Teju Cole

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

A Novel

A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year —Time and NPR NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul. “[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original.”—The New Yorker “A psychological hand grenade.”—The Atlantic “Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose.”—The Seattle Times “A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation.”—The Economist

Open City

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W. G. Sebald

Michael Hulse

A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia whose sights and sounds conjure up images of Britain's imperial past. They range from the slave trade to the Battle of Britain. By the author of The Emigrants.

The Rings of Saturn

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Maggie Nelson

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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Linda Nochlin

Catherine Grant

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later. Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women artists” on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art. With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After.” Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, “Thirty Years After” is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

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Mieko Kawakami

Sam Bett

David Boyd

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan's most important contemporary novelist, WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE. On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. The story of these three women reunited in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo is told through the gaze of Natsu--thirty years old, an aspiring writer, haunted by hardships endured in her youth. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko's silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets. On yet another blistering summer's day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless. One of Japan's most important and best-selling writers, Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness, wry humor, and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. Breasts and Eggs recounts the intimate journeys of three women on the path to finding peace and futures they can call their own. "Original and deeply moving...This book is a gift."--Laura van den Berg A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR Vogue・Thrillist・The Millions・ Literary Hub・Now Toronto

Breasts and Eggs

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Marilynne Robinson

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers--a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

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Joyce Carol Oates

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys

"Its power of evocation is remarkable." --The New Yorker 

In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her--something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have.

However, as The Senator's car whips around the island's roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America's foremost storytellers.

Black Water

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Umberto Eco

William Weaver

Playful parodies by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Here, Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art in criticism.

Misreadings

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Zadie Smith

Stories

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal! A dazzling collection of short fiction Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us. Nothing is off limits, and everything—when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze—feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.

Grand Union

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Roland Barthes

Richard Howard

Adam Phillips

First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work—a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

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Toni Morrison

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

Beloved

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Rebecca Solnit

A Memoir

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. Beyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced--and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.

Recollections of My Nonexistence

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Jez Butterworth

"An instant modern classic" - Daily Telegraph

"One of the most exciting new plays in ages" - New York Times

"Jez Butterowrth's gorgeous, expansive new play keeps coming at its audience in unpredictable gusts, rolling from comic to furious, from winsome to bawdy" - Observer

A Comic, contemporary vision of rural life in England's green and pleasant land.

On the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron is a wanted man. Local officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his son wants his full attention, and his motley crew of friends wants his ample supply of booze...

After its 2009 premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, Jerusalem won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 2009 and transferred to the West End in 2010. It opened on Broadway in April 2011 at the Music Box Theatre, with Mark Rylance reprising his award-winning performance as Byron.

Jez Butterworth is the author of The River, Mojo, The Night Heron, The Winterling, Parlour Song and Jerusalem. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Somerset, England.


Jerusalem

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Brit Bennett

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST “Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal “A story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be….” – Entertainment Weekly From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins. As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

The Vanishing Half

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Colson Whitehead

In a series of personal reminiscences, anecdotes, lyrical meditations, and vignettes, the award-winning author of The Intuitionist captures the complex inner and outer landscapes of the city of New York in an intimate portrait of life in the city. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

The Colossus of New York

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Mohamed Choukri

Jonas Elbousty

Roger Allen

The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri

The complete short stories of acclaimed Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri, translated into English and collected in one volume for the first time A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023 "Choukri is one of Morocco's most revered figures. . . . To have his words translated is to have the privilege to view the inner world of his intellect and the obscured landscapes of Tangier."--Noshin Bokth, The New Arab Mohamed Choukri's vivid stories invite the reader to wander the streets of Tangier, the ancient coastal crossroads between Europe and Africa, and to meet its denizens at markets, beaches, cafés, and brothels. Choukri's Tangier is a place where newborns are for sale, swindlers hawk the Prophet's shoes, and boys collect trash to sell for food. Choukri says that "writing is a protest, not a parade." And in these thirty-one stories he privileges the voices of those ignored by society: the abused, the abandoned, the addicted. The tales are at once vibrant local vignettes and profound reflections on the lives, sufferings, and hopes of Choukri's fellow Tangerines.

Tales of Tangier

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Yaa Gyasi

"A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice"--

Transcendent Kingdom

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Thomas Goltz

A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia fell prey to a series of power struggles. This work provides details about the struggles of this region of the former Soviet Union. Featuring portraits of individuals in high places and low, it traces the story from 1992 through the "Rose Revolution.

Georgia Diary

308b3374-3cf2-4b94-808c-3ddb5294f74a-0

Deesha Philyaw

DrunkPotato

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions. There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher's wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta's "same time next year" arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other. With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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Sophie Ward

'Sophie Ward is a dazzling talent who writes like a modern-day F Scott Fitzgerald' Elizabeth Day, author of How To Fail 'An act of such breath-taking imagination, daring and detail that the journey we are on is believable and the debate in the mind non-stop. There are elements of Doris Lessing in the writing - a huge emerging talent here' Fiona Shaw 'A towering literary achievement' Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things Rachel and Eliza are planning their future together. One night in bed Rachel wakes up terrified and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. Rachel is certain; Eliza, a scientist, is sceptical. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question. What follows is a uniquely imaginitive sequence of interlinked stories ranging across time, place and perspective to form a sparkling philosophical tale of love, lost and found across the universe.

Love and Other Thought Experiments

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Michelle Zauner

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - A Best Book of 2021: Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, Wall Street Journal, and more From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Crying in H Mart

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Lauren Elkin

Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY

A New York Times Notable Book of 2017

The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a "determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk." Virginia Woolf called it "street haunting"; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany's; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York.

Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she's lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.

Called "deliciously spiky and seditious" by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

Flâneuse

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J. Ellen Gainor

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Art, Music, Drama/Theater

The Nineteenth Century to the Present

"The most comprehensive collection of its kind, The Norton Anthology of Drama, Volume Two, offers thirty-five major plays - including three twentieth-century plays not available in any other drama anthology - the most carefully prepared introductions, annotations, and play texts, and a distinctive and convenient format." --Book Jacket.

The Norton Anthology of Drama

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Antiquity Through the Eighteenth Century

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Browse by categories

Teju Cole

Open City

W. G. Sebald; Michael Hulse

The Rings of Saturn

Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts

Linda Nochlin; Catherine Grant

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Mieko Kawakami; Sam Bett; David Boyd

Breasts and Eggs

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

Joyce Carol Oates

Black Water

Umberto Eco; William Weaver

Misreadings

Zadie Smith

Grand Union

Roland Barthes; Richard Howard; Adam Phillips

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Rebecca Solnit

Recollections of My Nonexistence

Jez Butterworth

Jerusalem

Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half

Colson Whitehead

The Colossus of New York

Mohamed Choukri; Jonas Elbousty; Roger Allen

Tales of Tangier

Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom

Thomas Goltz

Georgia Diary

Deesha Philyaw

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Sophie Ward

Love and Other Thought Experiments

Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart

Lauren Elkin

Flâneuse

J. Ellen Gainor

The Norton Anthology of Drama

J. Ellen Gainor

The Norton Anthology of Drama

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