Second Saturday Book Club

Second Saturday Book Club

Meets at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza on the 2nd Saturday of every month at 10:30 AM. and discusses literary fiction ranging from classics to contemporary.

Call store for details.
Books Inc. in Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness
San Francisco
415-776-1111

 

Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International) By James Baldwin Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780375701870
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Vintage - September 12th, 2013

July 2023 Second Saturday Book Club Pick at Books Inc. Opera Plaza 


The Magician: A Novel By Colm Toibin Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9781476785097
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Scribner - September 20th, 2022

June 2023 Second Saturday Book Club pick at Books Inc. Opera Plaza 


Staff Pick Badge
Harlem Shuffle: A Novel By Colson Whitehead Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780525567271
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Anchor - August 9th, 2022

May 2023 Pick


Light Lifting By Alexander MacLeod Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781897231944
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Biblioasis - April 5th, 2011

April 2023 Pick 


Daisy Miller By Henry James, David Lodge (Editor), David Lodge (Introduction by), David Lodge (Notes by), Philip Horne (Editor) Cover Image
By Henry James, David Lodge (Editor), David Lodge (Introduction by), David Lodge (Notes by), Philip Horne (Editor)
$8.00
ISBN: 9780141441344
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Penguin Classics - December 18th, 2007

December 2022 Selection

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

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 Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9780060837020
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Published: Harper Perennial Modern Classics - August 2nd, 2005

November 2022 Selection

A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: young, brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's neurosis becomes completely understandable and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such thorough exploration of the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche - and the profound collective loneliness that modern society has yet to find a solution for - is an extraordinary accomplishment, and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

This P.S. edition features extra insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.


Oh William!: A Novel By Elizabeth Strout Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780812989441
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Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks - April 26th, 2022

October 2022 Selection

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they've come from--and what they've left behind.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House


Staff Pick Badge
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel By Anthony Marra Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780770436421
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Hogarth - February 4th, 2014

September 2022 Selection 

New York Times Notable Book of the Year
In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader's guide and bonus content from the author.

 

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
New York Times
 Bestseller
National Book Award Longlist Selection
Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year
Washington Post Bestseller
NPR Bestseller
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Winner

An ALA Notable Book of the Year
A #1 Indie Pick

An Amazon.com Best Book of the Year
Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
Library Journal Top 10 Book of the Year
NBCC John Leonard Prize Winner

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by:
New York Magazine * Chicago Tribune * Kansas City Star * GQ * NPR * Christian Science Monitor * San Francisco Chronicle * Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Brilliant."
--New York Times

"A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles....Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, a story about desperate lives in a remote land that will quickly seem impossibly close and important....I haven't been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Extraordinary....a 21st century War and Peace....Marra seems to derive his astral calm in the face of catastrophe directly from Tolstoy."
--Madison Smartt Bell, New York Times Book Review

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless....[Marra is] a lover not a fighter, a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything Is Illuminated."
--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Over and over again, this is an examination of the ways in which many broken pieces come together to make a new whole. In exquisite imagery, Marra tends carefully to the twisted strands of grace and tragedy....Everything in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena...is dignified with a hoping, aching heartbeat."
--Ramona Ausubel, San Francisco Chronicle

"The most moving book I've read in years. By writing so beautifully about a tiny village in Chechnya, this 28-year-old Washington native has produced a timeless tragedy about the victims of war."
--Ron Charles, Washingtonian

"A powerful tale....The moment Akhmed walks into the hospital with Havaa...rivals anything Michael Ondaatje has written in its emotional force....There are many reasons to read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena....to marvel at the lack of fear in a writer so young. To read a book that can bring tears to your eyes and force laughter from your lungs....But the one I kept returning to, the best reason to read this novel, is that this story reminds us how senseless killing often wrenches kindness through extreme circumstances."
--John Freeman, Boston Globe

"[ A Constellation of Vital Phenomena] pulls together blown-out bits of a world turned inside-out to create a brutal form of beauty from chaos....its prose is also ruefully funny in places and littered throughout with dazzling poetry."
--John Barron, Chicago Tribune

"Amazing...brilliant...one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time....Though the lives lived in this novel can seem unbearable, what Anthony Marra has done is to diligently describe them in passionate, extraordinary prose."
--Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings, for NPR

"With remarkable pathos and a surprising amount of humor, Marra keeps the focus on the relationships, struggles, and tiny triumphs of an unforgettable group of characters....Marra creates a specific and riveting world around his characters, expertly revealing the unexpected connections among them....this novel, full of humanity and hope, ultimately leaves you uplifted. Constellation deserves to be on the short list for every major award. It's an absolute masterpiece."
--Sarah Jessica Parker for Entertainment Weekly

"Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully....his storytelling impulses are fed by wellsprings of generosity....[the] ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Excellent."
--New York

"My favorite book of the year....Many people can write beautifully, but few manage to create a whole that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. Marra does this in spades. It is a brilliant book."
--Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto

"Remarkable and breathtaking...a spellbinding elegy for an overlooked land engulfed by an oft forgotten war....Marra conjures fragile and heartfelt characters whose fates interrogate the very underpinnings of love and sacrifice."
--Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son

"Marra elegantly slides across time and perspective, mastering an omniscient voice that reveals each character's future, present, and past....Marra's characters are constantly aware of the transience of things, the frailty of their lives. This leads both to a resolve and poignancy that pervades the novel, as each character reckons with the inevitable."
--The Rumpus

"Extraordinary...Marra collapses time, sliding between 1996 and 2004 while also detailing events in a future yet to arrive, giving his searing novel an eerie, prophetic aura. All of the characters are closely tied together in ways that Marra takes his time revealing, even as he beautifully renders the way we long to connect and the lengths we will go to endure."
--Booklist (starred review)

"Stunning, dazzlingly good....Marra takes us on an extraordinary journey into a world little known to many of us. He slowly unfolds his story with a balanced sureness and subtlety rare in a first novel, with a rhythm that is graceful and welcoming....beautiful, heartbreaking and filled to the brim with the vital 'human matter' of life. It may be the best new novel you'll read this year."
-- Shelf Awareness (starred)

"[A]n authentic, heartbreaking tale of intertwining relationships during wartime....As he shifts in time through the years of the two Chechen wars, Marra confidently weaves those plots together, and several more besides, giving each character a rich backstory that intersects, often years down the line, with the others....[T]he novel's tone remains optimistic, and its characters retain vast depths of humanity (and even humor) in spite of their bleak circumstances."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"[Marra's] ambitions are Tolstoyan, and he brings stylistic virtuosity to the prose, giving us lyric passages saturated with intelligence and psychological insight. By the end of the novel, we love the characters and grieve with them, and rejoice with the 'immense, spinning joy' that is the novel's final note."
--2012 Whiting Writers' Awards, Selection Committee

"A complex debut...[Marra writes] with elegant details about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Powerful, convincing, beautifully realized--it's hard to believe that A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a first novel. Anthony Marra is a writer to watch and savor."
--T.C. Boyle, New York Times bestselling author of When the Killing's Done and The Women

 

"Both devastating and transcendent. The story of eight people (and a nation) navigating two brutal wars, it's a novel of loyalty and sacrifice and enduring love. You'll finish it transformed."
--Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

"Anthony Marra's fine debut novel reaches tenderly, unflinchingly, into the center of the Chechnyan conflict of the late 1990s. This tale has its roots in shocking brutality, and its beauty in the human redemption that can come from unaccountable human kindness. Whimsies of circumstance, fate, and the ties of family and faith serve to guide the reader and the characters through a richly layered and deeply beautiful journey."
--Vincent Lam, author of The Headmaster's Wager


The Master: A Novel By Colm Toibin Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780743250412
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Scribner - May 3rd, 2005

August 2022 Selection

"Colm Tóibín's beautiful, subtle illumination of Henry James's inner life" (The New York Times) captures the loneliness and hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably fail those he tried to love.

Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. With stunningly resonant prose, "The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, moving, and very beautiful" ( The New York Times Book Review). The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.


The Moor's Account By Laila Lalami Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780804170628
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Published: Vintage - August 18th, 2015

May 2022 Selection:

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST  A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America—this "stunning [book] sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history” (Huffington Post).

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the invented memoirs Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.


Staff Pick Badge
Never Let Me Go (Vintage International) By Kazuo Ishiguro Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9781400078776
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Vintage - March 14th, 2006

April 2022 Selection: 

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER  From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.


Sing to It: Stories By Amy Hempel Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781982109127
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Scribner - November 12th, 2019

January 2022 Selection:

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal).

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction.
These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.


The Elegance of the Hedgehog By Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (Translator) Cover Image
By Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (Translator)
$17.00
ISBN: 9781933372600
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Published: Europa Editions - September 2nd, 2008

March 2022 Selection: 

The international bestseller that has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a moving, funny, atmospheric novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us. 

We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. Renée, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.  

Then there's Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor. Talented, precocious, and startingly lucid, she has come to terms with life's seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her.


Vandover and the Brute By Frank Norris Cover Image
$39.90
ISBN: 9783734046421
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Outlook Verlag - September 21st, 2018

December 2021 Selection: Written circa 1894-95 but published posthumously in 1914, Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute presents an unflinching portrait of unconventional sexuality, moral dissolution, and physical degeneration. In the setting of turn-of-the-century San Francisco depicted in Vandover, disaster encompasses far more than the vivid accounts of shipwreck or earthquake that appear in the novel. The slow wasting away of characters who contract syphilis, the suicide of a young girl, and the murder of a man clinging to a lifeboat fascinate readers today as much as they did a century ago, when this scandalous novel was first published. The most complete wreck is Vandover himself, whose artistic talents and constitution collapse after orgies of drink and sexual abandon.

Russ Castronovo’s new edition gathers historical materials on literary naturalism, gender and criminality, and the visual culture of the late nineteenth century.


Washington Square By Philip Horne (Editor), Henry James, Martha Banta (Editor), Martha Banta (Introduction by), Martha Banta (Notes by) Cover Image
By Philip Horne (Editor), Henry James, Martha Banta (Editor), Martha Banta (Introduction by), Martha Banta (Notes by)
$9.00
ISBN: 9780141441368
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Penguin Classics - December 18th, 2007

February 2022 Selection: 

A masterful novel of New York society by a champion of literary realism
When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father's love and approval and her passion for the first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James's masterly novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.

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 Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a  Very Famous Family By Joshua Cohen Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9781681376073
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: New York Review Books - June 22nd, 2021

November 2021 Selection: Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I've read in what feels like forever. --Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian--but not an historian of the Jews--is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.


Staff Pick Badge
The Nickel Boys: A Novel By Colson Whitehead Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780345804341
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Anchor - June 30th, 2020

July 2021 Selection:

Staff Review: "I knew this would be an emotional ride, but man did Colson Whitehead compose a twist that was a gut punch. Just stunning."

— Elena - Books Inc. in Sf

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

 

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

 

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and "should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best (Entertainment Weekly).


The Fountain Overflows By Rebecca West, Andrea Barrett (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Rebecca West, Andrea Barrett (Introduction by)
$24.95
ISBN: 9781590170342
Availability: Backordered-Could Take 2-4Weeks
Published: NYRB Classics - December 31st, 2002

October 2021 Selection:The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.

In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.


Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780525657606
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Knopf - July 21st, 2020

June 2021 Selection:

In 1580's England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this "exceptional historical novel" ( The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.


The Quiet American: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) By Graham Greene, Robert Stone (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Graham Greene, Robert Stone (Introduction by)
$18.00
ISBN: 9780143039020
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Penguin Classics - August 31st, 2004

May 2021 Selection:

Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused, Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous Quiet American of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.

As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler's beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

Originally published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Robert Stone.

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.


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Warlight (Vintage International) By Michael Ondaatje Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9780525562962
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Vintage - April 2nd, 2019

April 2021 Selection:

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.

 

In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.


Staff Pick Badge
There There By Tommy Orange Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780525436140
Availability: In Stock Now - Click Title to See Store Inventory. Please allow up to 48-hours for Curbside Pickup orders to be processed.
Published: Vintage - May 7th, 2019

March 2020 Selection:

National Bestseller

One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize
Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of an American Book Award

Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

"Powerful. . . . There There has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it's a revelation." -- The New York Times

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.


The Complete Stories (FSG Classics) By Flannery O'Connor, Robert Giroux (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Flannery O'Connor, Robert Giroux (Introduction by)
$20.00
ISBN: 9780374515362
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Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - January 1st, 1971

November 2019 Selection: The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime - Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium, " in 1946 while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. This Book, which is arranged chronologically, shows that her last story, "Judgement Day, " sent to her publisher shortly before her death, is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these reveal an amazing lively, imaginative, and penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction written this century. Also included is an introduction and memoir by O'Connor's long-time editor, Robert Giroux.


Martin Eden By Jack London, Andrew Sinclair (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Jack London, Andrew Sinclair (Introduction by)
$18.00
ISBN: 9780140187724
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Published: Penguin Classics - February 1st, 1994

Fahrenheit 451: A Novel By Ray Bradbury Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9781451673319
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Published: Simon & Schuster - January 10th, 2012

January 2020 Selection: Sixty years after its originally publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

 

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.


Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) By Gabriel García Márquez Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780307389732
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Published: Vintage - October 5th, 2007

October 2019 Selection: "A love story of astonishing power." - Newsweek

The International Bestseller and modern literary classic by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.