Haruki Murakami

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

North Carolina

An unlikely alliance forms between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, fantastical world.

Kafka on the Shore

68507e70-c5d3-4840-ad9a-e919b85a2dfb-1

Mattie Montgomery

Good condition overall, inscription inside fromt cover

Lovely Things in Ugly Places

7f5fb093-6de4-4b73-bd7c-5c43b51ddaf6-0

James McBride

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

35025c74-022e-42e5-8864-f2c902195c24-1

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The sequel to The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, The Committed follows the "man of two minds" as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism, dealing drugs in 1980s Paris but unable to escape his past

The Committed

c996449e-da19-4de0-870d-c2ef9578548a-1

William S. Burroughs

The Restored Text

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.

Naked Lunch

0e4f8f47-d2dd-40d7-a3ca-df1c48d78405-1

Louise Erdrich

In her boldest and most darkly humorous novel yet, award-winning, critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist Louise Erdrich tells the intimate and powerful stories of five Great Plains women whose lives are connected through one man.

Stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, Jack Mauser's former wives huddle for warmth and pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking and often times comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

Tales of Burning Love

1d210739-a82c-4e38-b4e3-12321f92d773-1

Lemony Snicket

Very good condition. First edition with dust jacket.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Dear Reader, If you have just picked up this audio, then it is not too late to put it back down. Like the previous books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, there is nothing to be found in these pages but misery, despair, and discomfort, and you still have time to choose something else to read.Within the chapters of this story, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire encounter a darkened staircase, a red herring, some friends i a dire situation, three mysterious initials, a liar with an evil scheme, a secret passageway, and parsley soda.I have sworn to write down these tales of the Baudelaire orphans so the general public will know each terrible thing that has happened to them, but if you decide to read something else instead, you will save yourself from a heapful of horror and woe.With all due respect, Lemony Snicket

The Ersatz Elevator

84c22f51-ed73-4306-9c63-dd5ffc0587ae-1

Muriel Spark

The arrival of Chris Wiley, a seventeen-year-old literary prodigy, at the College Sunrise finishing school sparks a dangerous game of envy, sexual jealousy, and adultery for Rowland Mahler, a would-be novelist, and his wife, Nina.

The Finishing School

a6aaba16-a357-437d-924d-d9f5492d6692-1

Stephen Graham Jones

Excellent condition overall, one small corner bump 

A Novel

NOMINATED FOR THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2016 BY TOR.COM AND BOOK RIOT A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy, whose family lives on the fringe of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them. He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks. For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes—always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they’ve been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change. A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story— funny, bloody, raw, and real—told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.

Mongrels

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Mike Marqusee

Good shape overall, some age related wear, nothing that affects readability. Small piece of tape on dust jacket.

The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art

Bob Dylan's lyrics are at once abstruse and evocative, urgent and timeless. But, as Mike Marqusee's compelling study makes clear, behind the anarchy and playfulness of Dylan's imagery lie meanings that are often highly charged with political and social concerns. politics that unlocked his own astonishing songwriting ability, evidenced by dazzling responses in the early 1960s to the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. Marqusee traces the young song-writer's subsequent reluctance to be pigeonholed, his rejection of protest, and his turn to electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He shows the way folk tradition, modernism, and commercial popular culture are sublimely fused in Dylan's masterworks of the mid-1960s, notably on the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and discusses the artist's quest for American identity-amid the continuing carnage in Vietnam and growing chaos at home - in The Basement Tapes.

Chimes of Freedom

7f9214c8-9a6c-4a77-9e34-cc6e0fbd379b-1

Greil Marcus

Good shape overall, a little bit of wear on the egdes 

Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music— "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian"— and Bob Dylan, who in 2016 won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute masterwork in its richest, fullest context, capturing the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as musicians and technicians clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan at the height of his powers. But Marcus shows how, far from being a song only of 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" is rooted in faraway American places and times, drawing on timeless cultural impulses that make the song as challenging, disruptive, and restless today as it ever was, capable of reinvention by artists as disparate as the comedian Richard Belzer and the Italian hip-hop duo Articolo 31. "Like a Rolling Stone" never loses its essential quality, which is directly to challenge the listener: it remains a call to arms and a demand for a better world. Forty years later it is still revolutionary as will and idea, as an attack and an embrace. How Does it Feel? In this unique, burningly intense book, Marcus tells you, and much more besides.

Like a Rolling Stone

834eedd5-04fe-4c6f-a4c2-d9fced24c931-1

Stephanie Clifford

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise, a rich and riveting novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle that tells the story of one unforgettable woman's rise in country and western music.

It's 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.

Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian's youth--the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville--and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.

Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, she'll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.

Exploring one unforgettable woman's creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world--and an art form--made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.

The Farewell Tour (ARC)

19c51afe-a2cc-49c6-aaca-251a58b231a1-1

Donald L. Maggin

A Life in Jazz

"Georges Remi's Tintin has long been one of the world's most beloved characters; Frederic Tuten has long been one of the fiction world's best-kept secrets. Their meeting here is nothing short of a literary event: a dazzling, hauntingly lyrical reimagining of the adventure novel." "Tintin has been to the Yucatan and Tibet, to the South Sea Islands and the Great American Plains; he's even traveled to the moon. Until now, however, he has never charted the restless geography of his mind: Averse to self-examination, unschooled in worldly ways, he is forever trapped in the body and psyche of a young teenager, content to combat evil and let his personal demons slumber. Then a summons comes to his home at Marlinspike Hall, and he ventures forth - accompanied by his great-hearted, hard-drinking companion Captain Haddock and his faithful dog, Snowy - to Machu Picchu, where he encounters a cast of characters that includes several from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. He will discover among them minds that can create and destroy the world he knew with but a thought, and the woman to whom he will lose his heart for the first - and last - time. He will find in his hands the power to take a life, in his heart the power to feel hatred, and in his soul the power to become one with all living things." "Instantly recognizable as the boy-man first brought to life by the Belgian artist Remi (a.k.a. Herge) over sixty years ago, and familiar to readers in more than thirty languages, Frederic Tuten's Tintin is, nevertheless, completely his own creation. Tintin in the New World, a novel for both the fan and the initiate, places our hero in his most incredible adventure yet."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Stan Getz

94e26690-e99f-4560-980f-6bb3066f92cf-1

Nice shape overall, light wear on edges, spine is in tact

American Jazz Singers

Louis' Children

Marshall W. Stearns

General wear but all oages and pictures present and in tact. 

The effect of jazz upon American culture and the American character has been all-pervasive. This superlative history is the first and the most renowned systematic outline of the evolution of this unique American musical phenomenon. Stearns begins with the joining of the African Negro'smusical heritage with European forms and the birth of jazz in New Orleans then follows its course through the era of swing and bop to the beginnings of rock in the 50s, vividly depicting the great innovators, and covering such technical elements as the music's form and structure.

The Story of Jazz

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Ira Gitler

General wear on the cover but pages all in good shape

An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in The 1940s

Interviews with more than fifty of the seminal figures in jazz history recall how jazz moved from the big band era into the modern jazz period

Swing to Bop

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Joe Goldberg

Light age related wear on edges, pages all in very good condition 

The fifties, though a quiescent period in many ways, was one of the most fervent decades in jazz history. The landmarks of modern jazz were firmly planted and, it could be argued, nearly all directions the music has taken since then can be charted back to recordings, groups, or individuals from this era. In this series of profiles, Joe Goldberg examines the lives and the music, the crucial events and dominant forces of a decade of great music and conflicting esthetics: Miles Davis's recording of Kind of Blue; Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet; Cecil Taylor's percussive keyboard experiments; John Coltrane's and Sonny Rollins's marathon saxophone solos; MJQ's blending of classical structure and jazz improvisation; Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz. From Mingus to Monk to Blakey, it was an age of giants. Perhaps never before or since in jazz history have so many wildly idiosyncratic jazz innovators been contemporaries. Joe Goldberg was there and what his ears heard has become here a lasting music document.

Jazz Masters of The 50s

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Thomas Owens

Generally good condition. Pages all in tact. Some discoloration on edges.

The Music and Its Players

Discusses the origins of bebop, a style which at first even other jazz musicians considered chaotic, describes the contributions of Charlie Parker, and profiles the oustanding players of each of the instruments commonly used

Bebop

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Dave Gelly

Very good conditon. Pages and photos all in tact and clean. 

Lester Young

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Set in North Dakota at a time in this century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance--yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The reader will experience shock and pleasure in encountering a group of characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Tracks

3c8e8b23-a766-4b39-bdae-dd99fb5dd33b-1

Michael Azerrad

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

"This book will be fresh even for those whose lives these bands were...All thirteen profiles are page-turners." --Robert Christgau, Village Voice This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties--when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock with punk rock's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith has been recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right. Among the bands profiled: Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Big Black, Hüsker Dü, Fugazi, Minor Threat, Mudhoney, The Replacements, Beat Happening, and Dinosaur Jr.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

02e034ce-3125-4341-a17b-5353c9bdc10b-1

First paperback edition, light wear on edges, text in great condition 

Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes

Greil Marcus has been called "simply peerless, not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian" (Nick Hornby). It's appropriate, then, that he should choose to explore one of the most defining moments in American music: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. It was 1967--the Summer of Love. Bob Dylan and five other musicians (later known as The Band) met in a bungalow in Woodstock, New York, and wrote and produced music that ignored the psychedelic sounds of the time, songs that would eventually become known simply as "The Basement Tapes." The group mined the history of American music and their own talents to produce legendary tracks that were bootleg issues before appearing in official release. That is the alchemy that was practiced in the Basement Tapes laboratory, and "in that alchemy," Marcus writes, "is an undiscovered country, like the purloined letter hiding in plain sight." Marcus explores this music and the cauldron of the American experience in which it was formed in a book that illuminates America, then and now.

Invisible Republic

b8f93d19-b8bb-403c-ba9c-629868d7f6d6-1

book club edition. Age related wear to dust jacket and edges. Pages are nice and readable. See additional photos for more details, message me with any questions.

Browse by categories

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Mattie Montgomery

Lovely Things in Ugly Places

James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Committed

William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch

Louise Erdrich

Tales of Burning Love

Lemony Snicket

The Ersatz Elevator

Muriel Spark

The Finishing School

Stephen Graham Jones

Mongrels

Mike Marqusee

Chimes of Freedom

Greil Marcus

Like a Rolling Stone

Stephanie Clifford

The Farewell Tour (ARC)

Donald L. Maggin

Stan Getz

Leslie Gourse

Louis' Children

Marshall W. Stearns

The Story of Jazz

Ira Gitler

Swing to Bop

Joe Goldberg

Jazz Masters of The 50s

Thomas Owens

Bebop

Dave Gelly

Lester Young

Louise Erdrich

Tracks

Michael Azerrad

Our Band Could Be Your Life

Greil Marcus

Invisible Republic

Norman Mailer

Ancient Evenings

William G. Tapply

The Marine Corpse

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