Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A Novel

From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel in the tradition of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere, exploring the ties and fractures of a close-knit Indian-American family in the aftermath of a violent encounter with the police. Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple. For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member's perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America? For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.

A Great Country

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Véronique Olmi

Alison Anderson

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

An absorbing bildungsroman that tells the story of three sisters amidst France's rapid transformation in the 1970s Three sisters were born into a modest Catholic family in Aix-en-Provence. Sabine, the eldest, dreams of an artist's life in Paris; Hélène, the middle girl, grows up divided between the bourgeois environment of Neuilly-sur-Seine and the simple life led by her parents; Mariette, the youngest, learns the secrets and silences of a dazzling and crazy world. In 1970, French society is changing. Women have emancipated themselves whilst men have lost their bearings, and the three sisters, each in their own way, find ways to live a life of their own--a strong life, far from the morality, education, and the religion of their childhood. This family chronicle, which takes us from the May 1968 protests to the 1981 elections, is as much a tender and tragic stroll through the 20th century as it is the chronicle of an era, where consciousnesses are awakening to the upheaval of the world, and heralding the chaos to come.

Daughters Beyond Command

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D. K. Nnuro

Advance Reading Copy (hardcover size but paperback format) 

America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of three characters with ties to Africa in this gripping novel

When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle.
 
Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife--a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, "what Napoleon could not do": she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. Wilder's view of America differs markedly from his wife's, as he's spent his life railing against the racism and marginalization that are part of life for every African American living here.
 
For these three, their desires and ambitions highlight the promise and the disappointment that life in a new country offers. How each character comes to understand this and how each learns from both their dashed hopes and their fulfilled dreams lie at the heart of what makes What Napoleon Could Not Do such a compelling, insightful read.

What Napoleon Could Not Do

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Rebecca Solnit

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

"Commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more"--Amazon.com.

The Mother of All Questions

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American Crises (and Essays)

National Book Award Longlist
Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor's Choice Prize for Nonfiction


"Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading." --The New Republic

"Solnit's exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy." --Elle

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestsellerMen Explain Things to Me. Called "the voice of the resistance" by theNew York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through her incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between.



In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change.



The work of changing the world sometimes requires changing the story, the names, and inventing or popularizing new names and terms and phrases. Calling things by their true names can also cut through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence.

Call Them by Their True Names

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Marie Arana

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story

Winner, American Library Association Booklist’s Top of the List, 2019 Adult Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Against the background of a thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, just as then, a miner’s survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places. Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His story echoes the violence that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day. Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America—sometimes for good, sometimes not. In Silver, Sword, and Stone Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. What emerges is a vibrant portrait of a people whose lives are increasingly intertwined with our own.

Silver, Sword, and Stone

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Ayana Mathis

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.

The Unsettled

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Yiyun Li

First Edition, 1st printing, mint condition in Mylar jacket 

A collection by the author of The Vagrants brings to life the rich levels of Chinese-American and Chinese experience in stories like "Prison," in which a Chinese-American woman travels to rural China to choose a surrogate mother for her child.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

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Anne Enright

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

The Wren, the Wren

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Audrey Schulman

Based on the true story of an infamous 1960s experiment, The Dolphin House is a meditation on what makes us truly human. 1965: outside a small house on the coast of St. Thomas, four dolphins are circling in a pool. This is where Cora, newly arrived on the island, finds them by accident, as though they've been waiting for her. She won't discover the motives of the scientists working in the house until later, but by then her apparent connection with the animals--aided by her own deafness--has given her every reason to stay. The house is a research facility led by the obsessive Dr. Blum, a man aiming to teach the dolphins' human language. To stave off some of Blum's more insidious experimentations, Cora suggests they build a flooded apartment where she can live and speak with the youngest dolphin around the clock. The radical research forges ahead, but Blum has other ideas and Cora's instincts clash with the male-dominated world of science in the sixties. As a terrible scandal threatens to engulf the experiment, Cora's determination to save the dolphins becomes a battle to save herself.

The Dolphin House

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Pip Williams

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK FOR MAY '22! * "Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded."--The New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress."--Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means "slave girl," begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD

The Dictionary of Lost Words

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Lan Samantha Chang

An acclaimed storyteller returns with "a gorgeous and gripping literary mystery" that explores "family, betrayal, passion, race, culture and the American Dream" (Jean Kwok). The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last. Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead--presumed murdered--and his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant's reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens--and the family dog meets an unexpected fate--Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father's outsized appetites and their own future survival. Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.

The Family Chao

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Martin MacInnes

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

In Ascension

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Sarah Winman

From the Bestselling Author of STILL LIFE

From the author of STILL LIFE, WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT and A YEAR OF MARVELLOUS WAYS This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. It begins with two boys, Ellis and Michael, who are inseparable. And the boys become men, and then Annie walks into their lives, and it changes nothing and everything. 'Packs an enormous punch' Independent 'Exquisite. I haven't been so moved and so in love with a book and its characters for a very long time' Joanna Cannon 'This book is why I read' Nina Pottell, Prima 'Ephemeral yet powerful... Every fleeting moment is worth repeating, again and again' Stylist

Tin Man

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Guadalupe Nettel

Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel's fourth novel, treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence and originality that have won her international acclaim. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth - after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite - and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Still Born

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Gina Frangello

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why.

Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously.

A Life in Men

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Lise Marzouk

Adriana Hunter

A Mother's Memoir

When her ten-year-old son is hospitalised at the Curie Institute in Paris for lymphoma treatment, Lise finds herself torn between two worlds, one at his bedside, and the other at home with her two younger children, struggling to maintain a sense of stability in their lives. And so she writes - of their fears and doubts, but also of their moments of tenderness and joy - and through these memories, stories, and reveries, she arrives at a deeper understanding of herself as a woman, a mother, and a writer.

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Joan Silber

An engineer in Vietnam is shaken by the discovery about why his company's planes are getting lost, while a marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman sparks a terrible family fight, and a young woman in 1920s Siam experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. By the author of Ideas of Heaven.

The Size of the World

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Heather Rose

An Amazon Editors' Best Book of December 2018

"Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless." --from The Museum of Modern Love

Arky Levin has reached a dead end. Unexpectedly separated from his wife, he suddenly has the space he needs to work composing film scores--but none of the peace of mind he needs to create. As he wanders the city, guilty and restless, it's almost by chance that he stumbles upon an exhibition that will change his life. 

The installation the fictional Arky discovers--which is based on a real piece of performance art that took place in 2010--is inexplicably powerful. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art sit across a table from the performance artist Marina Abramović, for as short or long a period as they choose. Although some go in skeptical, almost all leave moved. And the participants are not the only ones to find themselves changed by this unusual experience: Arky finds himself drawn to the exhibit. He returns day after day to watch other people sit with Abramović--and as he does, he begins to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

The Museum of Modern Love

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Tobias Wolff

"With the same masterful prose and emotional subtlety that distinguished his bestselling memoir This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff's first novel, Old School, explores the deceptions and betrayals that turn a boy into a writer. The protagonist is a student at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants to be a writer. But to do that he must learn to tell the truth about who he actually is. Through the agency of a school literary contest-whose winner will be recognized by the most legendary writer of his time-Wolff animates the clash between idealism and ambition, the fear of obscurity and the fear of revelation."

Old School

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Luis Alberto Urrea

Stories

A new short story collection from Luis Alberto Urrea, bestselling author of The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Devil's Highway. From one of America's preeminent literary voices comes a new story collection that proves once again why the writing of Luis Alberto Urrea has been called "wickedly good" (Kansas City Star), "cinematic and charged" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and "studded with delights" (Chicago Tribune). Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice. Suffused with wanderlust, compassion, and no small amount of rock and roll, THE WATER MUSEUM is a collection that confirms Luis Alberto Urrea as an American master.

The Water Museum

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Yasmina Reza

John Cullen

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis Borges Schnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.

Happy Are the Happy

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Claire Vaye Watkins

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus 
 
Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012
Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 
A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . .

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Battleborn

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Cara Hoffman

"Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack, and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive"--Amazon.com.

Browse by categories

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

A Great Country

Véronique Olmi; Alison Anderson; Véronique Olmi

Daughters Beyond Command

D. K. Nnuro

What Napoleon Could Not Do

Rebecca Solnit

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit

Call Them by Their True Names

Marie Arana

Silver, Sword, and Stone

Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled

Yiyun Li

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Anne Enright

The Wren, the Wren

Audrey Schulman

The Dolphin House

Pip Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Lan Samantha Chang

The Family Chao

Martin MacInnes

In Ascension

Sarah Winman

Tin Man

Guadalupe Nettel

Still Born

Gina Frangello

A Life in Men

Lise Marzouk; Adriana Hunter

If

Joan Silber

The Size of the World

Heather Rose

The Museum of Modern Love

Tobias Wolff

Old School

Luis Alberto Urrea

The Water Museum

Yasmina Reza; John Cullen

Happy Are the Happy

Claire Vaye Watkins

Battleborn

Cara Hoffman

Running

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