Wishtree (Special Edition): Adult Edition (Paperback)

By Katherine Applegate

$15.99

ISBN: 9781250306869

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Feiwel & Friends - January 8th, 2019

The target audience for this lovely little number is ages eight to twelve, but I thoroughly enjoyed it all the same. Drawn from the Irish tradition of hanging one's wishes on a particular tree on a particular day once every year, Wishtree is narrated by Red, a several-hundred year-old (you guessed it) Wishtree with a knack for storytelling. According to Red, trees are not only very much alive, but are able to communicate verbally with non-tree beings. While it's expressly forbidden for trees to talk to people, Red has no problem conversing with the delightful cast of creatures living in her nooks, crannies, and branches. But when a boy carves into Red's trunk a hateful message directed at the Muslim family that just moved to her suburban American neighborhood, Red becomes fed up with all of the intolerance she's witnessed over the years and begins struggle with her role as observer, silently standing by. 

The Wake: A Novel (Paperback)

By Paul Kingsnorth

$16.00

ISBN: 9781555977177

Availability: Backordered

Published: Graywolf Press - September 1st, 2015

For some, reading this book would be tantamount to having teeth pulled or listening to someone recount their most recent dream at length and in great detail.  That being said, I love everything about it.

This was easily my number one pick of books I read in the year 2014. The Wake is an utterly unique and imaginative debut novel wherein Kingsnorth crafted a language with his own vocabulary and set of rules, much in the tradition of books like Finnegan’s Wake, Trainspotting, and A Clockwork Orange. Balking at the thought of writing a historical novel using contemporary language, Kingsnorth opted to create what he calls a “shadow tongue” that uses a combination of a phonetic dialect, Middle and Old English, and selective exclusion of words that didn’t enter the English language until after the time-period in which the story took place. The Wake is set in 1066 immediately following the Norman invasion and conquest of England. The story is narrated by and follows an English farmer from the rural North of the country who takes to the forests and swamps of his countryside in hopes of joining the fight in the underground resistance against the Normans. The story itself is an excellent one, but Kingsnorth’s adaptation, modification and mastery of the language in telling this story is what makes this book incredible. At first glance, this “ghost language” can admittedly be daunting to new readers, but with the aid of the brief “Note on Language” and the partial glossary found at the back of the book, the rules and rhythms of the text are remarkably easy to pick up, and it’s profoundly rewarding to find oneself gliding through the sentences without pause – even to the point of hearing the cadence and brogue of the narrator, Buccmaster of Holland. While I fully understand that this kind of book isn’t for everyone, if this sounds like something that remotely appeals to you as a reader, I would strongly encourage you to give it a try; I can’t overstate what a joy this was to read.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Paperback)

By Carmen Maria Machado

$16.00

ISBN: 9781555977887

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Graywolf Press - October 3rd, 2017

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut is everything I want from a modern collection of short stories; it’s immersive, explosive, surprising, lovely and terrifying.  Machado grabs you by the heartstrings from the first and refuses to relax her grip until the very last, and even then her stories stick with you, come to you at night and rehash their darkness and delight.  The stories in Her Body and Other Parties are utterly and brazenly unique, never asking that you suspend disbelief, instead suffusing you with their urgent and overwhelming reality.  While each story exists independently from the others, narratives involving the lives and bodies of women operate as the thematic thread pulling them all together. 

She Would Be King: A Novel (Paperback)

By Wayétu Moore

$16.00

ISBN: 9781644450017

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Published: Graywolf Press - September 3rd, 2019

She Would Be King is a rich and enchanting tale, a strikingly original and perfectly executed blend of historical fiction and magical realism. Through an utterly unique narrative perspective, Wayétu Moore presents us with a far-reaching and multifacted story revolving around the Transatlantic slave trade and the formation of Liberia. Yet another excellent, boundary-pushing, bar-raising debut from Graywolf Press.

Complete Stories (Hardcover)

By Kurt Vonnegut, Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor), Dan Wakefield (Editor), Dave Eggers (Foreword by)

$45.00

ISBN: 9781609808082

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Seven Stories Press - September 26th, 2017

As far as collected works go, this new volume of (my favorite Hoosier) Kurt Vonnegut's short stories reaches borderline perfection. Edited by longtime friends of and experts on Vonnegut, Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield, and with a thoughtful forward by Dave Eggers, this collection is clearly a labor of love. The 97 stories - including five previously unpublished works unearthed not long before the book went to the presses - are organized thematically ("War," "Women," "Science," "Romance," "Work Ethic vs. Fame and Fortune," "Behavior," "The Band Director" and "Futuristic"), each section given a brief introduction by one of the two editors, providing some background and context on Vonnegut's relationship to the theme. Even the book as an object (masterfully constructed by Seven Stories Press) is a wonder to behold.

Between the World and Me (Hardcover)

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

$20.80

ISBN: 9780812993547

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Published: One World - July 14th, 2015

There isn't anything I can say about this that hasn't already been said more eloquently by someone else.  Profoundly thoughtful, this may be the most important book to come out in the last two years. Presented as a letter written from Coates to his sixteen year-old son, Between the World and Me is a meditation on race in America.Invoking the writing of James Baldwin, Coates is candid and clear, and provides a level of perspective and understanding that we need to hear.

Eileen: A Novel (Paperback)

By Ottessa Moshfegh

$16.00

ISBN: 9780143128755

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Published: Penguin Books - August 16th, 2016

I'm a tiny bit smitten with Ottessa Moshfegh.  Her writing is dark and unforgiving, a gritty and unwashed place of moral ambiguity interspersed with glimpses of humanity and an occasional image or turn of phrase so stunning or beautifully crafted as to give us pause.  Her first novel, McGlue was a skinny little thing, but fantastic and packing a punch.  Eileen is longer, and more of a slow-burn; the title character is a twenty-something wallflower who works at a youth correctional facility in Massachusetts.  Quiet, sort-of pretty and unassuming, Eileen is a pretty unremarkable individual. Under the surface, however, she's strange and sinister as hell. There's some action, sure, a bit of violence, but Moshfegh makes you work for it.  The entire novel is one of anticipation, but in waiting for the gun to fire, the blade to drop, we're drawn under the spell of a narrator we're cheering for without knowing why, a character we want to like but are repulsed by, a fate we believe in but know we shouldn't.  Keep an eye out for Ottessa Moshfegh's forthcoming collection of short stories.

M Train (Paperback)

By Patti Smith

$16.00

ISBN: 9781101910160

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Published: Vintage - August 23rd, 2016

In her last book, Just Kids, Patti Smith chronicled her beginnings in New York City as a 20-year-old with no money and no contacts trying to figure out her place in the counter-culture of the sixties. M Train picks up on the other end of her long career, sitting in a coffee shop and musing on a life of creativity and love.  The title is ironic, as the progression of M Train isn't remotely straightfoward or consistent, but is rather meanders through personal history, insight and revelation. That being said, it is a lovely meditation on art, the creative process, love, relationships, and the passage of time. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Vintage International) (Paperback)

By Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translated by)

$16.00

ISBN: 9780804170123

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Published: Vintage - May 5th, 2015

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” This revelation is the impetus for one young Japanese man’s attempt to confront his painful past in the hope of attaining some measure of enlightenment and redemption. Newcomers to Murakami and long-time fans alike won’t be disappointed with the excellent addition to the celebrated writer’s remarkable oeuvre.

The Marble Orchard (Paperback)

By Alex Taylor

$16.95

ISBN: 9781935439998

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Ig Publishing - February 17th, 2015

The debut novel by Kentucky writer and short story virtuoso Alex Taylor. Here Taylor presents us with some Grit Lit at its finest – a ravaged landscape, an all-but-forgotten element of rural Kentucky, and no shortage of violence and vigilantism. Try it out!

Some Hell: A Novel (Paperback)

By Patrick Nathan

$16.00

ISBN: 9781555977986

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Graywolf Press - February 13th, 2018

A spellbinding debut novel about a boy whose typical coming-of-age narrative is abruptly derailed by the death by suicide of his father. In the wake of his father’s wake, our young narrator is must learn to navigate puberty, sexuality, and his burgeoning adulthood under the specter of tragedy and a hazy surreality while what remains of his family dissolves around him.

By Night in Chile (Paperback)

By Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (Translated by)

$13.95

ISBN: 9780811215473

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Published: New Directions - December 17th, 2003

Latin-American literary legend Roberto Bolaño delivers a searing, intriguing, thought-igniting treatise on church and state as told from the deathbed of a Chilean Jesuit priest. Although objectively little happens by way of action throughout this tale, the story is driven by remembrances of fast-paced dialogues held between various intellectuals, thinkers and artists of differing backgrounds and opinions and sporadically broken up by alternatively poignant and profound reflections from the dying man on his long and tumultuous life. Chris Andrews’ translation from the original Spanish does well to retain and do justice to Bolaño’s wit and poeticism and renders the text universally accessible – which is to say the reader needn’t have real prior knowledge of the Chilean cultural and historical background to still thoroughly enjoy this work. If you haven’t read Bolaño yet, fix that, and start here.

Children of God: A Novel (Paperback)

By Lars Petter Sveen

$16.00

ISBN: 9781555978204

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Graywolf Press - October 16th, 2018

A remarkable short-fiction cycle telling the stories of characters from the fringes of the Bible – soldiers, prostitutes, thieves and more – weaving a harrowing and entrancing tale of good and evil.

Zero K: A Novel (Paperback)

By Don DeLillo

$16.00

ISBN: 9781501138072

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Published: Scribner - May 16th, 2017

If you aren’t familiar with the work of Don Delillo, you ought to be. In the last forty years, he’s published seventeen novels and a collection of stories, establishing an incredible oeuvre of criticism and observation regarding modern American life and culture. His innate understanding of the human condition renders his work haunting, hilarious, and everything in between.

McGlue: A Novella (Paperback)

By Ottessa Moshfegh

$15.00

ISBN: 9780525522768

Availability: Not currently on our shelves, but available in 1-3 days.

Published: Penguin Books - January 8th, 2019

A sailor sobering up in the hold of a ship, suffering from a head injury and the DTs and grappling with the possibility that he may have killed a man. Equal parts poetry and brutality, quick and succinct like a knife to the gut, leaving you long after to ponder the wound. I love this book.

The Power (Paperback)

By Naomi Alderman

$16.99

ISBN: 9780316547604

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Published: Back Bay Books - January 8th, 2019

This book turned out to be so much better, so much more than I had hoped for. Gripping, enchanting, thrilling and thought-provoking. An alternate history for our time.

Fox 8: A Story (Hardcover)

By George Saunders, Chelsea Cardinal (Illustrator)

$17.00

ISBN: 9781984818027

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Published: Random House - November 13th, 2018

A darkly comic fable in which a fox’s pack is endangered by the construction of a shopping mall, leading him to pen a letter to the “Yumans” asking them to explain their cruelty. Utterly delightful.

Friday Black (Paperback)

By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

$14.99

ISBN: 9781328911247

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Published: Mariner Books - October 23rd, 2018

A debut collection of stories from an absolute powerhouse of a young writer, Adjei-Brenyah puts American racism and consumerism under a microscope, then ties them to a chair and doesn’t pull a single punch. DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK.

City on Fire (Paperback)

By Garth Risk Hallberg

$17.00

ISBN: 9780804172950

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Published: Vintage - July 26th, 2016

City on Fire is a panoramic view of New York City in the 1970s.  The birth of punk rock, the heroin epidemic, the subsequent AIDS epidemic, the top-down corruption, growing unrest in the city and the disparity between those with and those without, all culminating in the city-wide blackout.  It follows the interwining and overlapping stories of a handful of diverse characters, from a teenage anarchist squatting in a run-down tenement to one of the wealthiest families in the city. Reminiscent of Bonfire of the Vanities, this novel goes a lot of different places and strikes a lot of different chords.  It's a big one (700-some odd pages) but well worth it.  

Milk and Money: A Parody (Paperback)

By Rudi Boor

$12.95

ISBN: 9781604339277

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Published: Cider Mill Press - September 24th, 2019

"[...] takes readers through a journey of the most beautiful moments in life and ruins them, because there is a certain divine comedy in lackluster internet poetry. This long-anticipated parody of the NYT #1 bestseller mMilk and Honey is divided into no chapters and offers no reral opportunity for personal growth, self-reflection, or deeper-thinking."