Ali Smith

This is a library discard version. The spine is a little skewed as photographed but the book itself is readable with no markings on the pages. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

South Carolina

A Novel

Autumn

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Please review photos. There is some underlining in this copy. 

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet--a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit,  the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?

Spring. The great connective.

With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.

The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?

Hope springs eternal.

Spring

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Lorrie Moore

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

"Touches and dazzles and entertains. An enchanting novel." --The New York Times

In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America we share a grown woman's bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
 
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger--until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help--and then everything changes.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

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Iris Murdoch

Mary Kinzie

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize--a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs 

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Sea, the Sea

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Makenna Goodman

A "startlingly original" novel of "recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make" (Alexander Chee, Paris Review).

Alma and her family live close to the land, raising chickens and sheep. While her husband works at a nearby college, she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind--speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York.

In a series of flashbacks, Alma reveals the circumstances and choices that led to this moment: the joys and claustrophobia of their remote life; her fears and uncertainties about motherhood; the painfully awkward faculty dinners; her feelings of loneliness and failure; and her growing fascination with Celeste, a mysterious ceramicist and self-loving doppelgänger who becomes an obsession for Alma.

A fable both blistering and surreal, The Shame is a propulsive, funny, and thought-provoking debut about a woman in isolation, whose mind--fueled by capitalism, motherhood, and the search for meaningful art--attempts to betray her.

Honors for The Shame:

 * A Refinery29 Best New Book of Fall 2020
 * A Literary Hub Recommended Read for August 2020
 * A Bustle "Most Anticipated Book of August 2020"
 * A Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020, Selected by Miciah Bay Gault
 * A White Review Recommended Read of 2020
 * A Mpls.St.Paul Magazine Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020

The Shame

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Milan Kundera

Assorted characters--among them, Agnes, her husband, her sister, and her lover--experience anxiety about their immortality in contemporary Paris. By the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Reprint. $100,000 ad/promo.

Immortality

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Marilynne Robinson

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

Lila

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Jack (Oprah's Book Club)

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Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author's trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family's summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people.

Each of the Smarts--parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid--encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to see their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith's narrative freedom and exhilarating facility with language propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.

The Accidental

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Flannery O'Connor

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You."

O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story."

As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

A Prayer Journal

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Nick Flynn

The son of a convicted bank robber and con artist describes their complicated relationship, relating how his father, while in jail, sent the author letters throughout his childhood and turned up in a Boston homeless shelter where the author was a caseworker. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

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Britney Spears

See photos. There is some highlighting in this book. 

The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope. In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.

The Woman in Me

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Susan Dennard

SIGNED EDITIONFrom Susan Dennard, the New York Times bestselling author of the Witchlands series, comes a haunting and high-octane contemporary fantasy, about the magic it takes to face your fears in a nightmare-filled forest, and the mettle required to face the secrets hiding in the dark corners of your own family.

Hemlock Falls isn't like other towns. You won't find it on a map, your phone won't work here, and the forest outside town might just kill you.

Winnie Wednesday wants nothing more than to join the Luminaries, the ancient order that protects Winnie's town - and the rest of humanity - from the monsters and nightmares that rise in the forest of Hemlock Falls every night.

Ever since her father was exposed as a witch and a traitor, Winnie and her family have been shunned. But on her sixteenth birthday, she can take the deadly Luminary hunter trials and prove herself true and loyal - and restore her family's good name. Or die trying.

But in order to survive, Winnie enlists the help of the one person who can help her train: Jay Friday, resident bad boy and Winnie's ex-best friend. While Jay might be the most promising new hunter in Hemlock Falls, he also seems to know more about the nightmares of the forest than he should. Together, he and Winnie will discover a danger lurking in the forest no one in Hemlock Falls is prepared for.

Not all monsters can be slain, and not all nightmares are confined to the dark.

You'll want to get lost in the world of The Luminaries again and again." - Leigh Bardugo, #1 New York Times bestselling author


The Luminaries Signed Owlcrate Edition

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Terry Tempest Williams

Stories from the Field

The acclaimed author of Refuge here weaves together a resonant and often rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves, combining the power of her observations in the field with her personal experience--as a woman, a Mormon, and a Westerner. Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.

Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O'Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book--one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.

An Unspoken Hunger

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Lauren Groff

In a lush, haunting story of the American dream, Bit, born in a back-to-nature commune in 1970s New York State, must come to grips with the outside world when the commune eventually fails. By the best-selling author of The Monsters of Templeton.

Arcadia

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Annie Dillard

This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of life in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.

The Living

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Virginia Feito

A twenty-first-century Highsmith, Virginia Feito conjures the unforgettable Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife whose life is shattered by her husband's latest novel.

Mrs. March

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Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child

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Maggie Nelson

Four Songs of Care and Constraint

Named a Most Anticipated/Best Book of the Month by: NPR * USA Today * Time * Washington Post * Vulture * Women's Wear Daily * Bustle * LitHub * The Millions * Vogue * Nylon * Shondaland * Chicago Review of Books * The Guardian * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Publishers Weekly

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.


Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with--indeed, our inseparability from--others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture--from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis--is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

On Freedom

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Doris Lessing

The experiences of two women provide the framework for an intense literary study of liberated womanhood.

The Golden Notebook

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Lauren Asher

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The first book in a spin-off of the Dreamland Billionaire series.

Love Redesigned

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Elizabeth Hardwick

Darryl Pinckney

The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades. A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature—Melville, James, Wharton—and the changes in American fiction, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

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Domenico Starnone

Jhumpa Lahiri

Ties

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S. T. Gibson

Book I in the Summoner's Circle

When a family curse threatens David’s life, he will turn to the only person he’s ever trusted, his ex-boyfriend, Rhys—which means he will have to open his heart to Moira, Rhys’s wife. The day David Aristarkhov’s occultist father died, he bought himself an Audi, drank every drop of liquor in the house, and abandoned his life as a teen psychic prodigy. Now pushing thirty, David is a Boston attorney, moonlighting as a medium for a secret society. But when the Devil comes to collect on a deal David’s ancestor made, he reluctantly reaches out to his ex-boyfriend Rhys for help. However, to get to Rhys, David will have to befriend Moira, Rhys’s wife. The trio gets a little too close for comfort as they combine their powers to unravel the century-old curse, and if they don’t break the curse by David’s thirtieth birthday, he won’t live long enough for everyone to figure out their feelings for each other.

Browse by categories

Ali Smith

Autumn

Ali Smith

Spring

Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Iris Murdoch; Mary Kinzie

The Sea, the Sea

Makenna Goodman

The Shame

Milan Kundera

Immortality

Marilynne Robinson

Lila

Marilynne Robinson

Jack (Oprah's Book Club)

Ali Smith

The Accidental

Flannery O'Connor

A Prayer Journal

Nick Flynn

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Britney Spears

The Woman in Me

Susan Dennard

The Luminaries Signed Owlcrate Edition

Terry Tempest Williams

An Unspoken Hunger

Lauren Groff

Arcadia

Annie Dillard

The Living

Virginia Feito

Mrs. March

Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child

Maggie Nelson

On Freedom

Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

Lauren Asher

Love Redesigned

Elizabeth Hardwick; Darryl Pinckney

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Domenico Starnone; Jhumpa Lahiri

Ties

S. T. Gibson

Evocation Exclusive Owlcrate Edition

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