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FICTION |
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Sweeping Up Glass
by Carolyn Wall
Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, this first novel by Carolyn Wall is profoundly moving and impossible to read dry-eyed, with one thrilling sequence after another going off like a chain of firecrackers, not to mention plenty of surprises and reversals, subtle set-ups with genuine payoffs, dozens of delightful secondary characters, (Junk Hanley, Love Alice, Booger Phelps, Wing Harris) and a brave, honest woman at the heart of the story like Olivia Harker Cross that you love passionately and worry about until the last page. Sweeping up glass is a dangerous business. Even if your aren't the one who broke it, you can still get cut.
--- Nick
Paperback • Fiction • $14.00
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The Jewish Husband
by Lia Levi
This short, prize-winning novel by Lea Levi is a heartbreaking tour-de-force about a literature professor who needs to confess what happened thirty years ago in 1938, when his Jewish religion, always so half-hearted and perfunctory, suddenly became a one-way ticket to hell. Worst of all, because he is a Jew, his six-year-old son, Michele, the love of his father's life, won't be allowed to go to the best schools. Unless something is done... Told as an honest man's confession, with a blunt candor in the language and a quiet urgency of tone, Levi's novel builds subtly to it's quietly devastating end. Yet it's such a clean, solid story and so well written, the sadness is endurable and the beauty is luminous.
--- Nick
Paperback • Fiction • $15.00
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jeab Rhys
Rhys' last novel re-imagines the first Mrs. Rochester. Rhys writes the Creole madwoman Bronte kept locked up and loosed only as a force of insane destruction, not as the dark witch in the perfect white faerie tale, but as an actual, angry woman, from a place very much like the place from which Rhys herself came, as a woman very much as Rhys herself was; misused, volatile, exiled and or always escaping, frustrated by the misogyny and limitations of her time and place, painfully, tragically self aware but powerless, to control her own fate.
--- Brad
Paperback • Fiction • $13.95
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That Mad Ache
by Françoise Sagan
Translation by Douglas R. Hofstadter
One side is That Mad Ache, a fresh translation of the French novel, La Chamade, written by Francoise Sagan, whose novel Bonjour, Tristesse became an international sensation when the author was 19. Flip the book over and the other side is Translator, Trader, a brilliant, one hundred-page essay on the controversial art of translation by the translator himself, who is none other than Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning genius who created Godel, Escher, Bach. Sagan's novel is a witty, ironic dissection of upper class French lovers, gracefully baring the souls of her characters and watching them misunderstand each other. Lucile is the aimless, thirty year-old lover of Charles, twenty years her senior. She sits next to a gloomy young man she doesn't much like at a high society dinner, and together the two cause a scandal by a tactless burst of laughter. From there it's a labyrinthine journey into the human heart, in Hofstadter's fresh, invigorating new translation.
--- Nick
Paperback • Fiction • $14.95
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My Life in France
by Julia Child & Alex Prud'Homme
On a recent trip to Washington, D.C. I made a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Ensconced in the bowels of this building is the only monument I just had to see. Upon her return to California in 2001, Julia Child donated her kitchen to the Smithsonian and oversaw its installation. It is arranged in the museum just as it was in her home.
While visiting the exhibit I heard several children ask their parents just who Julia Child was. One mother responded that Julia was like the Food Network star of her day. I smiled at the analogy, but part of me was saddened that an entire generation of could-be foodies wouldn't know Julia.
Though we never met, I feel as though I've experienced Julia's warmth first-hand through her new memoir, published posthumously by her nephew Alex Prud'homme. My Life in France is Julia's open love letter to life. In it, we learn about the early years of her marriage to OSS colleague Paul Child, and her epiphanic first meal in France. We learn to see and love France as Julia does and we stand shoulder to shoulder with her as she confronts the male-dominated kitchens of the time. We toil with her on the manuscript for the now-classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And we eat' really eat, as we read her perfect recollections of perfect meals eaten years earlier.
I spent about an hour at Julia's kitchen in the Smithsonian, looking through her personal cookbook collection and admiring her knives. But when we open My Life in France, we get to know the real, passionate, quirky woman behind the icon. This summer, do yourself a favor. Sit down, pour yourself a glass of wine, and get to know Julia.
---Stesha
Paperback • Food Essay • $7.99
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The Soloist
by Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a successful columnist for the L. A. Times who discovers a homeless black man playing a violin with only two strings near the statue of Beethoven in downtown Los Angeles. This particular homeless madman, however, attended Julliard and was considered by his teachers to be a musical genius.
That was thirty years ago. Now he's Nathaniel Ayers, crazy street bum, a former musical phenomenon who carries his life with him in a shopping cart and fills the tunnels with classical music.
Lopez becomes obsessed with the homeless musician, and this brisk, heartwarming memoir recounts his struggle to get Nathaniel off the drug-riddled, rat-infested streets into safe housing. His attempts, as a reporter and as a friend, to do the right thing create a book so full of the spirit of compassion that when it's not laugh-out-loud funny you'll be wiping your eyes. It's a page-turning tale of two very different men, with two very different definitions of happiness, bound fiercely together by friendship.
---Nick
Paperback • Biography • $15.00
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NONFICTION |
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The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam
In 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of "The Best and the Brightest," his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book's title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. "It is often misused," he wrote, "failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended."
Halberstam died last year, but were he still around, I suspect he would be speaking up, loudly, right about now. As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, "the best and the brightest" has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it's time for Beltway reading groups to move on from "Team of Rivals" to Halberstam.
(excerpted from Frank Rich column, NYT, Dec. 7, 2008)
This book's the next best thing to Randolph Bourne's "War on the Intellectuals."
---Milt
Paperback • U.S. History & Politics • $16.95
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Proust and the Squid
by Maryanne Wolf
This is a book full of valuable insights into how the reading brain works, and more importantly what happens when it goes astray. Full of great quotes about reading, as well as Wolf's concern for the fate of reading in this digital age. An essential book for all those who care about reading.
---Jay
Paperback • Neuroscience • $14.95
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Proust Was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
This book examines how eight artists anticipated revelations in neuroscience. It is a valiant effort to bridge the cultural gap between the sciences and the humanities, to reevaluate the place if the aesthetic in scientific discovery.
---Jodie
Paperback • Neuroscience • $14.95
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Books By and About President Obama |
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Used Books |
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Holiday Collection
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