The International Collectors Library, 1963

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

Short Novels

Matt Haig

Have you ever had a friend tell you they didn’t love a book and then even if maybe you would have loved it you can’t bring yourself to read it. Well, exactly me with this book. Le sigh.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Novel

'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?' A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time. Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

The Midnight Library

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Basically brand new. Never read (probably) (I think it was a rescue from a thrift shop).

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

The Water Dancer

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Beautiful book, just haven’t read because I realized it was the third in the series and I haven’t the time. Please rescue and read this copy, even if you also haven’t read the first two.

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

The Mirror and The Light

Jessica Harrison

Some wrinkles to the cover, but actual book has almost never even been open. Perfect for Christmas, especially if you belong to a family of Penguins.

From Hans Christian Andersen to Angela Carter

The ultimate festive anthology of the best Christmas stories of all time, selected from around the world A Penguin Classics Hardcover This is a collection of the most magical, moving, chilling and surprising Christmas stories from around the world, taking us from frozen Nordic woods to glittering Paris, a New York speakeasy to an English country house, bustling Lagos to midnight mass in Rio, and even outer space. Here are classic tales from writers including Truman Capote, Shirley Jackson, Dylan Thomas, Saki and Chekhov, as well as little-known treasures such as Italo Calvino's wry sideways look at Christmas consumerism, Wolfdietrich Schnurre's story of festive ingenuity in Berlin, Selma Lagerlof's enchanted forest in Sweden, and Irène Nemerovsky's dark family portrait. Featuring santas, ghosts, trolls, unexpected guests, curmudgeons and miracles, here is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short story writers of all time.

The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories

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Emily St. John Mandel

Mostly a beautiful cover, but I’m sure the writing is lovely, too. Someone save it from purgatory on my IKEA shelf… would love to be read under a full moon by the sea on a tranquil evening. First edition 2022, if you’re into that sort of thing.

"The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and planets"--

Sea of Tranquility

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Gavin Lambert

“The Goodby People in his dark glory, melancholic, becalmed and effortlessly resonate.” - Christopher Fowler, The Independent 

Unread, perfect condition, would look stunning and watery on your shelf.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

First published in 1971, The Goodby People is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles. "His elegant, stripped-down prose caught the last gasp of Old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivalled." (Armistead Maupin) "The bisexual draft dodger living on the skids, the glamorous young widow in search of enlightenment, the skinny gamine from out of town who wants to make it in the movies . . ."* These are the people who inhabit Gavin Lambert's mordant portrait of Southern California at the end of the 1960s: forever swapping addresses, lovers, and dreams. They live in extraordinary, suffocating wealth; or else flirting with a Mansonesque cult; or else in a fantasy where golden-age actresses make ghostly visitations to comment on their daily life. All that binds them together is their common sense of aimlessness--and the clear, judgment-free eye of a British author trying his best to be a friend to each. Cool, incisive, yet essentially kind, and very much ahead of its time, The Goodby People unfolds "in the yawning chasm between real life in Los Angeles and the fantasies manufactured by its dominant business" (*Gary Indiana), and stands as Gavin Lambert's masterpiece.

The Goodby People

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Christina Hesselholdt

Paul Russell Garrett

Your perfect companion. Maybe, it wasn’t quite right for me obviously. Written in Danish originally, translated into English. Some casual wear and tear, since I actually did read this one. Melancholy in the vein of Virginia Woolf.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Companions

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Marilynne Robinson

I’m sure I would have loved it if I had read it, but I’m afraid I haven’t at this point and it would appreciate being with someone who will read it and love it well.

Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

Housekeeping (Fortieth Anniversary Edition)

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John Knowles

Not a peaceful read, I felt on edge most of the time. Melancholy like the Secret Garden without the roses. Supposedly a classic, but I don’t remember. Spine unbroken.

A Separate Peace

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Tia Williams

Some sticker residue on the front dust jacket (because Target is the worst) otherwise perfect to read in June over seven days.

Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again . . . From the author of The Perfect Find, this is a witty, romantic, and sexy-as-hell new novel of two writers and their second chance at love. Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry--or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since. Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered . . . With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.

Seven Days in June

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Geraldine Brooks

Quite a few stickers on this one, otherwise very fair indeed.

Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain's son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent ivy league education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March. Reprint.

Caleb's Crossing

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Kurt Vonnegut

Excellent though the dust jacket is imperfect, which I suppose means the dust jacket has done its job so far. Well done. 

Gleaned from short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout, "Only Kidding" delivers Vonnegut both speaking out with indignation and writing tenderly to his fellow Americans.

A Man Without a Country

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Chinua Achebe

Things fall apart, even the cover of this book. Though the spine is confidently unbroken and in tact, so the pages are, mercifully, not one of the things that fall apart. 

The contemporary African writer's classic novel depicting the destruction of traditional tribal life by the white man

Things Fall Apart

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The Los Angeles Times said this book is, and I quote “A profound and deeply rendered novel.” And perhaps it is, but I wouldn’t know. The previous novel in this series, Gilead, is also, I am happy to report first-hand, a profound and deeply rendered novel. So odds are in favor of the LA Times being right about Lila.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

Lila

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Annie Dillard

A beautiful book with beautiful writing, or so I’m told. Slight effects on the dust jacket, which is what the designer gets for making it all white and felt, uncoated paper. Not recommended to take to a camp in Maine where lookalikes prank one another, would rather live quietly and cleanly on Meredith Blake’s shelf in Cali.

"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love."  --New York Times

"In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington Times

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.

The Maytrees

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Vita Sackville-West

According to a previous reader, “not too good.” Perhaps because all the passion was spent. Reader also put a few red dots throughout. Perhaps there is a mystery afoot? Something relating to a dictionary perhaps? If the mystery is that the author is related to the Sackville-Bagginses in Hobbiton, then I am happy to announce I have solved it.

Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving, All Passion Spent is the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late.

After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane--a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India--everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle Lady Slane has other ideas. First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. There, to her offspring's utter amazement, she revels in her new freedom, recalls her youthful ambitions, and gathers some very unsuitable companions--who reveal to her just how much she had sacrificed under the pressure of others' expectations.

All Passion Spent

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Maxine Clair

A reissue of an out of print novel. Absolutely stunning design and cover and dust jacket, probably an absolutely stunning novel, but it’s sadly never been read. Would appreciate a bookshelf with equally stunning book design where books are actually read.

Too long unavailable, this luminous classic of small-town life in the segregated 1950s has "magic dust sprinkled over each and every page" (Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review). Irene Wilson knows that a “no-name invisible something” has settled over her parents’ marriage and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In the town of Rattlebone, a small Black neighborhood of Kansas City, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair. As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of neighbors whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own. Capturing an entire world through the eyes of its unforgettable heroine, Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction.

Rattlebone

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Joseph Heller

Spine in perfect condition, or at least better condition than the main character is for as much of the book as I read. I wanted to make a joke that was a catch-22, but it’s the classic bestseller, not me.

'Never Has a Book Been Laughed and Wept Over So Many Times'

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.

Catch-22

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Brad Leithauser

First edition, 2002. Because I am dull at finishing books, I copied this from the www: “In this one-of-a-kind novel that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction, the hero is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero.”

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel in Verse

Darlington’s Fall

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Lois Lowry

At the age of twelve, Jonas, a young boy from a seemingly utopian, futuristic world, is singled out to receive special training from The Giver, who alone holds the memories of the true joys and pain of life. An ALA Notable Book for Children & Newbery Medal Winner. Reissue.

The Giver

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Perfect for an Amtrak journey to Montreal or a dark and stormy and cold winter’s night. Debut novel for Emily St. John Mandel.

Last Night in Montreal

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Kate Dicamillo

For anyone who loves rural grocery stores, shaggy doggos, or glass bottles as yard art installations. Spine unbroken, ready for a new friend.

Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen to her because of her big ugly dog Winn-Dixie.

Because of Winn-Dixie

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Beautiful in a pastoral and haunting way. Spine still as perfectly smooth as it was the day it was gently and lovingly stocked on the shelf of a cat-ish bookstore in the west village.

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable secrets about the family of preachers. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

Browse by categories

John Steinbeck

Short Novels

Matt Haig

The Midnight Library

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Water Dancer

Hilary Mantel

The Mirror and The Light

Jessica Harrison

The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories

Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility

Gavin Lambert

The Goodby People

Christina Hesselholdt

Companions

Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping (Fortieth Anniversary Edition)

John Knowles

A Separate Peace

Tia Williams

Seven Days in June

Geraldine Brooks

Caleb's Crossing

Kurt Vonnegut

A Man Without a Country

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

Marilynne Robinson

Lila

Annie Dillard

The Maytrees

Vita Sackville-West

All Passion Spent

Maxine Clair

Rattlebone

Joseph Heller

Catch-22

Brad Leithauser

Darlington’s Fall

Lois Lowry

The Giver

Emily St. John Mandel

Last Night in Montreal

Kate Dicamillo

Because of Winn-Dixie

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

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