelt masterpiece about the joys of travel, reading, and companionship. In rural Canada, dotted along the coast of a vast mauve river, live villagers of different stripes: a recently divorced hydroplane pilot, a factory-worker who closely resembles her fisherman husband, a probing motorcyclist with a pet St. Bernard, a pair of beautiful blonde joggers, and other curious characters. For all their differences, each is brought together by a soft-spoken man, referred to only as “the Driver,” who travels up and down the coast each season, delivering books to areas not served by libraries and listening closely to the villager’s tales and to their woes. This summer tour is bound to be different than all the rest. The Driver has made friends with a traveling band of musicians, jugglers, artists, and acrobats who decide to come along for a ride that the Driver has privately decided will be his last. Jacques Poulin’s compassionate prose delves into the hidden pains of aging and loss without losing sight of the tremendous joy that can be found in making the world a little more livable for other people.

Autumn Rounds

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Milan Kundera

Michael Henry Heim

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story are told in this masterful classic.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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David Means

For what it’s worth, one of my favorite short story writers and favorite collections 

Stories

"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose. Like any artist who has finely honed his talent to its strongest expression he is a brilliant craftsman whose achievement is to appear unstudied, even casual . . . Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." —Joyce Carol Oates Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an “established master of the form.” (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral—featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and VICE—finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man’s funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia. Means’s work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own. "One of the most talented writers of short fiction in America. . ." —James Wood, The New Yorker

Instructions for a Funeral - First Edition, First Printing

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Gilbert Sorrentino

Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as the husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that the marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the imaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged throughout the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work. And no other novel so perfectly captures the moral bankruptcy of the United States as a background to divorce.

Sky Changes

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Eric Schlosser

Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

The New Yorker
“Excellent... hair-raising... Command and Control is how nonfiction should be written.” (Louis Menand)

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A ground-breaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age:  how do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them?  That question has never been resolved--and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind.  

Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years.  It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policymakers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust.  At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.   

Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled  nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view.  Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control.  Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.

Time magazine
 “A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S.... fascinating.” (Lev Grossman)

Financial Times
“So incontrovertibly right and so damnably readable... a work with the multilayered density of an ambitiously conceived novel… Schlosser has done what journalism does at its best."

Los Angeles Times
“Deeply reported, deeply frightening… a techno-thriller of the first order.”

Command and Control - First Edition, First Printing

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Lucia Berlin

Lydia Davis

Selected Stories

Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form.

A Manual for Cleaning Women

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Jeffrey Eugenides

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.

Fresh Complaint - Signed by Author on Title Page - First Edition, First Printing

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Nikky Finney

Poems

Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

Winner, 2012 GCLS Award for Poetry

Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry

Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry



The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address. 

 

Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

Head off and Split

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Simeon Marsalis

Shortlisted for the 2017 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “A portrait of a young man’s unraveling, a depiction of how race shapes and deforms us, a coming–of–age story that is also a confrontation with American history and amnesia. The book achieves more in its brief span than most books do at three times the length.” —Zachary Lazar, author of I Pity the Poor Immigrant David, the narrator of Simeon Marsalis’s singular first novel, is a freshman at the University of Vermont who is struggling to define himself against the white backdrop of his school. He is also mourning the loss of his New York girlfriend, whose grandfather’s alma mater he has chosen to attend. When David met Melody, he lied to her about who he was and where he lived, creating a more intriguing story than his own. This lie haunts and almost unhinges him as he attempts to find his true voice and identity. On campus in Vermont, David imagines encounters with a student from the past who might represent either Melody’s grandfather or Jean Toomer, the author of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance novel Cane (1923). He becomes obsessed with the varieties of American architecture “upon land that was stolen,” and with the university’s past and attitudes as recorded in its newspaper, The Cynic. And he is frustrated with the way the Internet and libraries are curated, making it difficult to find the information he needs to make connections between the university’s history, African American history, and his own life. In New York, the previous year, Melody confides a shocking secret about her grandfather’s student days at the University of Vermont. When she and her father collude with the intent to meet David’s mother in Harlem—craving what they consider an authentic experience of the black world—their plan ends explosively. The title of this impressive and emotionally powerful novel is inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” (1896): “We wear the mask that grins and lies . . .”

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