The Book of Ruth

Author: Jane Hamilton

Category: Literary

Regular price: $15.20

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 07, 2024

Deal ends: December 07, 2024

Description:

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner: An “enthralling” novel of a woman trapped within a tragically dysfunctional family (Entertainment Weekly).   From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Excellent Lombards and A Map of the World, this is “an extraordinary story of a family’s disintegration [that] will be compared to Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres” (People). It follows Ruth Grey, a young woman in a tiny Illinois farm town, who has lost her father to World War II, and constantly faces her unhappy mother’s wrath—when she isn’t being ignored in favor of her math-prodigy brother. As Ruth navigates her lonely life, she strives to find happiness and pleasure where she can, but the world may conspire to defeat her.   “A sly and wistful, if harrowing, human comedy . . . [An] original voice in fiction and one well worth listening to.” —The Boston Sunday Globe   “Unforgettably, beat by beat, Hamilton maps the best and worst of the human heart and all the mysterious, uncharted country in between.” —Kirkus Reviews   “Hamilton’s story builds to a shocking crescendo. Her small-town characters are as appealingly offbeat and brushed with grace as any found in Alice Hoffman’s or Anne Tyler’s novels.” —Glamour

People Like Us

Author: Dominick Dunne

Category: Literary

Regular price: $10.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 07, 2024

Deal ends: December 07, 2024

Description:

Before they had Too Much Money, the inhabitants of Dominick Dunne’s glitzy, gossipy New York Times bestselling novels were People Like Us. The way journalist Gus Bailey tells it, old money is always preferred, but occasionally new money sneaks in–even where it is most unwelcome. After moving from Cincinnati, Elias and Ruby Renthal strike it even richer in New York, turning their millions into billions. It would be impolite for high society to refuse them now. Not to mention disadvantageous. As long as the market is strong, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about–except for those nasty secrets from the past. Scandal, anyone?

For Today I Am a Boy

Author: Kim Fu

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.78

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 06, 2024

Deal ends: December 06, 2024

Description:

A son of Chinese immigrants discovers his true self in a “sharply written debut . . . a coming-of-age tale for our time” (Seattle Times). Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Winner 2015 PEN/ Hemingway Award, Finalist Lambda Literary Award, Finalist Longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection for Spring 2014 A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize   At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name Juan Chaun, “powerful king.” To his parents, newly settled in small-town Ontario, he is the exalted only son in a sea of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his immigrant father’s dreams of Western masculinity. Peter and his sisters grow up in an airless house of order and obligation, though secrets and half-truths simmer beneath the surface. At the first opportunity, each of the girls lights out on her own. But for Peter, escape is not as simple as fleeing his parents’ home. Though his father crowned him “powerful king,” Peter knows otherwise. He knows he is really a girl. With the help of his far-flung sisters and the sympathetic souls he finds along the way, Peter inches ever closer to his own life, his own skin, in this darkly funny, emotionally acute, stunningly powerful debut.   “Sensitively wrought . . . “For Today I Am a Boy” is as much about the construction of self as the consequences of its unwitting destruction—and what happens when its acceptance seems as foreign as another country.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Subtle and controlled, with flashes of humor and warmth.” —Slate   “Keeps you reading. Told in snatches of memory that hurt so much they have the ring of truth.” —Bust

A Very German Christmas

Author:

Category: Literary

Regular price: $8.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 06, 2024

Deal ends: December 06, 2024

Description:

This collection of new and classic Christmas literature includes stories by Herman Hesse, Joseph Roth, The Brothers Grimm, and many others.   This collection brings together traditional and contemporary holiday stories from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. You'll find classic works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as more recent tales by writers like Heinrich Böll, Peter Stamm and Martin Suter. It also includes the first published English translation of Joseph Roth’s story “Christmas in Cochinchina.”   Enjoy Eine fröhliche Weihnachten?A Merry Christmas?made all the more festive with these literary treats redolent of candle-lit trees, St. Nikolaus, gingerbread, Gugelhopf and stollen cakes, all accompanied by plenty of schnapps.

The One-in-a-Million Boy

Author: Monica Wood

Category: Literary

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 06, 2024

Deal ends: December 06, 2024

Description:

The story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything at school? So says 104-year-old Ona to the 11-year-old boy who's been sent to help her out every Saturday morning. As he refills the bird feeders and tidies the garden shed, Ona tells him about her long life, from first love to second chances. Soon she's confessing secrets she has kept hidden for decades. One Saturday, the boy doesn't show up. Ona starts to think he's not so special after all, but then his father arrives on her doorstep, determined to finish his son's good deed. The boy's mother is not so far behind. Ona is set to discover that the world can surprise us at any age, and that sometimes sharing a loss is the only way to find ourselves again.   “Readers won’t be able to resist falling for Ona … The conclusion will leave them smiling through their tears.”—Shelf Awareness ?“Poignant … There is much to enjoy in this heartfelt tale of love, loss, and friendship.”—Express “A must-read book … Whimsical and bittersweet.”—Good Housekeeping

The Puttermesser Papers

Author: Cynthia Ozick

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 05, 2024

Deal ends: December 05, 2024

Description:

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times"A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review