Jenny Odell

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Illinois

Resisting the Attention Economy

** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

How to Do Nothing

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Sam Cohen

Has some water damage in the dust jacket (pictured)

"In SARAHLAND, Sam Cohen brilliantly (and often hilariously) explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, giving its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself. In one story, a Jewish college girl named Sarah suffers from passively consenting to a form-life devoted to getting one's "mrs." degree. Yet another reveals a version of Sarah finally finding peace with her favorite local necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah continues her misguided search for self in a twin-- while probing fan culture. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narrative. Readers watch as the ever-evolving "Sarah" gets recast: as a biblical trans woman, a lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. While Cohen presents a world that will clearly someday end, "Sarah" will continue. In each Sarah's refusal to adhere to a single narrative, she might even help build a better home for all of us, a place to live that demands no fixity of self, no plague of consumerism, no bodily compromise, a place called SARAHLAND"--

Sarahland

38435fac-a1f3-4c60-9443-2024109dc142

International Collectors Library Edition, has a ribbon bookmark. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Wuthering Heights

Claudia Rankine

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

An American Lyric

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Citizen

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Carmen Maria Machado

Curling on bottom of front cover and pages, no markings on the inside. 

Stories

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Her Body and Other Parties

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Ottessa Moshfegh

A Novel

Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour. So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.

Eileen

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Min Jin Lee

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 *A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

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Jessica Hernandez

Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science

A 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & Technology

An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why western conservationism isn't working--and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors.

Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as "soft"--the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Here, Jessica Hernandez--Maya Ch'orti' and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Pina Soul--introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives, citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle; her family's fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America; and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.

Through case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, Hernandez makes the case that if we're to recover the health of our planet--for everyone--we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.

Fresh Banana Leaves

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Kazuo Ishiguro

Pages are yellowing a little but otherwise there are no marks inside. 

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is a novel that is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control.

The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.

The Unconsoled

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Noor Naga

Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire--for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other--takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.

A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga's experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

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Ada Limón

Some dents on dust jacket but otherwise perfect condition

Poetry in the Natural World

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers. For many years, "nature poetry" has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes--both literal and literary--are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape--be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop--offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States. Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

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Zadie Smith

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. Reprint. 200,000 first printing.

White Teeth

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Raven Leilani

Some dents in the dust jacket and writing on first page (pictured)

Sharp, comic, disruptive, tender, Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, sees a young black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She's also, secretly, haltingly figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric's family life, his home. She becomes hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman young Akila may know. Razor sharp, darkly comic, sexually charged, socially disruptive, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make her sense of her life in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

Luster

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Joshua Whitehead

Used but in good condition, no writing on the inside

An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

Lambda Literary Award winner

A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed.

This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories.

Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.

Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom.

Love after the End

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Sayaka Murata

Ginny Tapley Takemori

There are some creases on the dust jacket spine but otherwise in excellent condition! 

The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existence

With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader's interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In "A First-Rate Material," Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can't stand the conventional use of deceased people's bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. "Lovers on the Breeze" is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child's bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. "Eating the City" explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while "Hatchling" closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.

Zephy

@zephy936279

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

Sam Cohen

Sarahland

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

Claudia Rankine

Citizen

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen

Min Jin Lee

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

Jessica Hernandez

Fresh Banana Leaves

Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled

Noor Naga

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Ada Limón

You Are Here

Zadie Smith

White Teeth

Raven Leilani

Luster

Joshua Whitehead

Love after the End

Sayaka Murata; Ginny Tapley Takemori

Life Ceremony

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Browse by categories

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

Sam Cohen

Sarahland

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

Claudia Rankine

Citizen

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen

Min Jin Lee

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

Jessica Hernandez

Fresh Banana Leaves

Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled

Noor Naga

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Ada Limón

You Are Here

Zadie Smith

White Teeth

Raven Leilani

Luster

Joshua Whitehead

Love after the End

Sayaka Murata; Ginny Tapley Takemori

Life Ceremony

Get The App