Emily's Favorites

Emily wants to be friends with your dog.

The Lover By Marguerite Duras Cover Image
$15.00
ISBN: 9780375700521
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Pantheon - September 8th, 1998

This is probably (and when I say probably I really mean definitely) my favorite book of all time. Haunting, sparse, beautiful, The Lover chronicles the lifespan of an affair from its tumultuous beginning to its inevitable end. Somehow I always find myself coming back to this book. It is that first love you always remember, never quite get over.


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How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life By Ruth Goodman Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9781631492532
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Liveright - January 17th, 2017

Ruth Goodman is such a joy! Her ability to bring history to life is truly unmatched. In her work you will not find an endless list of dates and names and places, but instead an immersive dive into the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. As I read this book I couldn’t help but stop every few pages to tell my partner about a new interesting fact I’d just learned (did you know that folks who woke up at dawn instead of first light were called slugabeds? I didn’t!) Follow her on a journey into Tudor England and you will not regret it. -Emily


Blue Highways: A Journey into America By William Least Heat-Moon, Bill McKibben (Foreword by) Cover Image
$19.99
ISBN: 9780316353298
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books - October 19th, 1999

It seems so inadequate to call this just a travel book. Blue Highways is a meditation on loneliness, on America, on the kindness of strangers and the coldness of strangers. It's a book for the broken hearted, a siren's call to the open road and the antidote to that strange disease called restlessness. Quite simply it is beautiful and I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love it.


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The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living By Scott Nearing, Helen Nearing Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780805209709
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Schocken - January 3rd, 1990

The Good Life is THE Back-to-the-Land bible. During the Depression the Nearings became disillusioned with the wage labor economy and sought out an alternate way to live, buying a run down farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont and starting a life based on self-sufficiency, shared work and freedom from the 9-5. Their memoir of 60+ years of living off the land is as inspiring today as it was when it was first published.


Mrs. Caliban By Rachel Ingalls, Rivka Galchen (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Rachel Ingalls, Rivka Galchen (Introduction by)
$13.95
ISBN: 9780811226691
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: New Directions - November 28th, 2017

A beautiful love story about a woman who falls in love with a giant lizard man. Need I say more?


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Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night By Tiffany Francis-Baker, Tiffany Francis-Baker (Illustrator) Cover Image
$15.00
ISBN: 9781472964601
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Bloomsbury Wildlife - January 5th, 2021

Tiffany Francis' Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night is a beautiful blend of nature and travel writing taking the reader from Francis' home in rural England to Norway, the Black Forest, the Baltic sea and beyond to uncover the mysteries of the nocturnal world. Francis does a wonderful job exploring how the known and familiar becomes new and mysterious after dark and encourages us all to look at the world from a new perspective.


Machine: A Novel By Susan Steinberg Cover Image
$15.00
ISBN: 9781555978471
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Graywolf Press - August 20th, 2019

Susan Steinberg is one of THE BEST writers working today. Her first novel (she has three previous story collections that are also excellent) is a haunting and fragmented portrait of a group of teenagers following the death of a local girl. This book is filled with lines I found myself reading over and over. Let the words echo and fill the space around you.


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The Mercies By Kiran Millwood Hargrave Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780316529235
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books - February 23rd, 2021

The Mercies is one of the best novels I've read in years. Kiran Millwood Hargrave has an incredible talent for creating visceral scenes and sensations. She does everything from capture the smell of a sealskin coat, to permeating cold of an arctic winter to the stench of a body burning at the stake. Despite not sparing any gory details however this book is beautifully written and feels all too relevant to our times. 


The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown By Michael Patrick F. Smith Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781984881533
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Penguin Books - February 15th, 2022

Michael Patrick F. Smith’s memoir of working in the North Dakota oil fields during the 2013 boom is a quiet and thoughtful account of hard work, loneliness and the irresistible lure of a job well done--and in return, perhaps, a life well lived. This is not an expose of the oil business or a detailed explanation of how fracking works, but instead one man’s experience of a system that cares very little about the individuals within it and yet creates a sense of brotherhood found in few other places. If you’ve ever wondered what it is really like to live and work in a modern day boomtown this is the book for you.


At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life By Fenton Johnson Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780393541441
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - January 26th, 2021

Surrounded by Friends By Matthew Rohrer Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781940696034
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Wave Books - April 7th, 2015

"Every evening in the city is a deep pool of wine Everyone who lives in the city is drunk with it And cannot leave They are surrounded by friends"


Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems: Collected Poems & Selected Prose By Rosemary Tonks, Neil Astley (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Rosemary Tonks, Neil Astley (Introduction by)
$19.95
ISBN: 9781780373614
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Bloodaxe Books - May 26th, 2016

"Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one, For if you mix with the wrong people - And you yourself may be one of the wrong people - If you make love to the wrong person. In some old building with its fabric of dirt, As clouds of witchcraft, nitro-glycerine, and cake, Brush by (one autumn night) still green From our green sunsets...and then let hundreds pass, unlit, They will do you ferocious indelible harm! Far beyond anything you can imagine, jazzy sneerin one, And afterards you'll live in no man's land, You'll lose your identity, and never get yourself back, diablotin, It may have happened already, and as you read this... Ah, it has happened already. I remember, in an old building; Clouds which had cut themselves on a sharp winter sunset (With its smoking stove of frosts to keep it cold) went by, bleeding."


The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry By Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth (Introduction by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781640091979
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Counterpoint - May 14th, 2019

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (California Studies in Food and Culture #8) By Harvey Levenstein Cover Image
$41.94
ISBN: 9780520234406
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: University of California Press - May 30th, 2003

Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life By Gretchen Legler Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9781595349590
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Trinity University Press - February 15th, 2022

America Is Not the Heart: A Novel By Elaine Castillo Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780735222427
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin Books - April 2nd, 2019

The Witch Elm: A Novel By Tana French Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780735224643
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin Books - July 30th, 2019

Cassandra at the Wedding By Dorothy Baker, Deborah Eisenberg (Afterword by) Cover Image
By Dorothy Baker, Deborah Eisenberg (Afterword by)
$17.95
ISBN: 9781590176016
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: NYRB Classics - August 21st, 2012

On Ghosts By Elizabeth Robinson Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780984414260
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Solid Objects - August 31st, 2013

Towards Another Summer By Janet Frame Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9781582435824
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Counterpoint - March 23rd, 2010

Shantytown By César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translated by) Cover Image
By César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translated by)
$14.95
ISBN: 9780811219112
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: New Directions - November 20th, 2013

Saving the Season: A Cook's Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving: A Cookbook By Kevin West Cover Image
$40.00
ISBN: 9780307599483
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Knopf - June 25th, 2013

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia By Adrian Shirk Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781640093300
Availability: Backordered
Published: Counterpoint - March 15th, 2022