Silje Ulstein

Alison McCullough


A brilliantly twisty and unusual literary thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn, Jo Nesbo, Kate Atkinson and Tana French, which asks the question: Can you ever really shed your skin?

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

A bestselling Norwegian debut already sold in thirteen territories, Reptile Memoirs is a brilliantly twisty and unusual literary thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn, Jo Nesbø, Kate Atkinson, and Tana French, asking the question: Can you ever really shed your skin? Liv has a lot of secrets. For her, home is the picturesque town of Ålesund, perched on a fjord in western Norway. One night, in the early-morning embers of a great party in the basement apartment she shares with two friends, Liv is watching TV, high on weed, and sees a python on an Australian nature show. She becomes obsessed with the idea of buying a snake as a pet. Soon Nero, the baby Burmese python, becomes the apartment's fourth roommate. As Liv bonds with Nero, she feels extremely protective, like a caring mother, and she is struck by a desire that surprises her with its intensity. Finally she is safe. Thirteen years later, in the nearby town of Kristiansund, Mariam Lind goes on a shopping trip with her eleven-year-old daughter, Iben, who angers her mother by asking for a magazine one too many times. Mariam storms off, leaving Iben in the shop and, expecting her young daughter to find her own way home, heads off on a long calming drive. When she returns home in the evening, her husband is relieved to see her but terrified that Iben isn't also there. Detective Roe Olsvik is assigned to the case of Iben's disappearance; he has just turned sixty and is new to the Kristiansund police department. As he interrogates Mariam, he instantly suspects her--but there is much more to this case and these characters than their outer appearances would suggest. A biting and constantly shifting tale of family secrets, rebirth, and the legacy of trauma, Reptile Memoirs is a brilliant exploration of the cold-bloodedness of humanity, and the struggle to mend broken lives and families.

Reptile Memoirs

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Ocean Vuong

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

An instant New York Times Bestseller! Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction! Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more. “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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Joan Didion

David Thomson

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Play It As It Lays

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Edward Brooke-Hitching

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History

Do you know how big the biggest book in the world is? Have you ever heard of books made out of knots? What about a book written in human blood? Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of utterly bizarre book history in THE MADMAN'S LIBRARY. THE MADMAN'S LIBRARY is a beautifully illustrated journey through the fascinating and arcane territories of literature, hunting down the strangest books ever written and revealing the stories behind their creation. This eccentric and extraordinary collection features books that hoaxed the world, books invisible to the eye, books that tower over the reader, ancient spell books, books bound in human skin, books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered . . . and others that are almost too bizarre for words. Every strand of strangeness imaginable has been unearthed and bound together to please the curious book-lover. Following in the footsteps of the author's celebrated THE PHANTOM ATLAS and THE SKY ATLAS, this eccentric collection will take you on a vivid journey through the unknown crevices of literature to examine the most unusual books ever created.

The Madman's Library

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Watership Down 

Samantha Shannon

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction--but assassins are getting closer to her door. 

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. 

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. 

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

The New York Times bestselling "epic feminist fantasy perfect for fans of Game of Thrones" (Bustle). NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: AMAZON (Top 100 Editors Picks and Science Fiction and Fantasy) * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY * BOOKPAGE * AUTOSTRADDLE A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens. The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction--but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

The Priory of the Orange Tree

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Vince A. Liaguno

The third terrifying volume in the award-winning anthology series of original queer horror.

Like the final girl in a slasher film, the LGBTQIA community knows first-hand what it's like to fight for its survival. Beaten and bloodied after an extended chase scene through modern-day politics and the courts, we think we've triumphed and conquered our oppressors. We breathe a little easier knowing our rainbow is ascending in the distance. But-like the indestructible slasher villain-our enemies rise up again and again, as if on a looping third-act jump scare. It's a seemingly never-ending return to battle as the pendulum of progress swings back.

In this third volume of the award-winning anthology series, the darkest minds from both the LGBT+ and horror literary communities join forces to bring readers an all-new collection of terrifying tales from that line on the horizon where the dark rainbow rises.

Praise for Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet: "There is much to praise in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, a sharp, new gay-themed anthology. The 24 entries comprise a sophisticated collection of topnotch tales of terror, most of which could appear in any fright anthology without qualification and suggest the maturing of 'gay horror' into a viable and solid genre indeed."-Fangoria Magazine

Praise for Unspeakable Horror 2: Abominations of Desire: "If Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet helped to establish speculative fiction as a mature and important genre for queer fiction when it was published about a decade ago, then Unspeakable Horror 2: Abominations of Desire takes it to new heights and creates an expectation of excellence. Tightly written and edited, free of tropes and mundane writing, these stories propel the queer horror genre to scare us while making a statement about our world and accomplish it with the best of writing possible."-Lambda Literary Review

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing-Tales from the Darkest Depths

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Dark Rainbow Rising

The third terrifying volume in the award-winning anthology series of original queer horror. Like the final girl in a slasher film, the LGBTQIA community knows first-hand what it's like to fight for its survival. Beaten and bloodied after an extended chase scene through modern-day politics and the courts, we think we've triumphed and conquered our oppressors. We breathe a little easier knowing our rainbow is ascending in the distance. But-like the indestructible slasher villain-our enemies rise up again and again, as if on a looping third-act jump scare. It's a seemingly never-ending return to battle as the pendulum of progress swings back. In this third volume of the award-winning anthology series, the darkest minds from both the LGBT+ and horror literary communities join forces to bring readers an all-new collection of terrifying tales from that line on the horizon where the dark rainbow rises. Stories by Chad Helder, Hailey Piper, Mathew L. Reyes, A.P. Thayer, J. Daniel Stone, Yah Yah Scholfield, Oliver Nash, Holly Lyn Walrath, Paul Tremblay, Carmilla Voiez, James Cato, Lucy A. Snyder, Maxwell I. Gold, Zachary Rosenberg, Matthew Blain-Hartung, Maryse Meijer, Vincent Kovar, CG Inglis, Craig Laurance Gidney, Dan Coxon, Kaitlin Tremblay, Michael Thomas Ford, Craig Brownlie, Amanda M. Blake, Sara Tantlinger, and Eric LaRocca. Edited by Vince A. Liaguno. Praise for Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet: "There is much to praise in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, a sharp, new gay-themed anthology. The 24 entries comprise a sophisticated collection of topnotch tales of terror, most of which could appear in any fright anthology without qualification and suggest the maturing of 'gay horror' into a viable and solid genre indeed."-Fangoria Magazine Praise for Unspeakable Horror 2: Abominations of Desire: "If Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet helped to establish speculative fiction as a mature and important genre for queer fiction when it was published about a decade ago, then Unspeakable Horror 2: Abominations of Desire takes it to new heights and creates an expectation of excellence. Tightly written and edited, free of tropes and mundane writing, these stories propel the queer horror genre to scare us while making a statement about our world and accomplish it with the best of writing possible."-Lambda Literary Review Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing-Tales from the Darkest Depths.

Unspeakable Horror 3

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Gretchen Felker-Martin

Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they’ll never face the same fate.

Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics—all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.

Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, an explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and men on a grotesque journey of survival. Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate. Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe. After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics--all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons. Manhunt is a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people, from a powerful new voice in horror.

Manhunt

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Lacy Crawford

When the elite St. Paul's School came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note. With her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the na ve, hardworking girl she'd been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford's assault and gone to great lengths to bury it. Now a wife, mother, and writer living on the other side of the country, Crawford learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been the imagined effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child. This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America's elite. Her investigation looks beyond the sprawling playing fields and soaring chapel towers of crucibles of power like St. Paul's, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society. An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Memoir

A riveting, lucid memoir of a young woman's struggle to regain her sense of self after trauma, and the efforts by a powerful New England boarding school to silence her--at any cost When the elite St. Paul's School recently came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered at St. Paul's decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note. Her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hard-working girl she'd been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford's assault and gone to great lengths to bury it. Now a wife, mother, and writer living on the other side of the country, Crawford learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been imagined as the effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child. This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America's elite. Her investigation looks beyond the sprawling playing fields and soaring chapel towers of crucibles of power like St. Paul's, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society. An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy?

Notes on a Silencing

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Margaret Atwood

It's 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.

Takes readers into the life and mind of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women of the 1840s, who is serving a life sentence for murders she claims she cannot remember

Alias Grace

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Mona Awad

A National Bestseller A USA TODAY Bestseller A New York Times Editors’ Choice A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Electric Literature, Tor, and Literary Hub From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a “Grimm Brothers fairy tale for the modern age” (Good Housekeeping) and “darkly funny horror novel” (NYLON) about a lonely young woman who’s drawn to a cult-like spa in the wake of her mother’s mysterious death. “Surreal, scary and deeply moving—like all the best fairy tales” (People). A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Time, Vogue, The Guardian, Goodreads, Bustle, The Millions, LitHub, Tor, Good Housekeeping, and more! For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass. Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

Rouge

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Saidiya Hartman

Cover's a little lifted! Highlighter here and there, and tabs, but that stops around page 100 or so!

History

A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present.--Elizabeth Schmidt, "The New York Times."

Lose Your Mother

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Joanna Quinn

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household – her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist – build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.

As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France – a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK * A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II--a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation.

"The Whalebone Theatre is absolute aces...Quinn's imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold." --The New York Times

"Utterly heartbreaking and joyous...I just disappeared into The Whalebone Theatre and didn't want to leave." --Jo Baker, author of Longbourn

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household--her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist--build a theatre from the beast's skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.

As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France--a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

The Whalebone Theatre

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Esther Yi

Some pen and highlighter but I've kept it clean otherwise!

DESCRIPTION 

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on livestreams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant, Y/N is a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life

“Wondrous and weird . . . Y/N resists the junkiness of the internet . . . against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat.” —New York Times "Gorgeous." —New Yorker "High Brow x Brilliant." —NY Mag (Approval Matrix) "Piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing." —Entertainment Weekly "Utterly brilliant." —Cosmopolitan "A true novel of the era." —Elle "Freakish and hallucinatory." —Vulture "Absurdly funny." —Ms. Magazine "Haunting." —Esquire "Riveting and innovative." —TIME "Sophisticated." —Chicago Review of Books "Strange, haunting, and undeniably beautiful." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "One of the most daring novels of the year." —Bookpage (Starred Review) "Witty, self-knowing and, extraordinarily, far beyond categorization." —The Times UK Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant—a novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction. It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star. Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence. From a conspicuous new talent comes Y/N, a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Crackling with the intellectual sensitivity of Elif Batuman and the sinewy absurdism of Thomas Pynchon, Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.

4f241349-47ed-473b-a930-2281bff0e1ec-0

Yaa Gyasi

Winner of the NBCC's John Leonard First Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah.com, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones, BuzzFeed, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the notorious Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and shipped off to America to be sold into slavery. With breathtaking scope, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the slave traders of the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the Asantes' struggle against British colonialism to the first stirrings of the American Civil War, from the jazz of twentieth-century Harlem to the sparkling shores of modern Ghana. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

Homegoing

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John Darnielle

Highlighter, tabs, and pen!! Two steps away from being an illuminated page 

From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him when he was a child. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and a movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell--his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research into the murders with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.

Devil House is John Darnielle's most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

Devil House

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Robert Jones, Jr.

Finalist for the National Book Award Instant New York Times Bestseller "May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves." —The New York Times Book Review “A new kind of epic...A grand achievement...While The Prophets' dreamy realism recalls the work of Toni Morrison...its penetrating focus on social dynamics stands out more singularly.” —Entertainment Weekly A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony. With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets fearlessly reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

The Prophets

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Xochitl Gonzalez

Tabs, highlighter and pen. Book of the month cover.

Olga Dies Dreaming

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Zadie Smith

Read it through but barely touched it because I'm not a contemporary fan 😔

A 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2012 • One of TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012 • One of The Wall Street Journal's Best 10 Fiction Books of 2012 • A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2012 “[NW] is that rare thing, a book that is radical and passionate and real.” —Anne Enright, The New York Times Book Review “A triumph . . . As Smith threads together her characters' inner and outer worlds, every sentence sings.” —The Guardian “A powerful portrait of class and identity in multicultural London.” —Entertainment Weekly Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone—familiar to city-dwellers everywhere—NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

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Ronald Gottesman

Charles Burns

Upton Sinclair

Eric Schlosser

Highlighted, annotated and tabbed to hell! Very well-loved but no rips or anything like that.

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The horrifying conditions of the Chicago stockyards are revealed through this narrative of a young immigrant's struggles in America.

The Jungle

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Ken Follett

It's a second hand, second hand so there's a little wear on the cover but i didnt read much of it so there's very few marks.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.

The Pillars of the Earth

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Gabino Iglesias

Limited markings! I only got 50 pages in before deciding it wasnt for me, so it's really close to new. I'm sending along the translation guide as well!

From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what's left of his family--even if it means a descent into violence.

Buried in debt due to his young daughter's illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won't return the same.



The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby's southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The Devil Takes You Home

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Kate Bernheimer

A few highlighted bits and a tear, tragically, that i repaired with tape 

Fifty New Myths

Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse—his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions. Aimee Bender retells the myth of the Titans. Elizabeth McCracken retells the myth of Lamia, the child-eating mistress of Zeus. Madeline Miller retells the myth of Galatea. Kevin Wilson retells the myth of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Emma Straub and Peter Straub retell the myth of Persephone. Heidi Julavits retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Ron Currie, Jr. retells the myth of Dedalus. Maile Meloy retells the myth of Demeter. Zachary Mason retells the myth of Narcissus. Joy Williams retells the myth of Argos, Odysseus’ dog. If “xo” signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbye to an old way of mythmaking. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, a squid who falls in love with the sun, and a girl who gives birth to cubs, here are extravagantly imagined, bracingly contemporary stories, heralding a new beginning for one of the world’s oldest literary traditions.

Xo Orpheus

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##hardcover #fiction #bookofthemonth #botm 

"Don't Cry for Me is a perfect song."--Jesmyn Ward A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob's tumultuous relationship with Isaac's mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob's role as a father and his reaction to Isaac's being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace. With piercing insight and profound empathy, acclaimed author Daniel Black illuminates the lived experiences of Black fathers and queer sons, offering an authentic and ultimately hopeful portrait of reckoning and reconciliation. Spare as it is sweeping, poetic as it is compulsively readable, Don't Cry for Me is a monumental novel about one family grappling with love's hard edges and the unexpected places where hope and healing take flight.

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Silje Ulstein; Alison McCullough