New Arrivals 1/26/2010

New books published this week.

 

Three Days Before the Shooting, by Ralph EllisonWhere I Must Go, by Angela JacksonJust Kids, by Patti SmithThe Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don LattinLenin's Brother, by Philip PomperBomb Power, by Gary WillsCutting for Stone, by Abraham VergheseThe Red Convertible, by Louise ErdrichWish Her Safe at Home, by Stephen BenatarThe Lost City of Z, by David GrannIt All Changed in an Instant: Six-Word MemoirsA.D. 381, by Charles Freeman Mrs. Lincoln, by Catherine Clinton

By Ralph Ellison, John Callahan, Adam Bradley
$39.95
ISBN-13: 9780375759536
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Modern Library, 01/01/2010
At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison's unfinished epic. Three Days Before the Shooting gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published.

Where I Must Go (Hardcover)

By Angela Jackson
$19.95
ISBN-13: 9780810151857
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Triquarterly, 09/01/2009
Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement. The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena's story includes a wide range of characters - black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson's narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.

Just Kids (Hardcover)

By Patti Smith
$21.50
ISBN-13: 9780066211312
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ecco, 01/01/2010
Smith's evocative, honest, and moving coming-of-age story reveals her extraordinary relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Part romance, part elegy, Just Kids is about friendship in the truest sense, and the artist's calling.

By Don Lattin
$19.95
ISBN-13: 9780061655937
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: HarperOne, 01/01/2010
Lattin examines the lives and times of four men--Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Andrew Weil, and Huston Smith--whose paths crossed in the 1960s at Harvard, and who consequently launched the mind, body, spirit movement.

By Philip Pomper
$19.95
ISBN-13: 9780393070798
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 01/01/2010
The gripping previously untold story of a terrorist leader whose death would catapult his brother--Vladimir Lenin--to revolution.

Bomb Power (Hardcover)

By Garry Wills
$21.95
ISBN-13: 9781594202407
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin Press HC, The, 01/01/2010
From Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills comes this groundbreaking examination of how the atomic bomb profoundly altered the nature of American democracy, and why we have been in a state of war alert ever since.

Cutting for Stone (Paperback)

By Abraham Verghese
$12.75
ISBN-13: 9780375714368
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 01/01/2010
A stunning debut novel from the author of My Own Country, Cutting for Stone offers an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, fathers and sons, doctors and patients, exile and home.

By Louise Erdrich
$11.95
ISBN-13: 9780061536083
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial, 01/01/2010
In Louise Erdrich's fictional world, the mystical can emerge from the everyday, the comic can turn suddenly tragic, and violence and splendor inhabit a single emotional landscape. The fantastic twists and leaps of her imagination are made all the more meaningful by the deeper truth of human feeling that underlies them. These thirty-six short works selected by the author herself--including five previously unpublished stories--are ordered chronologically as well as by theme and voice, each tale spellbinding in its boldness and beauty. The Red Convertible is a stunning literary achievement, the collected brilliance of a fearless and inventive writer.

By Stephen Benatar, John Carey
$12.75
ISBN-13: 9781590173350
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: NYRB Classics, 01/01/2010

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.

In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam's oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.


By David Grann
$12.75
ISBN-13: 9781400078455
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 01/01/2010
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer Grann sets out to solve the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century: what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

By Larry Smith, Rachel Fershleiser
$9.50
ISBN-13: 9780061719431
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial, 01/01/2010
The New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning made six-word memoirs an international phenomenon. This much-anticipated sequel contains a thousand more glimpses of humanity from writers famous and obscure--six words at a time.

By Charles Freeman
$12.76
ISBN-13: 9781590202876
Availability: Not in stock. Can usually be ordered within 1-5 days.
Published: Overlook Press, 01/01/2010
In A.D. 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This edict defined Christian orthodoxy and brought to an end a lively and wide-ranging debate about the nature of God; all other interpretations were now declared heretical. It was the first time in a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization free thought was unambiguously suppressed. Why has Theodosius's revolution been airbrushed from the historical record? In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed historian Charles Freeman argues that Theodosius's edict and the subsequent suppression of paganism not only brought an end to the diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs throughout the empire, but created numerous theological problems for the Church, which have remained unsolved. The year A.D. 381, as Freeman puts it, was "a turning point which time forgot."

By Catherine Clinton
$12.75
ISBN-13: 9780060760410
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial, 01/01/2010
Abraham Lincoln is the most revered president in American history, but the woman at the center of his life--his wife, Mary--has remained a historical enigma. One of the most tragic and mysterious of nineteenth-century figures, Mary Lincoln and her story symbolize the pain and loss of Civil War America. Authoritative and utterly engrossing, Mrs. Lincoln is the long-awaited portrait of the woman who so richly contributed to Lincoln's life and legacy.