Gregorius ($0.88), by Bengt Ohlsson, Silvester Mazzarella (Translator)Book Description
Bengt Ohlsson, one of Sweden’s most successful young writers, has responded to the classic Doctor Glas with Gregorius, which is the voice of Pastor Gregorius over the course of what could be his last and fateful summer. Gregorius is a rancorous, malodorous, and unattractive figure married to a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. But his sense of his own mortality, of his personal inadequacy, and his tenuous hold on happiness are uniquely absorbing and haunting. It is a compelling study of loneliness, longing, and the nature of love, the desires that bring people together and the fears that keep them apart.
The Handmaid's Tale ($3.95), by Margaret AtwoodBook Description
The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood first published in 1985. The novel explores themes of women in subjugation, and the various means by which they gain agency, against a backdrop of the establishment of a totalitarian theocratic state. Dress Codes play a key role in imposing social control within the new society.
The novel is often studied by high school and college students.The American Library Association lists it in "10 Most Challenged Books of 1999" and as number 37 on the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000" due to many complaints from parents of pupils regarding the novel's anti-religious content and sexual references.
The Handmaid's Tale won the Governor General's Award for 1985 and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. It has been adapted several times into performance works.
Angle of Repose ($3.95), by Wallace Stegner, was selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century, winning the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971. Another of his novels, All the Little Live Things, is also $3.95.Book Description
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.
On the Road ($3.95), by JACK KEROUACBook Description
Kerouac's quintessential novel of America and the Beat GenerationOn the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired every generation since its initial publication more than forty years ago.
Comfort Food ($4.45), by Kate JacobsBook Description
Shortly before turning the big 5-0, boisterous party planner and Cooking with Gusto! personality Augusta "Gus" Simpson finds herself planning a birthday party she'd rather not -- her own. She's getting tired of being the hostess, the mother hen, the woman who has to plan her own birthday party. What she needs is time on her own with enough distance to give her loved ones the ingredients to put together successful lives without her. Assisted by a handsome up-and-coming chef, Oliver, Gus invites a select group to take an on-air cooking class. But instead of just preaching to the foodie masses, she will teach regular people how to make rich, sensuous meals-real people making real food. Gus decides to bring a vibrant cast of friends and family on the program: Sabrina, her fickle daughter; Troy, Sabrina's ex-husband; Anna, Gus's timid neighbor; and Carmen, Gus's pompous and beautiful competitor at the Cooking Channel. And when she begins to have more than collegial feelings for her sous-chef, Gus realizes that she might be able to rejuvenate not just her professional life, but her personal life as well....
The Konkans ($1.36), by Tony D'SouzaBook Description
Francisco D’Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son—all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the ÒJews of India,Ó the Konkans kneeled before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s sword and before Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics. In 1973 Francisco’s Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot and speaks little. But his mother, who served in the Peace Corps in India, and his uncle Sam (aka Samuel Erasmus D’Sai) are passionate raconteurs who do their best to preserve the family’s Konkan heritage. Friends, allies, and eventually lovers, Sam and Denise feed Francisco’s imagination with proud visions of India and Konkan history.
Filled with romance, comedy, and masterful storytelling, The Konkans leaves us surprised by what secrets history may hold for us if only we wonder enough to look.
The Unpossessed City ($2.54), by Jon FasmanBook Description
In this taut, atmospheric novel by the author of The New York Times bestseller The Geographer's Library, a young American finds himself adrift in Russia amid murderous bureaucrats, Central Asian mobsters, and a conspiracy to sell Soviet bioweapons to the highest bidder.Jim Vilatzer was going nowhere-working in his parents' restaurant, sleeping in his childhood bedroom-until he ran up gambling debts that forced him to go somewhere far away-fast. He uses his Russian-language skills (learned from his emigre grandparents) to cadge a job in Moscow finding and interviewing survivors of the Gulag. At first, he only finds that they are well hidden and leery of sharing their horrific stories, but he also discovers that he's falling in love with their homeland. He is intoxicated by Moscow's brooding, ironic atmosphere, its vast reservoir of entrepreneurial energy, its otherworldly churches and majestic subways. On any given day, petty indignities are more than offset by random acts of kindness.Jim's taste for gambling is satisfied merely by living in a city that teems with risk and promise. So he blithely accepts a big win when a chance meeting with a lovely aspiring actress leads not only to romance but also to her grandfather, a concentration camp survivor who does actually want to share his story. Soon Jim is on a roll, scoring interviews with four other survivors in as many days, learning harrowing and fascinating things about bygone atrocities and feeling like he has finally found where he belongs.But his apparent success has earned him the attention of Russia's Interior Ministry and the CIA. Jim has become an unwitting cog in a scheme to spirit Soviet scientists and their deadly secrets out of Russia and into the hands of the highest bidder. Pursued ruthlessly by both sides, he must flee again, this time to the lawless border country, where an economist-cum- mobster is preparing to peddle the world's most dangerous technologies to whichever terrorists can muster the cash first.
Like Donna Leon's novels of Venice or John Burdett's Bangkok series, The Unpossessed City makes of its setting an intricate, irresistible character. With taut, ingenious plotting and incisive prose, Fasman engages our most visceral fears and throws brilliant light on our most primal drives-to feel that we belong, to find love, to become better than we are.
Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist ($3.51), by Marisa HandlerBook Description
The most high-minded excuse for doing nothing is that the means with which to do it or the company you'd keep are flawed, the justification that you're keeping your hands clean (which is another way to say that you'll save only yourself). There are unambiguous realities in this book - the reality of poverty and of exploitation - but every situation still requires a tightrope-walker's balancing act: of pragmatism and idealism, of solidarity and independent-mindedness, of purposefulness and flexibility. And this is where the book becomes more than a conventional tale of an activist's evolution: spirituality, eventually in the clear form of Buddhism, enters in, and Buddhism itself offers the nonattachment, the recognition of ephemerality and the need to let go, the sense of life as an ever-moving river, that helps Marisa make sense out of all that she witnesses and does. At a very young age, she has gone very far. This book is an invitation to the rest of us to keep going.
The Stone Diaries ($3.74), by Carol ShieldsBook Description
In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize?winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe EditionONE OF THE MOST successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life-from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.
A Family Daughter ($2.28), by Maile MeloyBook Description
Maile Meloy's debut novel, Liars and Saints, captured the hearts of readers and critics alike. Now Meloy returns with a novel even more dazzling and unexpected than her first. Brilliantly entertaining, A Family Daughter might also be the most insightful novel about families and love that you will read this year.
It's 1979, and seven-year-old Abby, the youngest member of the close-knit Santerre family, is trapped indoors with the chicken pox during a heat wave. The events set in motion that summer will span decades and continents, change the Santerres forever, and surprise and amaze anyone who loved Meloy's Liars and Saints.
A rich, full novel about passion and desire, fear and betrayal, A Family Daughter illuminates both the joys and complications of contemporary life, and the relationship between truth and fiction. For everyone who has yet to meet the Santerres, an unmatched pleasure awaits.
Red Is for Remembrance ($2.30), by Laurie Faria StolarzBook Description
I know you're alone . . . Shattered by her boyfriend's tragic death, Stacey is struggling in her first year of college, hoping that somehow, somewhere, Jacob is still alive. Now her nightmares are back, haunted by ghosts and misery. Casting healing spells brings Stacey closer to Porsha-a troubled girl who's also dreaming of death-and to a strange boy whose life is in danger. To save him, it'll take all the strength and magic they've got. And maybe even cost them their lives.
Woman in Red ($1.70), by Eileen GoudgeBook Description
The stories of two generations intertwine in this tale, set on an island in the Pacific Northwest, that revolves around a mysterious portrait.
A powerful story of love and redemption and what one woman will do to overcome the buried secrets of her past. It’s a tale that weaves the past with the present, revealing a forbidden wartime romance and from which we come to know the story behind the “woman in red.”
