Rachel Kushner

Read once, light wear, no markings except black marker line on spine.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Michigan

A Novel

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

The debut novel by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Kushner, called "shimmering" (The New Yorker), "multilayered and absorbing" (The New York Times Book Review), and "gorgeously written" (Kirkus Reviews).

Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom--three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them--the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.

In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.

Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

Telex from Cuba

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Jeanne Thornton

Short story/novella collection. No markings or blemishes.

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. A high schooler finds her drawings corrupted by a haunted stone she inherits from a suicidal underground cartoonist. A video game addict discovers a vast, hidden dimension to colonize in the walls of his girlfriend's apartment. A philosophy student seeks anonymous Craigslist sex with the ubiquitous devil that stalks her. In this short fiction collection from Jeanne Thornton, author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam (a Lambda Literary Award finalist), reality and relationships blur, creating a queer pulp experience with a literary sensibility, a hallucinatory journey into despair... and, possibly, toward hope. "The gorgeousness of Thornton's writings help sustain the worlds she creates... That's the kind of seductiveness these stories have. In reading them, you become strange and dreamy in the same way they are."--Torrey Peters "Jeanne has this way of writing self-consciousness inside these perfect, self-contained worlds with signifiers that make them seem like they are the world we live in but if that world were... I don't even know exactly. Mystifying and uncomfortable and bulging with complicated, contradictory feeling just below the surface of everything."--Imogen Binnie

The Black Emerald

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Francesca Lia Block

Very minimal shelf wear. No markings or tears.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

From the beloved author of Necklace of Kisses comes a modern-day fairy tale of a willful and intuitive heroine and a world of shocking realism and transcendent magic. Francesca Lia Block, this time with co-writer Carmen Staton, introduces readers to Ruby, a Midwestern girl named for the jewel that is believed to ward off evil spirits. Ruby's special gift is a sixth sense that makes her at one with nature and gives her the ability to know her own destiny. After growing up in an abusive family, Ruby escapes to Los Angeles and learns of her soulmate -- Orion -- a British actor. She travels to England, where she works at a potions and herbs shop, and through a series of coincidental circumstances, ends up nursing Orion back to health without confessing that she has been on a quest to find him all along. But just when she thinks her dream is becoming a reality, Ruby is stopped in her tracks by the violent demons of her past. Only by facing the darkness together can she and Orion finally fulfill their destiny. As with Necklace of Kisses, Block, here with Staton, breaks the mold. In Ruby, readers will find a story about the power of our minds to overcome the past and ultimately change the course of our lives.

Ruby

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Jeanette Winterson

The Daylight Gate, an instant bestseller in the UK, is award-winning Jeanette Winterson’s singular vision of a dark period of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power in a time when politics and religion were closely intertwined. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, every Catholic conspirator in England fled to a wild, untamed place far from the reach of London law. On Good Friday, 1612, deep in the woods of Pendle Hill, amid baptismal pools and low, thick fog, a gathering of thirteen is interrupted by the local magistrate. Two of their coven have already been imprisoned for witchcraft and are awaiting trial, but those who remain are vouched for by the wealthy and respected Alice Nutter. Shrouded in mystery and gifted with eternally youthful beauty, Alice is established in Lancashire society and insulated by her fortune. Yet she is also plagued by rumors of a dark and torrid love affair with another woman, the matriarch of the notorious Demdike clan. As those accused of witchcraft retreat into darkness, Alice stands alone as a realm-crosser, a conjurer of powers that will either destroy her or set her free.

The Daylight Gate

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Some reading and shelf wear. Creased spine, a few unobtrusive markings on a handful of pages.

Echo

Paul Auster

This has been sitting on a shelf for several years, so there's some slight page yellowing. But the cover and spine are pristine as if the book's never been opened.

A New York Times Bestseller From the bestselling author of Invisible and The New York Trilogy comes a new novel set during the 2008 economic collapse. Sunset Park opens with twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller trashing out foreclosed houses in Florida, the latest stop in his flight across the country. When Miles falls in love with Pilar Sanchez, he finds himself fleeing once again, going back to New York, where his family still lives, and into an abandoned house of young squatters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Woven together from various points of view—that of Miles's father, an independent book publisher trying to stay afloat, Miles's mother, a celebrated actress preparing her return to the New York stage, and the various men and women who live in the house—"Auster seems to carry all of humanity inside him" (Jan Stuart, The Boston Globe).

Sunset Park

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Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Barely handled, no marks or visible wear.

Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.

Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss's son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group "Los Injected Ones," which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II's upcoming visit.
 
When Renato goes missing, Rafa's search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city's detritus by Los Injected Ones.
 
A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.

Sacrificio

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Ex-library copy, stamped, stickered, and plastic covered. No page markings or blemishes otherwise.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A compulsively readable and electrifying debut about an ambitious young female artist who accidentally photographs a boy falling to his death—an image that could jumpstart her career, but would also devastate her most intimate friendship. Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life…if she lets it. But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors’ son, and the tragedy brings all the building’s residents together. It especially unites Lu with his beautiful grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to use the photograph to advance her career, and to protect a woman she has come to love. Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success, a powerful exploration of the complex terrain of female friendship, and a brilliant debut from novelist Rachel Lyon.

Self-Portrait with Boy

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Sticker on back, mark on spine, minimal cover wear, clean and unmarked pages. 

Returning with deep psychological scars after a tour of duty in Iraq, soldier Lauren Clay guides her younger brother to an upstate New York oil field that has become the subject of her obsession and begins teaching him survival skills while revealing herexperiences.

Shannon

@monasterymonochrome

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Rachel Kushner

Telex from Cuba

Jeanne Thornton

The Black Emerald

Francesca Lia Block

Ruby

Jeanette Winterson

The Daylight Gate

Francesca Lia Block

Echo

Paul Auster

Sunset Park

Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Sacrificio

Rachel Lyon

Self-Portrait with Boy

Cara Hoffman

Be Safe I Love You

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Rachel Kushner

Telex from Cuba

Jeanne Thornton

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Jeanette Winterson

The Daylight Gate

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Sunset Park

Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Sacrificio

Rachel Lyon

Self-Portrait with Boy

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Be Safe I Love You

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