Mark Epstein

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Truth about What the Buddha Taught

“A masterpiece. . . . It teaches us how not to fear and repress, but to rechannel and harness the most powerful energies of life toward freedom and bliss.” —ROBERT THURMAN It is common in both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis to treat desire as if it is the root of all suffering and problems, but psychiatrist Mark Epstein believes this to be a grave misunderstanding.In his controversial defense of desire, he makes clear that it is the key to deepening intimacy with ourselves, each other, and our world. Proposing that spiritual attainment does not have to be detached from intimacy or eroticism, Open to Desire begins with an exploration of the state of dissatisfaction that causes us to cling to irrational habits. Dr. Epstein helps readers overcome their own fears of desire so that they can more readily bridge the gap between self and other, cope with feelings of incompletion, and get past the perception of others as objects. Freed from clinging and shame, desire’s spiritual potential can then be opened up.

Open to Desire

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Julia Armfield

Former library book. Intact on the inside. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

From White Review Short Story Prize winner Julia Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link. In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates’. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected. Blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, salt slow is an utterly original collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock, heralding the arrival of a daring new voice.

Salt Slow

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Yiyun Li

Stories

In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of The New Yorker's top 20 fiction writers under 40, gives us exquisite stories in which politics and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition. A professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. A lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. Six women establish a private investigating agency to battle extramarital affairs in Beijing. Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl introduces us to worlds strange and familiar, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.




Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

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Lydia Davis

A fifth collection by the author of the National Book Award finalist, Varieties of Disturbance, includes pithy one-liners, exploratory observations and letters of complaint, including "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," in which a professor is stymied by her choices. 50,000 first printing.

Can't and Won't

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Brandon Taylor

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER BRANDON TAYLOR IS: “A powerhouse.” —Newsweek “An extraordinary cartographer.” —Esquire “A striking new voice with a vital perspective.” —Harper’s Bazaar “A brilliant writer.” —Garth Greenwell Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Elle, Enterntainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, Vulture, Thrillist, The Week, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Millions, and Paperback Paris A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty. One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as “a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.” With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

Filthy Animals

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Timothy F. Murphy

Suzanne Poirier

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis

Writing AIDS

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Excellent condition minus a wrinkle in the cover (see pics.)

A Novel

A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master" (Elizabeth McCracken, Vanity Fair).

"Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art."--The Wall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD * LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times * NPR * The Guardian * The Paris Review

The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, "I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words."

Yiyun Li meets life's deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.

Where Reasons End

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An Invitation to Flash Fiction

Going Short

Terese Marie Mailhot

Cover shows wear but it’s pristine inside — minus one or two doggy ears. 

A Memoir

A powerful, poetic memoir of an Indigenous woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest—this New York Times bestseller and Emma Watson Book Club pick is “an illuminating account of grief, abuse and the complex nature of the Native experience . . . at once raw and achingly beautiful (NPR). Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

Heart Berries

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Garth Greenwell

Some pages got wet. Check additional pictures to see how they look. 

In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell expands his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves. Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

Cleanness

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Melanie Finn

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Underneath

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Matvei Yankelevich

Boris by the Sea

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Some wear on the cover but otherwise in a great condition. 

Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transfroms Our Lives

Kelly Link

A follow-up collection to Stranger Things Happen celebrates the intersection between the worlds of reality and the supernatural, in an anthology that features such topics as a haunted convenience store and a weekly apocalyptic poker party. Reprint.

Magic for Beginners

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Abbi Jacobson

Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

New York Times Bestseller From the co-creator and co-star of the hit series Broad City, a "poignant, funny, and beautifully unabashed" (Cheryl Strayed) bestselling essay collection about love, loss, work, comedy, and figuring out who you really are when you thought you already knew. When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and opinions: Why wasn't she going with friends? Wouldn't it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one... why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude, and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city and town on her way to Los Angeles, she mulled over the big questions-- What do I really want? What is the worst possible scenario in which I could run into my ex? How has the decision to wear my shirts tucked in been pivotal in my adulthood? In this collection of anecdotes, observations and reflections--all told in the sharp, wildly funny, and relatable voice that has endeared Abbi to critics and fans alike--readers will feel like they're in the passenger seat on a fun and, ultimately, inspiring journey. With some original illustrations by the author.

I Might Regret This

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Kazim Ali

Autobiography and Cities

Eloquent intercultural coming-of-age story

This groundbreaking, transgenre work--part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past--is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Bright Felon

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Daniel Magariel

"A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father--One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent"--

One of the Boys

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Alyssa Songsiridej

Read once and is in excellent condition. No markings or doggy ears 

"Cleanness meets Conversations with Friends in this sly, sensual, daring debut novel about art, autonomy, and the thin line between power and submission. When the unnamed narrator of Little Rabbit first meets the choreographer at an artists' residency in Maine, it's not a match. He thinks her serious, guarded, always running away to write. She finds him loud, conceited, domineering. But when he reappears in her life in Boston and invites her to his dance company's performance, she's compelled to attend. Their interaction at the show sets off a summer of expanding her own body's boundaries: She follows the choreographer to his home in the Berkshires, to his apartment in New York, and into submission during sex. Her body learns to obediently follow his, and his desires quickly become inextricable from her pleasure. She wants it; this must be happiness, right? Back in Boston, her roommate Annie's skepticism amplifies her own doubts about these heady weekend retreats. What does it mean for a queer young woman to partner with an older man, for a fledgling artist to partner with an established one? Is she following her own agency, or is she merely following him? Does falling in love mean eviscerating yourself? Then why has her writing never been better? Is this transcendence or surrender? Combining the sticky sexual politics of Luster with the dizzying, perceptive intimacy of Cleanness, Little Rabbit is a wholly new kind of coming-of-age story about female lust, punishment, and the language-defying desires that challenge the hard won boundaries of the self"--

Little Rabbit

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Najwa Barakat

Luke Leafgren

It has a little scratch on the cover but it’s unread, technically new. 

Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel--he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: there is desperate poverty, the ever-present threat of violence, and masses of Syrian refugees planning to reach Europe via a dangerous sea passage.

How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his "real life" of a character from one of his early novels--a vicious militiaman and torturer. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself . . . or just seek psychiatric help?

Browse by categories

Mark Epstein

Open to Desire

Julia Armfield

Salt Slow

Yiyun Li

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Lydia Davis

Can't and Won't

Brandon Taylor

Filthy Animals

Timothy F. Murphy; Suzanne Poirier

Writing AIDS

Yiyun Li

Where Reasons End

Nancy Stohlman

Going Short

Terese Marie Mailhot

Heart Berries

Garth Greenwell

Cleanness

Melanie Finn

The Underneath

Matvei Yankelevich

Boris by the Sea

Louise DeSalvo

Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transfroms Our Lives

Kelly Link

Magic for Beginners

Abbi Jacobson

I Might Regret This

Kazim Ali

Bright Felon

Daniel Magariel

One of the Boys

Alyssa Songsiridej

Little Rabbit

Najwa Barakat; Luke Leafgren

Mister N

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