Jac Jemc

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Or the Lives of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Sisi of Austria (Queen of Hungary), Cousins, in Their Pursuit of Connection and Beauty...

A wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from the incomparable Jac Jemc. History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins who shared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal to submit to the roles imposed upon them. Ludwig, simultaneously spoiled and punished for his softness and "unmanly" interests, falls hard for the operas of Richard Wagner and neglects his state duties in the pursuit of art. Sisi, married at the age of sixteen to her beloved Franzl, bristles at the restrictions of her elevated position, the value placed on her beauty, and the simultaneous expectation that she ravage her body again and again in childbirth. Both absurdly vain, both traumatized by the demands of their roles, Sisi and Ludwig struggle against the ideals they are expected to embody, and resist through extravagance, petulance, performance, and frivolity. A tragicomic tour de force, Empty Theatre immerses readers in Ludwig and Sisi’s rarefied, ridiculous, restrictive world—where the aesthetics of excess belie the isolation of its inhabitants. With wit, pathos, and imagination, Jac Jemc takes us on an unforgettable journey through two extraordinary parallel lives and the complex, tenuous friendship that linked them.

Empty Theatre: a Novel

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Kiley Reid

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick An Indie Next Pick A LibraryReads Pick From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students. It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue. A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.

Come and Get It

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?” In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety. But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures. Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Long Island Compromise

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The ornithologist's field guide to love

Signed exclusive independent bookshop edition 

Mrs Death Misses Death

Patrisse Cullors

asha bandele

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Black Lives Matter Memoir

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. New York Times Editor’s Pick. Library Journal Best Books of 2019. TIME Magazine's "Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far." O, Oprah’s Magazine’s “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.” Politics & Current Events 2018 O.W.L. Book Awards Winner The Root Best of 2018 "This remarkable book reveals what inspired Patrisse's visionary and courageous activism and forces us to face the consequence of the choices our nation made when we criminalized a generation. This book is a must-read for all of us." - Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America—and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free. Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country—and the world—that Black Lives Matter. When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele’s reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.

When They Call You a Terrorist

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Ibram X. Kendi

A Journal for Awareness, Reflection, and Action

Reflect on your understanding of race and discover ways to work toward an antiracist future with this guided journal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning. Antiracism is not a destination but a journey--one that takes deliberate, consistent work. Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism has reenergized and reshaped the conversation about racial justice in America and pointed us toward new ways of thinking about ourselves and our society. Whether or not you've read How to Be an Antiracist, this stunning paperback journal offers the opportunity to reflect on your personal commitment to antiracism. Be Antiracist is both a confessional and a log of your journey toward a more equitable and just society. Be Antiracist helps you reflect on topics such as body, power, class, gender, and policy, as well as specific questions like, "Who or what scares you the most when you think about race?" and "How can we go about disconnecting Blackness from criminality?" and "What constitutes an American to you?" Kendi's multipronged approach to self-reflection will challenge you to make change in yourself and your community, and contribute to an antiracist future.

Be Antiracist

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Jose Antonio Vargas

Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American."  --Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

"l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured." --Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins

"This book couldn't be more timely and more necessary." --Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.

"This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book--at its core--is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.

After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom."

--Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

Dear America

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Hannah Gadsby

A Memoir Situation

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with her show Nanette when she declared that she was quitting stand-up. Now she takes us through the defining moments in her life that led to the creation of Nanette and her powerful decision to tell the truth--no matter the cost.

"Hannah is a Promethean force, a revolutionary talent. This hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic book is all about where her fires were lit."--Emma Thompson

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Vulture

"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself," Hannah Gadsby declared in her show Nanette, a scorching critique of the way society conducts public debates about marginalized communities. When it premiered on Netflix, it left audiences captivated by her blistering honesty and her singular ability to take them from rolling laughter to devastated silence. Ten Steps to Nanette continues Gadsby's tradition of confounding expectations and norms, properly introducing us to one of the most explosive, formative voices of our time.

Gadsby grew up as the youngest of five children in an isolated town in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. She perceived her childhood as safe and "normal," but as she gained an awareness of her burgeoning queerness, the outside world began to undermine the "vulnerably thin veneer" of her existence. After moving to mainland Australia and receiving a degree in art history, Gadsby found herself adrift, working itinerant jobs and enduring years of isolation punctuated by homophobic and sexual violence. At age twenty-seven, without a home or the ability to imagine her own future, she was urged by a friend to enter a stand-up competition. She won, and so began her career in comedy.             

Gadsby became well known for her self-deprecating, autobiographical humor that made her the butt of her own jokes. But in 2015, as Australia debated the legality of same-sex marriage, Gadsby started to question this mode of storytelling, beginning work on a show that would become "the most-talked-about, written-about, shared-about comedy act in years" (The New York Times).           

Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby's growth as a queer person, to her ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and her struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.

Ten Steps to Nanette

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What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor

After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments.

Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity.

On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.

On the Clock

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Leana Wen

A Doctor's Journey on the Frontlines of Medicine and Social Justice

From medical expert Leana Wen, MD, Lifelines is an insider's account of public health and its crucial role—from opioid addiction to global pandemic—and an inspiring story of her journey from struggling immigrant to being one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. “Public health saved your life today—you just don’t know it,” is a phrase that Dr. Leana Wen likes to use. You don’t know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the devastation of COVID-19. Leana Wen—emergency physician, former Baltimore health commissioner, CNN medical analyst, and Washington Post contributing columnist—has lived on the front lines of public health, leading the fight against the opioid epidemic, outbreaks of infectious disease, maternal and infant mortality, and COVID-19 disinformation. Here, in gripping detail, Wen lays bare the lifesaving work of public health and its innovative approach to social ills, treating gun violence as a contagious disease, for example, and racism as a threat to health. Wen also tells her own uniquely American story: an immigrant from China, she and her family received food stamps and were at times homeless despite her parents working multiple jobs. That child went on to attend college at thirteen, become a Rhodes scholar, and turn to public health as the way to make a difference in the country that had offered her such possibilities. Ultimately, she insists, it is public health that ensures citizens are not robbed of decades of life, and that where children live does not determine whether they live.

Public Health Saved Your Life Today

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Susannah Cahalan

The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

In 2009, 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan hovered on the precipice between life and death. Even as her doctors informed her family that she had incurable schizophrenia and would spend the rest of her short life in an institution, another doctor down the hall performed one final, informal test that, miraculously, delivered a lifesaving diagnosis: her disease was brought on by a physical problem and therefore treatable -- more "real," in other words, than the intangible problem of a purely mental illness. Susannah is the rare patient who has experienced both sides of this divide: the compassionate response to a treatable, physical diagnosis and the frightening realities of the label of insanity. Obsessed with that same dichotomy, psychiatrist David Rosenhan published a study in 1974 in the prestigious journal Science titled "On Being Sane in Insane Places." Eight people -- sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society -- checked themselves into mental institutions with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia forced to remain until they'd "proven" themselves sane. Rosenhan's watershed report, built on the data they collected, broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever. But the story doesn't end there: as Cahalan's explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. The more we learn about the study, the more questions emerge about what really happened behind those closed doors. How far have we come in answering the question that David Rosenhan posed all those years ago: "If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them"?

The Great Pretender

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D. T. Max

A Medical Mystery

Explores prions, enigmatic brain proteins, and their influence on human life, examining the case of an Italian family victimized for two centuries by a fatal familial insomnia, and the links between prions and various brain maladies.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep

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Emily Maloney

Essays

The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed. What does it cost to live? When we fall ill, our lives are itemized on a spreadsheet. A thousand dollars for a broken leg, a few hundred for a nasty cut while cooking dinner. Then there are the greater costs for even greater misfortunes. The car accidents, breast cancers, blood diseases, and dark depressions. When Emily Maloney was nineteen she tried to kill herself. An act that would not only cost a great deal personally, but also financially, sending her down a dark spiral of misdiagnoses, years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and tens of thousands owed in medical debt. To work to pay off this crippling burden, Emily becomes an emergency room technician. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, chronicling these interactions in searingly beautiful, surprising ways. Shocking and often slyly humorous, Cost of Living is a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay, as well as a look at what goes on behind the scenes at our hospitals and in the minds of caregivers.

Cost of Living

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Sharon Moalem

Jonathan Prince

A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

Joining the ranks of modern myth busters, Dr. Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth, from plants and animals to insects and bacteria.

So why does disease exist? Moalem proposes that most common ailments--diabetes, hemochromatosis, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia--came into existence for very good reasons. At some point they helped our ancestors survive some grand challenge to their existence. Examining the evolution of man, Moalem reveals the role genetic and cultural differences have played in the health and well-being of various races, including their susceptibility to disease.

With mesmerizing insight, Moalem offers groundbreaking insight into :

* How diabetes may be a biproduct of a mechanism that helped humans survive the Ice Age

* Why African Americans living in the north might suffer from vitamin D deficiencies,

* Why Asians can't drink as much alcohol as Europeans

Revelatory, utterly engaging, and timely--Moalem ponders strongN1, the emerging Avian Flu virus--Why Redheads Feel More Pain and Asians Can't Drink will irrevocably change the way we think about our bodies and ourselves.

Survival of the Sickest

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John Launer

And Other Essays

Doctor and medical columnist John Launer has written on the practice and teaching of medicine for many years. Now, more than fifty of his essays have been collected in How Not to Be A Doctor. Taken together, they set out an argument that being a doctor--a real doctor--should mean being able to draw on every aspect of yourself, your interests, and your experiences, however remote these may seem from the medical task of the moment.Originating from popular columns Launer has written for medical journals, the essays range from the title essay "How Not to Be A Doctor," an ironic piece illustrating how being authentic as a doctor may mean behaving in ways you were never taught in medical school, to a story of the imagined conversation between two prehistoric medical men on the primitive diet, to the author's poignant account of being a patient himself as he received treatment for a life-threatening illness. Some of the essays take the form of short stories, either imaginary or autobiographical, and some are contemplative in tone, while others are polemical, humorous, educational, fantastical, satirical, or dead serious. They cover a range of topics including music, poetry, literature, and psychoanalysis, as well as contemporary medical politics and the personal experiences of being a doctor. From the absurd to the profound, the short stories, essays, and reflections in How Not to Be a Doctor combine erudition with humor, candor, and the human touch to show how, in medicine, you cannot separate personal experiences from professional ones, and to inform and entertain readers on both sides of the stethoscope.

How Not to Be a Doctor

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Leslie Jamison

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

The Empathy Exams

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A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey

Last Night in the OR

G. E. Gallas

One day, Doctor Caim is hired by a village to treat both the rich and the poor. The doctor readily accepts this position, but goes about the work with much trial and error. Doctor Caim encounters patients from all walks of life, experimenting with treatments while monitoring his own health and watching the stars for omens. With the aesthetic of a medieval illuminated manuscript, The Plague and Doctor Caim finds macabre comedy within the history of the bubonic plague.

The Plague and Doctor Caim

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Hamilton: An American Musical

Mark Greenberg

David Tait

Barbara Balch

Ken Burns

The Historic Presidency of Barack Obama: 2,920 Days

Obama

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Andrew Shaffer

An Obama Biden Mystery

Hope Never Dies

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Parragon

The Diet Doodle Diary is a great way to keep track of your diet; you choose what you want to write about and when you want to record and no one's going to judge you if you don't get it right. It is a logbook for your food and exercise with real-life tips from successful dieters.

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