Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

Reflections on Self-Delusion

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time.”—Vulture FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HARVARD CRIMSON AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Chicago Tribune • The Washington Post • NPR • Variety • Esquire • Vox • Elle • Glamour • GQ • Good Housekeeping • The Paris Review • Paste • Town & Country • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • BookRiot • Shelf Awareness Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet. FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY

Trick Mirror

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Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

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Natalie Shapero

With deadpan humor, quick turns, and blunt logic, Natalie Shapero’s third collection moves nimbly between the lines of power structures—linguistic, personal, political— to expose the loneliness of our contemporary realities. Popular Longing takes on, among other topics, art markets, consumer desire, privatization, NIMBYism, passive aggression, sex, violence, and the mythology of California. Shapero moves from a whisper to a scream and back again, in the time it takes for the neighborhood dog to take a rat in its jaws and bite.

The poems of Natalie Shapero's third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers--be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. "Why even / look up, when all we'll see is people / looking down?" In a world where everyone has to answer to someone, it seems no one is equipped to disrupt the status quo, and how the most urgent topics of conversation can only be approached through refraction. By scrutinizing the mundane and all that is taken for granted, these poems arrive at much wider vistas, commenting on human sadness, memory, and mortality. Punchy, fearlessly ironic, and wickedly funny, Popular Longing articulates what it means to share a planet, for better or more often for worse, with other people.

Popular Longing

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Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Neith

Richard Papen, a relatively impoverished student at a New England college, falls in with an exclusive clique of rich, worldly Greek scholars and soon learns the dreadful secret that keeps them together. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

The Secret History

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Anyi Wang

Michael Berry

Susan Chan Egan

Set in post-World War II Shanghai, "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the "longtong," the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods.

A Novel of Shanghai

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. After the Communist victory, Wang Qiyao continues to indulge in the decadent pleasures of the Shanghai bourgeoisie, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist campaign and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. She reemerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai," only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

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Riichi Yokomitsu

Dennis Washburn

Published serially between 1928 and 1931, Shanghai tells the story of a group of Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement at the time of the May 30th Incident of 1925. The personal lives and desires of the main characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest, factional intrigue, colonialist ambitions, and racial politics.The author, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), was an essayist, writer, and critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. He looked to contemporary avant-garde movements in Europe -- Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism -- for inspiration in his effort to explode the conventions of literary language and to break free of what he saw as the prisonhouse of modern culture.

A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi

A brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a city in turmoil by one of Japan's most influential avant-garde writers of the 1920s and '30s

Shanghai

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An account of Minamata disease, which struck a small Japanese fishing village due to methylmercury poisoning of the sea. Originally published in Japanese in 1972, with this translated edition published by Michigan University Classics in Japanese Studies in 2003 (notes by Livia Monnet).

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Our Minamata Disease 

Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow

Audre. Lorde

A Biomythography

The poet, Audre Lorde, depicts her life and examines the influence of various women on her development

Zami: a New Spelling of My Name

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Genevieve Cogman

Series information from author's website.

The Invisible Library

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David Means

Stories

A story collection for our time from David Means, the visionary “master of the form” (The Guardian).

Two Nurses, Smoking

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Manuel Munoz

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Shimmering stories set in California's Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters--straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old--are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently--perhaps literally--haunted.

In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It's a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

The Consequences

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John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman’s short story collection 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

*A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of the Year*

From John Edgar Wideman, a modern "master of language" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a stunning story collection that spans a range of topics from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell.

In Look For Me and I'll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that--despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division--encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior.

Never content merely to tell a story, Wideman seeks once again to create language that delivers passages like jazz solos, and virtuosic manipulations of time to entangle past and present. The story "Separation" begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather's coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. "Atlanta Murders" starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating "Evidence of Things Not Seen," James Baldwin's report on the 1979-1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia.

Comprised of fictions of the highest caliber and relevancy by a writer whose imagination and intellect "prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul" (Entertainment Weekly), Look For Me and I'll Be Gone will entrance and surprise committed Wideman fans and newcomers alike.

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone

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J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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Ryosuke Takeuchi

Arthur Doyle

The untold story of Sherlock Holmes' greatest rival, Moriarty!

Before he was Sherlock's rival, Moriarty fought against the unfair class caste system in London by making sure corrupt nobility got their comeuppance. But even the most well-intentioned plans can spin out of control--will Moriarty's dream of a more just and equal world turn him into a hero...or a monster?

In the late 19th century, Great Britain rules over a quarter of the world. Nobles sit in their fancy homes in comfort and luxury, while the working class slaves away at their jobs. When young Albert James Moriarty's upper-class family adopts two lower-class orphans, the cruelty the boys experience at his family's hands cements Albert's hatred of the nobility he was born into. He asks the older of the two boys--who has a genius mind and a killer instinct--to help him rid the world of evil, starting with Albert's own family!

Neith

@neithliveshere

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Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Natalie Shapero

Popular Longing

Donna Tartt

The Secret History

Anyi Wang; Michael Berry; Susan Chan Egan

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Riichi Yokomitsu; Dennis Washburn

Shanghai

Ishimure Michiko

Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow

Audre. Lorde

Zami: a New Spelling of My Name

Genevieve Cogman

The Invisible Library

David Means

Two Nurses, Smoking

Manuel Munoz

The Consequences

John Edgar Wideman

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Ryosuke Takeuchi; Arthur Doyle

Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1

Ann Charters

The Story and Its Writer

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Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Natalie Shapero

Popular Longing

Donna Tartt

The Secret History

Anyi Wang; Michael Berry; Susan Chan Egan

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Riichi Yokomitsu; Dennis Washburn

Shanghai

Ishimure Michiko

Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow

Audre. Lorde

Zami: a New Spelling of My Name

Genevieve Cogman

The Invisible Library

David Means

Two Nurses, Smoking

Manuel Munoz

The Consequences

John Edgar Wideman

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Ryosuke Takeuchi; Arthur Doyle

Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1

Ann Charters

The Story and Its Writer

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