Sam's favorites

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Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel By Venita Blackburn Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780374602826
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: MCD - January 23rd, 2024

The most exciting book I've read in months! Grief is the engine of this novel's exhilarating prose and the capaciousness of its vision, which weaves multiple threads that include a grieving writer pretended via texts to be her brother, her own dystopian work of sci-fi, a bit of fan fiction, and a collective narrating we--characters from the protagonist's novel--trying to understand life and death.--Sam


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The MANIAC By Benjamin Labatut Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593654477
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin Press - October 3rd, 2023

The greatest fear of the beyond-brilliant mathematician John von Neumann—a major figure in a dizzying number of fields including quantum physics and artificial intelligence—was that he would be forgotten. I would have been one of many people with no idea who he was had it not been for Benjamin Labatut's engrossing novel. A work that largely takes the form of an oral history from the point of view of colleagues, friends, foes and lovers, it’s a work that ambitiously tackles not only his life but grand questions about the relationship between reason and madness, about the ways that logic, taken to its extremes, ultimately ends in insanity.


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Terrace Story: A Novel By Hilary Leichter Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780063265813
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ecco - August 29th, 2023

There's a character in Terrace Story who can stretch and squeeze space, and you might say the same of Hilary Leichter herself, who dives into the particulars of the personal throughout multiple universes. This book is playful and powerful; it made me laugh, broke my heart and stitched it back together.


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Y/N: A Novel By Esther Yi Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781662601538
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Astra House - March 21st, 2023

Y/N is strange and elegant, with an addictively esoteric edge to almost every sentence. I knew this novel was for me in the first few pages, when a friend tells the narrator a concert will change her life. "I don't want my life to change," she responds. "I want my life to stay in one place and be one thing as intensely as possible." She ends up attending anyway and becomes obsessed with one of the band members, Moon. This book is full of mind-bending metaphors, cryptic philosophical conversations and a narrator who hovers between over-intellectual awareness and absolute devotion.


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Mobility By Lydia Kiesling Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9781638930563
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Crooked Media Reads - August 1st, 2023

A bildungsroman for the anthropocene, Mobility follows Bunny, the daughter of a diplomat, from mostly-oblivious teendom in Azerbaijan to adulthood in Texas, where she falls into PR work for an oil company (but mostly for the clean energy side! she relentlessly protests). This novel masterfully grapples with an individual life amidst global geopolitics: the disconnect between the truths we acknowledge yet ignore, the seemingly small choices we make and the mind-boggling, earth-changing consequences that follow. I was hooked.


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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us By Rachel Aviv Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781250872913
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Picador - September 19th, 2023

Couldn't put this book down! Rachel Aviv devotes each chapter to people who, in different ways, have become entangled in the complicated world of psychiatry--including herself. Just when you think you know where she's headed, she reveals a new surprising facet of the story. There are no simple answers to questions of diagnosis and treatment, or even what it means to be mentally ill. Her focus instead is on real, particular, often messy lives.


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Minor Detail By Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette (Translated by) Cover Image
By Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette (Translated by)
$15.95
ISBN: 9780811229074
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: New Directions - May 26th, 2020

A tale told in two parts--the first methodical and cruel, the second obsessive and searching--this is a slim masterpiece of Palestinian exile.


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Cold Enough for Snow By Jessica Au Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9780811231558
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: New Directions - February 15th, 2022

Such a tender, deliberate, inquisitive novel about fundamental human relationships, particularl the curious distance of familial love, and on what terms we can bridge the gaps.


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A Heart So White (Vintage International) By Javier Marías, Jonathan Coe (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Javier Marías, Jonathan Coe (Introduction by)
$18.00
ISBN: 9780307950765
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage - March 26th, 2013

This is one of those novels that left me in awe from the very beginning, which starts with a literal bang. It's also one of those novels that you could open to just about any page and find yourself immediately drawn into the narrator's capacious and curious mind. Ostensibly about a translator, Juan, and his new marriage, it's about the mysterious lives of loved ones, about what is unsaid and what is compelled to be said, about relationships and secrets. "For the sake of love or its essence," he thinks at one point, "...one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past. In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you."


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Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World By Sasha Fletcher Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9781612199474
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Melville House - February 15th, 2022

This book blew me away! Ecstatically angry, furiously joyful and often hilarious, it's the most radical book you'll ever read about two people who just really, totally love each other (while reviewing some of history's darker moments, hoping they aren't blackbagged by the secret police, and wondering if/when the angels are coming).


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The Vegetarian: A Novel By Han Kang Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9781101906118
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Hogarth - August 23rd, 2016

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The President's Room By Ricardo Romero, Charlotte Coombe (Translator) Cover Image
By Ricardo Romero, Charlotte Coombe (Translator)
$13.95
ISBN: 9781999722722
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Charco Press - January 14th, 2020

I'm a sucker for a strange premise, and this book delivers: every home in this suburb in an unnamed country has a room prepared for the president, should the leader ever arrive. Spare and mysterious, I read this brief book in one enthralling sitting.


The Door (NYRB Classics) By Magda Szabo, Len Rix (Translated by), Ali Smith (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Magda Szabo, Len Rix (Translated by), Ali Smith (Introduction by)
$17.95
ISBN: 9781590177716
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: NYRB Classics - January 27th, 2015

The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories By Yukiko Motoya, Asa Yoneda (Translated by) Cover Image
By Yukiko Motoya, Asa Yoneda (Translated by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781593766788
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Soft Skull - November 6th, 2018

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Temporary (Emily Books) By Hilary Leichter Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566895668
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Coffee House Press - March 3rd, 2020

Capitalism and surrealism collide in this weird and sharp novel about a temp worker. It's a tale that includes a locket containing the talking ashes of a chairman, a pirate ship, an assassin, barnacles and eighteen boyfriends (each with their own purpose). Absurd and funny, devastating and moving. I am here for all of it.