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Certain Dark Things

Certain Dark Things

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From Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic, comes Certain Dark Things, a pulse-pounding neo-noir that reimagines vampire lore.

Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo is mesmerized.

Atl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn't include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in.

Vampires, humans, cops, and criminals collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive? Or will the city devour them all?

COLD NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD

COLD NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD

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WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE TRANSLATION PRIZE


"A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance."--Kirkus Reviews


The Bell JarGood Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey's most beloved writers.


The narrator of Tezer Özlü's novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü's status as one of Turkey's most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.

Collected Poems (USED)

Collected Poems (USED)

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The poems of Edgar Bowers have been highly praised since his first book, The Form of Loss, appeared in 1956. Now, in this gathering of forty years' work, one can see that Bowers arrived almost fully formed as the major poet he has continued to be. This volume contains, in addition to the contents of earlier books, a substantial amount of new work, all of it dazzling in its elegant verse-making and precise emotional discharge.
CONFESSIONS OF A BOOKSELLER

CONFESSIONS OF A BOOKSELLER

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One cozy, funny year with a Scottish used bookseller as he stays afloat while managing staff, customers, and life in the village of Wigtown. This endearing world is the next best thing to visiting your favorite bookstore (shop cat not included).

Inside a Georgian townhouse on the Wigtown highroad, jammed with more than 100,000 books and a portly cat named Captain, Shaun Bythell manages the daily ups and downs of running Scotland's largest used bookshop with a sharp eye and even sharper wit. His account of one year behind the counter is something no book lover should miss.

Shaun copes with eccentric staff, tallies up the day's orders, drives to distant houses to buy private libraries, and meditates on the nature of life and independent bookstores ("There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you've been searching for, but with people too.").

Confessions of a Bookseller is a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books. It's for any reader looking for the kind of friend you meet in a bookstore.

Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto

Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto

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Few artists achieve fame and fortune, but that doesn't mean your creative life can't flourish. Writer, illustrator, zinemaker, and playwright Ayun Halliday interviewed dozens of creative people and shared her own experiences to produce this rallying cry for the "small potato"--someone whose focus is making cool, meaningful work and living a creative life rather than achieving wealth or celebrity. Sections range from the practice of artmaking to wrangling self-doubt to DIY marketing and self-promotion. Along the way, Halliday shows that your art can bring you satisfaction, success, community, and a modest income--without losing sight of your reasons for doing it in the first place. Want to amp up your creativity with weird, juicy activities? Check out the Creative, Not Famous Activity Book, a standalone companion workbook and journal for all flavors of creators.
CROOKED HALLELUJAH

CROOKED HALLELUJAH

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"A book that you want to share with everyone you know and one that you are desperate to keep in your own possession. A masterful debut and a new and thrilling voice for readers across the globe." --Sarah Jessica Parker, on Instagram

It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine--a mixed-blood Cherokee woman-- and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma's Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn't easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world--of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados--intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.

Crooked Hallelujah

Crooked Hallelujah

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"A book that you want to share with everyone you know and one that you are desperate to keep in your own possession. A masterful debut and a new and thrilling voice for readers across the globe." --Sarah Jessica Parker, on Instagram

It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine--a mixed-blood Cherokee woman-- and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma's Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn't easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world--of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados--intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American--"in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself" (NPR). - CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Dayswork: A Novel

Dayswork: A Novel

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In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers--among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell--whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD:

DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD:

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Dirge for an Imaginary World from Matthew Buckley Smith is the winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award, selected by Andrew Hudgins. These are poems of breathtaking craftsmanship that find inspiration in the simplicity of the quotidian, or the perplexity of the grand. Smith is equally at ease musing about Neanderthals or God as he is with a ballet exam or highway medians. These poems of personal and universal introspection are filled with grace, and sparkle with abundant intelligence and wit. This masterful debut collection is an event to celebrate.

PRAISE FOR DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD:

Wildness and precision and passion balanced with wit-there are the hallmarks of Matthew Buckley Smith's superb Dirge for an Imaginary World. In subjects great ("For the Neanderthals") and small made great ("For the College Football Mascots"), the comic is rich with serious intent and gravity lightened with discerning wit. But only a poet who lifts heavy and unwieldy subjects-death, lost love, the absence of god-knows the imperatives of graceful balance.
- Andrew Hudgins (Judge, 2011 Able Muse Book Award)

In this deeply impressive debut volume of poetry, Dirge for an Imaginary World, Matthew Buckley Smith delivers a remarkable range of deft formal schemes, temporal movements, and varied settings. We encounter sonnets, couplets, quatrains, Sapphics, sestets and so forth written with a slick, delightful merging of technical expertise and smooth contemporary rhythms. The range of subjects is equally and as charmingly eclectic, from Neanderthals, Dante, Vermeer, for instance, to College Football Mascots, Highway Mediums, and Spring Ballet Exams. Mental and linguistic agility generously challenge the reader in poem after poem.
- Greg Williamson (from the "Foreword")

"If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst," wrote Thomas Hardy, whose spirit moves through the fine poems of Matthew Buckley Smith's debut collection. Like his blast-beruffled predecessor, Smith braves a clear-eyed look at our fallen world, mourning in elegantly precise language the sorrows inherent in "set(ting) out to map a promised land/ Out of reach and always just at hand," but also wishing great mercy upon us travelers failed and failing. These are poems full of both reckoning and grace, made all the more beautiful for their humane wisdom. Dirge for an Imaginary World is immensely impressive.
- Carrie Jerrell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Matthew Buckley Smith was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MFA in poetry at the Johns Hopkins University. His poems have appeared, or will soon appear in various magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, The Alabama Literary Review, Think Journal, and Best American Poetry 2011. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Joanna.