Rachel Kushner

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

South Carolina

A Novel

"Creation Lake is a novel about a freelance agent, a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and bold opinions and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"- making him believe the encounter was accidental. And like everyone she chooses to interact with, Lucien is useful to her, used by her. Sadie operates on strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts," shadowy figures in business and government, instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists, who lives in a vast network of underground caves on his daughter's land and communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past before civilization. Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those whom she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut, propulsive, and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, keen insights, and unforgettable pleasure. From Rachel Kushner on the title: My character Bruno refers to "a deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation" - meaning all of human history, the whole struggle in which chains of civilizations try to figure out how to live. He believes he can hear these voices underground. To me, "Creation Lake" suggests intrigue. Creation of what? In Sadie's case, a persona, a feint, a manipulation. But also in her case, the creation possibly of her own soul"--

Creation Lake

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A. K. Blakemore

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A New York Times EDITORS’ CHOICE | MOST ANTICIPATED by The Guardian • Paste Magazine • LitHub • The Millions • Library Journal From the prizewinning author of The Manningtree Witches, a subversive historical novel set during the French Revolution, inspired by a young peasant boy turned showman, said to have been tormented and driven to murder by an all-consuming appetite. “Obscenely beautiful…Every sentence is gorgeous...Powerful and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review “This year, I found myself seeking one quality above all others from the books I read: escapism. And no book plunged me into another world quite so bracingly as The Glutton.” —Vogue 1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite…an appetite they say tortures him still. Born in an impoverished village to a widowed young mother, Tarare was once overflowing with quiet affection: for the Baby Jesus and the many Saints, for his mother, for the plants and little creatures in the woods and fields around their house. He spends his days alone, observing the delicate charms of the countryside. But his world is not a gentle one—and soon, life as he knew it is violently upended. Tarare is pitched down a chaotic path through revolutionary France, left to the mercy of strangers, and increasingly, bottomlessly, ravenous. This exhilarating, disquieting novel paints a richly imagined life for The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon in 18th-century France: a world of desire, hunger and poverty; hope, chaos and survival. As in her cult hit The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore showcases her stunning lyricism and deep compassion for characters pushed to the edge of society in The Glutton, her most unputdownable work yet.

The Glutton

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Ben Shattuck

In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A New England Indie Bestselller A New York Times Best Book of Summer, a Wall Street Journal and Town & Country Best Book of Spring "A gorgeous reminder that walking is the most radical form of locomotion nowadays." --Nick Offerman "I think Thoreau would have liked this book, and that's a high recommendation." --Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Six Walks

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Javier Marías

All Souls is a compelling black comedy of Oxford life by Javier Marías, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features a new Introduction by John Banville, author of The Sea.The pretty young tutor Clare Bayes attracts many eyes at an Oxford college dinner, not least those of a visiting Spanish lecturer (desperate to escape his conversation with an obese economist about an eighteenth-century cider tax). As they begin an affair, meeting in hotel bedrooms away from the eyes of Clare's husband, the Spaniard finds himself increasingly drawn into the strange world of Oxford, 'one of the cities in the world where the least work gets done', in a story of lust, loneliness, vanity and memory. Filled with brilliant set pieces and pin-sharp observation, All Souls is a masterpiece of black humour.

All Souls

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Tahar Djaout

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

"Silently holding his ground, Boualem withstands the new regime, using the shop and his personal history as weapons against puritanical forces. Readers are taken into the lush depths of the bookseller's dreams, the memories of his now empty family life, his passion for literature - then yanked back into the terror and drudgery of his daily routine by the vandalism, assaults, and death warrants that afflict him."--BOOK JACKET.

The Last Summer of Reason

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Stephanie Feldman

"A heady mix of the most terrifying elements of our troubled past and inevitable future; an eerie, propulsive novel." --Carmen Maria Machado

The Saturnalia carnival marks three years since Nina walked away from Philadelphia's elite Saturn Club--with its genteel debauchery, arcane pecking order, and winking interest in alchemy and the occult. In doing so, she abandoned her closest friends and her chance to climb the social ladder. Since then, she's eked out a living by telling fortunes with her Saturn Club tarot deck, a solemn initiation gift that Nina always considered a gag but has turned out to be more useful than she could have ever imagined.

For most, the Saturnalia carnival marks a brief winter reprieve for the beleaguered people of the historic city, which is being eroded by extreme weather, a collapsing economy, and feverish summers--whose disease carrying mosquitos are perhaps the only thing one can count on. Like Thanksgiving or Halloween, Saturnalia has become a purely American holiday despite its pagan roots; and nearly everyone, rich or poor, forgets their troubles for a moment. 

For Nina, Saturnalia is simply a cruel reminder of the night that changed everything for her. But when she gets a chance call from Max, one of the Saturn Club's best-connected members and her last remaining friend, the favor he asks will plunge her back into the Club's wild solstice masquerade, on a mysterious errand she cannot say no to.

Tonight, Nina will put on a dress of blackest black, and attend the biggest party of the year. Before it's over, she will discover secret societies battling for power in an increasingly precarious world and become custodian of a horrifying secret--and the target of a mysterious hunter. As Nina runs across an alternate Philadelphia balanced on a knife's edge between celebration and catastrophe, through parades, worship houses, museums, hidden mansions, and the place she once called home, she's forced to confront her past in order to take charge of her own--and perhaps everyone's--future.

Saturnalia

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Jacob Soboroff

Inside an American Tragedy

"A deeply reported, newsbreaking account the humanitarian crisis of our time by the journalist who has been at the center of the story: MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award, offers a chilling expose of the human cost of the Trump administration's border and immigration policies."--

Separated

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Andrea Lee

Stories

American brio confronts European sophistication—and diverse cultures collide with surprising results—in brilliant, sometimes outrageous stories of seduction and self-discovery by acclaimed New Yorker writer Andrea Lee. In vivid prose shot through with mordant irony, Lee takes us into the hearts and minds of a number of extraordinary women—intelligent, seductive, self-possessed—who, with wit and style, must grapple with questions of identity in a shrinking world where everyone is, in some way, a foreigner. In “The Birthday Present,” a loyal and conventional American wife explores the wilder shores of marital devotion by giving her Italian husband a costly present: a night with a high-class Milanese call girl. “Winter Barley” is the account, alternately lyrical and perverse, of the brief love affair in Scotland between an elderly European prince and a thoroughly modern New England beauty half his age. And in the collection’s title story, “Interesting Women,” an American woman on vacation in Thailand reflects with mocking detachment on the confessional relationships that spring up between women (“another day, another soul laid bare”), before falling into one herself, which culminates in a hilarious and absurd odyssey through the jungle. Lee’s beautifully crafted stories, reminiscent of Colette’s, offer the reader a rare combination: sensual evocation of the moment, and profound insight into the underlying struggles—of gender, race, and class—that shape relationships worldwide.

Interesting Women

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Patricia Lockwood

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE “A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I’m so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

No One Is Talking about This

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Hannah Michell

A former journalist turned stay-at-home mother ventures into the dark underbelly of Seoul, South Korea, to find her missing husband and protect her children in this gripping, page-turning exploration of the lengths one woman will go to unveil hard truths. Sae is waiting with two clingy toddlers for her husband to come home from work when she learns of a horrific disaster, the collapse of a massive skyscraper where Jae is an engineer. Minutes, then hours, and then days pass. Speculations of North Korean terrorism and structural instability circulate as possible causes of the Tower’s collapse. No one has seen Jae, but things aren’t adding up. Jae had told Sae he was working on a swimming pool on the top floor, but reports showed he was in the basement, on a different project. The government was involved, but the contractors were missing. Sae—who met Jae when they were students at an anti-government protest and has relied on him as her guiding and steadying hand—is troubled and suspicious. Leaving the children with her estranged mother, Sae sets out to uncover the truth of what happened to her husband. Her investigation takes her to an upscale club where the proprietor, Myonghee, is not merely supplying booze and girls but also seeking information, for her own purposes, from every drunken businessman who lets corporate secrets slip. As Sae begins to find what she sought, she must ask herself: How well can you truly know the one you love and how is truth shaped by power?

Excavations

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY



By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.



Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.



Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.



Race for Profit

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Sheila Heti

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal--to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she's left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.

Pure Colour

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Jean-Claude Grumberg

A Tale

Set during the height of World War II, a powerful and unsettling tale about a woodcutter and his wife, who finds a mysterious parcel thrown from a passing train.



Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child.

A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest.

While foraging for food, the wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harboring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home.

Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

The Most Precious of Cargoes

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Carolina De Robertis

"From the acclaimed author of Cantoras comes a mystical and heartening tale about seeking justice and the power of memory. In his modest home at the edge of town, the former President of a Latin American country receives a journalist in his iconic gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights, and selflessness within his nation. And yet, he is tempted to reveal a secret from his past: while he was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement-due to madness or in a surreal twist-he survived in part by conversing with the only creature who ever spoke back, a loud-mouth frog, about revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country. As engrossing as it is innovative, The President and the Frog explores the resilience of the human spirit and what is possible when danger looms. Ferrying us between a grim jail cell and lush garden, De Robertis emphasizes that even the smallest voice can change the world. Vivid, heartfelt, and full of wit and humor, The President and the Frog reaches beyond all borders and dares us to be human in the face of chaos"--

The President and the Frog

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Melissa Lozada-Oliva

"Candelaria is a masterpiece from a writer destined to produce many." —Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog "Candelaria sticks to your soul and leaves you seeing the world and the people in it a bit differently." —Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Olga Dies Dreaming Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road Your granddaughters are lost, Candelaria. Bianca, the brainy archaeologist, had to forfeit her life's work in Guatemala after her advisor seduced and deserted her. Paola, missing for over a decade, resurfaces in Boston as a brainwashed wellness cultist named Zoe. And Candy, the youngest, is a recovering addict who finds herself pregnant by a man she's not even sure ever existed. None of this concerns you of course, until a cataclysmic earthquake hits Boston. Now you must traverse the crumbling city to reach the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet—for a reason you still cannot disclose—battling strange entities and your own strange past to save your granddaughters and possibly the world. Author of Dreaming of You Melissa Lozada-Oliva delivers an unsettling, raucous debut novel written with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost. A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive.

Candelaria

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

10 classic books 

Bantam Classics Bundle 

Qian Julie Wang

A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world--an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent * A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK

In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country." Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian's parents were professors; in America, her family is "illegal" and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive.

In Chinatown, Qian's parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly "shopping days," when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn's streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center--confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all.

But then Qian's headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor's visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you've always lived here.

Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

Beautiful Country

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Colette

Rachel Careau

An exquisite new translation of Colette's tragicomic masterpiece, a pair of novels exploring the relationship between an aging courtesan and a much younger man.


Chéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri, mark Colette's finest achievements in their brilliant, subtle, and frank investigations of love and power. Set in the Parisian demimonde in the last days of the Belle Époque, Chéri tells the story of Léa, a courtesan at the end of a successful career, and her lover, the beautiful but emotionally opaque Chéri. Chéri will soon enter into an arranged marriage, ending their six-year affair, which--they will each realize too late--has been the one real love of their lives.

The End of Chéri picks up their story in the aftermath of the First World War. Chéri, now a decorated soldier, has returned from the trenches to a changed world. Emotionally estranged from his independent and unfaithful wife, a psychically wounded Chéri begins an inexorable descent--one that leads him back to a stunning encounter with Léa.

As the acclaimed writer and translator Lydia Davis puts it in an illuminating foreword, Rachel Careau's "brilliantly ingenious, close new translation" reveals Chéri and The End of Chéri as "the strangest of love stories." Colette skillfully portrays her characters' shifting inner lives and desires amid a clear-eyed depiction of interpersonal power dynamics. Careau's lean, attentive translation restores to these classic novels their taut, remarkably modern style--the essence of Colette's genius.

Chéri and the End of Chéri

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Ore Agbaje-Williams

Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.

What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion?

The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky friend with whom to laugh about facile men, and an affectionate husband who loves her above all else. The only thing missing from this portrait is a baby. But motherhood is a serious undertaking, especially for the wife who has valued her selfhood more than anything.

On a seemingly normal day, the best friend comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made that threaten to throw everything off balance, the wife's two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions. Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts--the wife, the husband, the best friend--the day quickly unfolds to show how the trio's dented visions of each other finally unravel, throwing everyone's integrity into question--and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over pivotal years, into utter chaos. 

At once subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive, The Three of Us explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal, ultimately asking: who are we if not for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the people we're meant to love?

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