Damon Young

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Ohio

A Memoir in Essays

From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

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Åsne Seierstad

Sarah Death

The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

An account of the 2011 massacre in Norway delves into the killer's troubled childhood to trace his descent from a privileged and gifted youth to a terrorist, offering insights into his radical beliefs against a backdrop of the country's famously peaceful politics.

One of Us

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Kate Winkler Dawson

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December 5th of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days. Mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and 12,000 people died. That same month, there was another killer at large in London: John Reginald Christie, who murdered at least six women. In a braided narrative that draws on extensive interviews, never-before-published material, and archival research, Dawson captivatingly recounts the intersecting stories of the these two killers and their longstanding impact on modern history.

Death in the Air

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Muriel Barbery

Alison Anderson

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

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Eleanor Catton

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

All the world's a stage--and nowhere is that more true than at an all-girls high school, particularly one where a scandal has just erupted. A teacher has had an affair with his underage student, and though her friends pretend to be dismayed, they are secretly curious and jealous. They obsessively examine the details of the affair under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies. When the local drama school turns the story of the scandal into their year-end show, the real world and the world of the theater are forced to meet. With both performances--the musicians' and the acting students'--approaching, the boundaries between dramas real and staged, private and public, begin to dissolve. THE REHEARSAL is a tender portrait of teenage yearning and adult regret, an exhilarating, darkly funny, provocative novel about the complications of human desire.

The Rehearsal

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Kerri Rawson

My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming

What is it like to learn that your ordinary, loving father is a serial killer? Kerri Rawson, the daughter of the notorious serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), tells the nightmarish story of that discovery and of her long journey of faith and healing.

A Serial Killer's Daughter

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Neil Gaiman

Author's Preferred Text

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose….If you have enjoyed John Crowley’s Little, Big or Stephen King’s The Stand or the urbane horror fiction of Jonathan Carroll…then American Gods arrives just in time.” —Washington Post “Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul.” —Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay It has been a decade since #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book) rocked the literary world with American Gods—his breathtaking tale of the war on Earth between old gods and new. For those who have yet to experience Gaiman’s bestselling tour de force—a novel USA Today called “a powerful, searing force that makes readers confront what is real and what is not”—and for those eager to enter this astonishing world again, comes the Author’s Preferred Text 10th Anniversary Edition. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker Awards, with a special introduction by the author, this is American Gods as Neil Gaiman always meant it to be.

American Gods

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Zadie Smith

"An extraordinary vision of our age." --Washington Post

This is the story of a city. The northwest corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and those who live nowhere at all. And many people in between. Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation.

Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic novel follows four Londoners--Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan--as they try to make adult lives outside Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is 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.

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Kiran Millwood Hargrave

After the men in an Arctic Norwegian town are wiped out, the women must survive a sinister threat in this "perfectly told" 1600s parable of "a world gone mad" (Adriana Trigiani). Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a stranger arrives on their shore. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, The Mercies is a story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.

The Mercies

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Kazuo Ishiguro

Sent to live in England after the disappearance of his parents, Christopher Banks returns to Shanghai, the city of his birth, more than twenty years later to uncover the truth about the tragedy that transformed his childhood.

When We Were Orphans

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Caitlin Moran

Limited Edition from Olive Collection from 2016

The New York Times bestseller—part manifesto, part memoir—that put a new face on feminism as it cut to the heart of issues with an irreverent, transcendent, and hilarious touch—now available in a limited Olive Edition. “There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman….A glorious, timely stand against sexism so ingrained we barely even notice it. It is, in the dour language [Moran] militates so brilliantly against, a book that needed to be written.”—New York Times Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives with laugh-out-loud funny scenes from her own, from the riot of adolescence to her development as a writer, wife, and mother. With rapier wit, Moran slices right to the truth—whether it's about the workplace, strip clubs, love, fat, abortion, popular entertainment, or children—to jump-start a new conversation about feminism. With humor, insight, and verve, How to Be a Woman lays bare the reasons why female rights and empowerment are essential issues not only for women today but also for society itself.

How to Be a Woman

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Leigh Bardugo

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST!

The mesmerizing adult debut from Leigh Bardugo, a tale of power, privilege, dark magic, and murder set among the Ivy League elite

Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale's freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she's thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world's most prestigious universities on a full ride. What's the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale's secret societies. Their eight windowless "tombs" are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street's biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

Lillian Mae

@lillianmae

Books Listed

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Followers

Damon Young

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

Åsne Seierstad; Sarah Death

One of Us

Kate Winkler Dawson

Death in the Air

Muriel Barbery; Alison Anderson

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Eleanor Catton

The Rehearsal

Kerri Rawson

A Serial Killer's Daughter

Neil Gaiman

American Gods

Zadie Smith

Nw

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies

Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans

Caitlin Moran

How to Be a Woman

Leigh Bardugo

Ninth House

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Damon Young

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

Åsne Seierstad; Sarah Death

One of Us

Kate Winkler Dawson

Death in the Air

Muriel Barbery; Alison Anderson

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Eleanor Catton

The Rehearsal

Kerri Rawson

A Serial Killer's Daughter

Neil Gaiman

American Gods

Zadie Smith

Nw

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies

Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans

Caitlin Moran

How to Be a Woman

Leigh Bardugo

Ninth House

Get The App