Joy Williams

First edition, good condition, clean text 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Illinois

New and Collected Stories

The legendary writer's first collection in more than ten years--and, finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order.

Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.

The Visiting Privilege

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Roberto Bolaño

Natasha Wimmer

First American edition, some wear to dust jacket (top of binding, pictured), good condition, clean text 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

The Savage Detectives

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W. G. Sebald

Michael Hulse

Binding is slightly cocked (pictured), otherwise good condition, clean text 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again the readers' guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid the restless literary ghosts of Kafka, Stendhal, and Casanova. Now in paperback, "Vertigo" is the marvelous first novel of W.G. Sebald, the acclaimed European writer.

Vertigo

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Alice Munro

Stories

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

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Julio. Cortázar

Cover is a bit worn around the edges (pictured) and there are a few dogeared pages, but otherwise good condition! Clean text, inscription pictured. 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

When La Maga, his mistress, disappears, Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian writer living in Paris, decides to return home to Buenos Aires

Hopscotch

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John Steinbeck

In Search of America

An intimate journey across and in search of America, as told by one of its most beloved writers, in a deluxe centennial edition

In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity, accompanied by a distinguished French poodle named Charley; and riding in a three-quarter-ton pickup truck named Rocinante.
 
His course took him through almost forty states: northward from Long Island to Mai≠ through the Midwest to Chicago; onward by way of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana (with which he fell in love), and Idaho to Seattle, south to San Francisco and his birthplace, Salinas; eastward through the Mojave, New Mexico, Arizona, to the vast hospitality of Texas, to New Orleans and a shocking drama of desegregation; finally, on the last leg, through Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York.
 
Travels with Charley in Search of America is an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life--a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. Written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South--which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand--Travels with Charley is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Travels with Charley

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Percival Everett

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

The Trees

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Andrew O'Hagan

An unforgettable coming-of-age novel that becomes a profound mediation on life, death, and lifelong friendship.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently.

Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news--news that forces the life-long friends to confront their own mortality head-on. What follows is an incredibly moving examination of the responsibilities and obligations we have to those we love. Mayflies is at once a finely-tuned drama about the delicacy and impermanence of human connection and an urgent inquiry into some of the most important questions of all: Who are we? What do we owe to our friends? And what does it mean to love another person amidst tragedy?

Mayflies

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Patti Smith

Book is in excellent condition with minor wear to dust jacket (pictured), clean text 

A deeply moving and brilliantly idiosyncratic visual book of days by the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, featuring more than 365 images and reflections that chart Smith's singular aesthetic--inspired by her wildly popular Instagram.

In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message "Hello Everybody!" Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots, and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith's world, photographs of her daily coffee, the books she's reading, the graves of beloved heroes--William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil, Albert Camus. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape, and more than a million followers responded to Smith's unique aesthetic in images that chart her passions, devotions, obsessions, and whims. Original to this book are vintage photographs: anniversary pearls, a mother's keychain, and a husband's Mosrite guitar. Here, too, are photos from Smith's archives of life on and off the road, train stations, obscure cafés, a notebook always nearby. In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.

With over 365 photographs taking you through a single year, A Book of Days is a new way to experience the expansive mind of the visionary poet, writer, and performer. Hopeful, elegiac, playful--and complete with an introduction by Smith that explores her documentary process--A Book of Days is a timeless offering for deeply uncertain times, an inspirational map of an artist's life.

A Book of Days

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It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

Just Kids

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Douglas Stuart

A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.



Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

Young Mungo

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N. K. Jemisin

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging."--Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" --NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold."--Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul. For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out: The Inheritance TrilogyThe Hundred Thousand KingdomsThe Broken KingdomsThe Kingdom of Gods The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition)Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction)The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) Dreamblood DuologyThe Killing MoonThe Shadowed Sun The Dreamblood Duology (omnibus) The Broken EarthThe Fifth SeasonThe Obelisk GateThe Stone Sky

How Long 'til Black Future Month?

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens wrote a number of supernatural and horror stories, some of which were included in his longer works, while others were published in magazines. This collection provides an invaluable insight into the author's storytelling apprenticeship and his steady growth towards excellence. As well as offering a further dimension to the world of his better-known masterpieces, these tales – from 'The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton' to the celebrated 'The Signalman' – illustrate Dickens's well-known love of a spooky story told around a blazing fire, the pastime of a bygone age to be rediscovered for our own delight.

Supernatural Short Stories

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Jacques Poulin

Sheila Fischman

A splendid introduction to "one of the finest and most underrated novelists in Quebec" (The Globe and Mail).

Spring Tides

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Lydia Davis

Very good condition, clean text, small nick on front cover (pictured)

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

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Lucy Foley

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "I loved this book. It gave me the same waves of happiness I get from curling up with a classic Christie...The alternating points of view keep you guessing, and guessing wrong." -- Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient "Evok[es] the great Agatha Christie classics...Pay close attention to seemingly throwaway details about the characters' pasts. They are all clues." -- New York Times Book Review A wedding celebration turns dark and deadly in this deliciously wicked and atmospheric thriller reminiscent of Agatha Christie from the New York Times bestselling author of The Hunting Party. The bride - The plus one - The best man - The wedding planner - The bridesmaid - The body On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It's a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed. But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride's oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast. And then someone turns up dead. Who didn't wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?

The Guest List

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William F. Maxwell

1989 printing, binding in good condition with clean text, some foxing on paper (pictured)

On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. "A small, perfect novel."--Washington Post Book World.

So Long, See You Tomorrow

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Geoff Dyer

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Experiences from the Outside World

From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.
 
Geoff Dyer's restless search--for what? is unclear, even to him--continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his "greatest experience from the outside world"; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.
 
Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for."

With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.

White Sands

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Italo Calvino

Tim Parks

First American edition, ex-library. Some underlining in light pencil.

Five fictional autobiographical pieces by the late Italian writer.

The Road to San Giovanni

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James Baldwin

Contains eight short fiction stories about men and women who are struggling in their own ways to survive the traumas of life.

Going to Meet the Man

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Maggie Nelson

Great condition, some annotations (like pictured)

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

The Argonauts

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Anna DeForest

Book is in great condition with some wear to edges of the dust jacket. Clean text. 

A novel of meticulous brevity and a tone and vision all its own, transmuting the practice of medicine into a larger exploration of humanity, the meaning of care, and the nature of annihilation--physical, spiritual, or both.



A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian.

 

In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.   



In brilliant, wry, and biting prose, A History of Present Illness is a boldly honest meditation on the body, the hope of healing in the face of total loss, and what it means to be alive.

A History of Present Illness

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Cynthia Ozick

Used, good condition with a few pages dog-eared. Clean text. 

Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, a finalist for the National Book Award traces the adventurous fantasy life of a bookish spinster and New York civil servant. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Puttermesser Papers

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Domenico Starnone

Oonagh Stransky

This extraordinary Strega Prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone's reputation as one of Italy's greatest living writers. Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore. A modest apartment in Via Gemito smelling of paint and turpentine. Its furniture pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio. Drying canvases moved from bed to floor each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced that he possesses great artistic promise. If it weren't for the family he must feed and the jealousy of his fellow Neapolitan artists, nothing would stop him from becoming a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but also arrogant and resentful, Federí is scarred by constant disappointment. He is a larger-than-life character, a liar, a fabulist, and his fantasies shape the lives of those around him, especially his young son, Mimi, short for Domenico, who will spend a lifetime trying to get out from under his father's shadow. Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, author of New York Times notable book of the year, Ties, and the critically acclaimed Trust, takes readers beyond the slim, novella-length works for which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.

Browse by categories

Joy Williams

The Visiting Privilege

Roberto Bolaño; Natasha Wimmer

The Savage Detectives

W. G. Sebald; Michael Hulse

Vertigo

Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Julio Cortázar

Hopscotch

John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley

Percival Everett

The Trees

Andrew O'Hagan

Mayflies

Patti Smith

A Book of Days

Patti Smith

Just Kids

Douglas Stuart

Young Mungo

N. K. Jemisin

How Long 'til Black Future Month?

Charles Dickens

Supernatural Short Stories

Jacques Poulin; Sheila Fischman

Spring Tides

Lydia Davis

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Lucy Foley

The Guest List

William F. Maxwell

So Long, See You Tomorrow

Geoff Dyer

White Sands

Italo Calvino; Tim Parks

The Road to San Giovanni

James Baldwin

Going to Meet the Man

Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

Anna DeForest

A History of Present Illness

Cynthia Ozick

The Puttermesser Papers

Domenico Starnone; Oonagh Stransky

The House on Via Gemito

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