Alana S. Portero

Mara Faye Lethem

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Utah

A Novel

Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of Shuggie Bain and Detransition, Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro Almodóvar, a staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the class struggles of a trans woman growing up in Madrid in the last decades of the twentieth century. "I saw a whole generation of boys fall like irredeemable angels." Told in the heartrending voice of a girl trapped within the body of a boy, Bad Habit is a story of coming-of-age in working class Madrid-in a godforsaken neighborhood ironically named after a saint. Alana S. Portero's spunky protagonist struggles to make sense of herself and the world she inhabits, conveying her surroundings with mythic allusions and a poetic vitality absent from everyday life. Set against the heroin epidemic that ravaged Madrid in the 1980s and the city's vibrant party scene that dominated its nightlife in the 1990s, Bad Habit follows Portero's unnamed protagonist as she grows up in a blue-collar suburb that has no place for her. Forging ahead, she discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death. Blistering and compassionate, Bad Habit illuminates the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood. Shimmering in its lyrical beauty, vivid in its realism, autobiographical in its detail, it is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us. Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem

Bad Habit

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Aside from one dust jacket tear (shown in photos), this book is in fantastic condition. 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New Jersey

An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?” In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety. But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures. Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Long Island Compromise

45d80937-60f2-4ca3-a59f-6c63ba162a3f-0

Caitlin Doughty

Dianné Ruz

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Illinois

And Other Questions about Dead Bodies

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can grandma have a Viking funeral? In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Doughty blends history, science, and anthropology to offer candid, hilarious answers to urgent questions about what will happen (to our bodies) after we die. This edition features an interview with a psychologist on how to talk about death and new and never-before-answered questions from readers. Beautifully illustrated by Dianné Ruz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is "a charming guide into something we take enormous pains to avoid" (Paste).

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