Isabel Wilkerson

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Origins of Our Discontents

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions--now with a new Afterword by the author.

#1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * National Book Award Longlist * National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist * Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist * PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist * PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist * Kirkus Prize Finalist

"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not."
 
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
 
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Caste

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Mariko Tamaki

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The team behind Skim presents the sumptuous graphic tale of a young teen whose latest summer at a beach lake house is overshadowed by her parents' constant arguments, her younger friend's secret sorrows and the dangerous activities of older teens. Simultaneous.

This One Summer

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Jillian Tamaki

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The cartoonist of This One Summer and SuperMutant Magic Academy explores the virtual and IRL world of contemporary women via a lens both surreal and wryAPPEARED ON BEST OF THE YEAR LISTS FROM NPR, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, WASHINGTON POST, VULTURE, BOOKLIST, AND MORE

The cartoonist of This One Summer and SuperMutant Magic Academy explores the virtual and IRL world of contemporary women via a lens both surreal and wry

Jenny becomes obsessed with a strange mirror Facebook," which presents an alternate, possibly better, version of herself. Helen finds her clothes growing baggy, her shoes looser, and as she shrinks away to nothingness, the world around her recedes as well. The animals of the city briefly open their minds to us, and we see the world as they do. A mysterious music file surfaces on the internet and forms the basis of a utopian society-or is it a cult?

Boundless is at once fantastical and realist, playfully hinting at possible transcendence: from one's culture, one's relationship, oneself. This collection of short stories is a showcase for the masterful blend of emotion and humour of award-winning cartoonist Jillian Tamaki.


Boundless

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Cliff Kuang

Robert Fabricant

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

AMAZON BEST BOOKS OF 2019 PICK

FORTUNE WRITERS AND EDITORS' RECOMMENDED BOOKS OF 2019 PICK

"User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting."
--EDWARD TENNER, The New York Times Book Review

In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women's rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been--and continues to be--remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.

In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change--an underappreciated but essential history that's pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time--and you'll never interact with technology the same way again.

User Friendly

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Gabrielle Zevin

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

"Utterly brilliant. In this sweeping, gorgeously written novel, Gabrielle Zevin charts the beauty, tenacity, and fragility of human love and creativity. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the best books I've ever read."
--John Green
 
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
 
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

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Patrick Radden Keefe

The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of SAY NOTHING The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Empire of Pain

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Eric Metaxas

Timothy Keller

Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

WHO BETTER TO FACE THE GREATEST EVIL OF THE 20TH CENTURY THAN A HUMBLE MAN OF FAITH? As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a pastor and author. In this New York Times best-selling biography, Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer’s life—the theologian and the spy—and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil. Metaxas presents the fullest accounting of Bonhoeffer’s heart-wrenching decision to leave the safe haven of America to return to Hitler’s Germany, and sheds new light on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the famous Valkyrie plot and in “Operation 7,” the effort to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland. In a deeply moving narrative, Metaxas uses previously unavailable documents?including personal letters, detailed journal entries, and firsthand personal accounts?to reveal dimensions of Bonhoeffer's life and theology never before seen. "Bonhoeffer is the story of a life framed by a passion for truth and a commitment to justice on behalf of those who face implacable evil. Includes Readers’ Guide “[A] beautifully constructed biography.” —Alan Wolfe, The New Republic “Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer’s story with passion and theological sophistication. . . .” —Wall Street Journal “[A] weighty, riveting analysis of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. . . .” —Publishers Weekly “Metaxas presents Bonhoeffer as a clear-headed, deeply convicted Christian who submitted to no one and nothing except God and his Word.” —Christianity Today “Metaxas has written a book that adds a new dimension to World War II, a new understanding of how evil can seize the soul of a nation and a man of faith can confront it. . . .” —Thomas Fleming, author, The New Dealers’ War “Metaxas has created a biography of uncommon power—intelligent, moving, well researched,vividly written, and rich in implication for our own lives. Or to put it another way: Buy this book. Read it. Then buy another copy and give it to a person you love. It’s that good.” —Archbishop Charles Chaput, First Things "A definitive Bonhoeffer biography for the 21st century." —Kirkus Reviews 2011 ECPA Book of the Year 2011 Canterbury Medal by the Becket Fund recognizing courage in the defense of religious liberty 2011 Christopher Award winner highlighting the power of faith, courage, and action "A definitive Bonhoeffer biography for the 21st century." -Kirkus Reviews

Bonhoeffer

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William Atkins

New Travel Writing

From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger - to acknowledge that one person's frontier is another's home. In 1984 Granta published its first issue devoted to travel writing. Nearly forty years after that genre-defining volume, a new generation of writers from around the globe offers a new vision of what travel writing can be. Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins. It features: Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds Carlos Manuel Alvarez navigates Cuba's customs system Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis Francisco Cantu and Javier Zamora: a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child Jennifer Croft's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia Sinead Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector Kate Harris with the Tinglit people of the Taku River basin, Alaska Artist Roni Horn on Iceland Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home Sven Lindqvist in the Mauritanian Sahara in 1987 - a previously unpublished essay by the late icon of travel writing Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia

Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home?

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A. G. Lafley

Roger L. Martin

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

How Strategy Really Works

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

Playing to Win

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Otto Penzler

Amor Towles selects the twenty best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Andrew Child, Jeffrey Deaver, and Michael Mallory Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, New York Times bestseller Amor Towles has selected the twenty most puzzling, most thrilling, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume. The volume also contains a "bonus story" selected from the bookshop's rare book room, featuring a look into the history of this illustrious genre.

The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023

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Rachel Aviv

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine
A best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus

The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity.

Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn't know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel--until it no longer does.

Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives--and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

Strangers to Ourselves

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Andrea Barnet

How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World

Winner of The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature

A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography

Four influential women we thought we knew well--Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters--and how they spearheaded the modern progressive movement

This is the story of four visionaries who profoundly shaped the world we live in today. Together, these women--linked not by friendship or field, but by their choice to break with convention--showed what one person speaking truth to power can do. Jane Jacobs fought for livable cities and strong communities; Rachel Carson warned us about poisoning the environment; Jane Goodall demonstrated the indelible kinship between humans and animals; and Alice Waters urged us to reconsider what and how we eat. 



With a keen eye for historical detail, Andrea Barnet traces the arc of each woman's career and explores how their work collectively changed the course of history. While they hailed from different generations, Carson, Jacobs, Goodall, and Waters found their voices in the early sixties. At a time of enormous upheaval, all four stood as bulwarks against 1950s corporate culture and its war on nature. Consummate outsiders, each prevailed against powerful and mostly male adversaries while also anticipating the disaffections of the emerging counterculture.

All told, their efforts ignited a transformative progressive movement while offering people a new way to think about the world and a more positive way of living in it. 

 

Visionary Women

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Stephen King

The author shares his insights into the craft of writing and offers a humorous perspective on his own experience as a writer.

On Writing

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Noam Chomsky

Mitsou Ronat

Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

An attractive new edition of two of Chomsky's most popular books on language - an ideal introduction to his pioneering work in modern linguistics. In Part I, Language and Responsibility, the legend discusses his political, moral and linguistic thinking via a series of interviews with French linguist Mitsou Ronat. In Part II, Reflections on Language, he explores the more general implications of his linguistic theories and the controversies among social scientists over fundamental questions of language.

On Language

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Malcolm Gladwell

What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers--and why they often go wrong. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn't true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland--throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Talking to Strangers

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Kazuo Ishiguro

"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?"--

Klara and the Sun

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R. F. Kuang

A Reese's Book Club Pick

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK - EXCERPT TO NEW NOVEL KATABASIS! "Hard to put down, harder to forget." -- Stephen King White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences... Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Yellowface

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Adam. Grant

The Science of Achieving Greater Things

“This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.” —Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights. We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door. Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked. Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Hidden Potential

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Browse by categories

Isabel Wilkerson

Caste

Jillian Tamaki

This One Summer

Jillian Tamaki

Boundless

Cliff Kuang; Robert Fabricant

User Friendly

Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain

Eric Metaxas; Timothy Keller

Bonhoeffer

William Atkins

Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home?

A. G. Lafley; Roger L. Martin

Playing to Win

Otto Penzler

The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023

Rachel Aviv

Strangers to Ourselves

Andrea Barnet

Visionary Women

Stephen King

On Writing

Noam Chomsky; Mitsou Ronat

On Language

Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers

Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun

R. F. Kuang

Yellowface

Adam. Grant

Hidden Potential

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