Apples: A Novel
by Richard Milward
Paperback $15.00
Apples, an unassuming debut novel plucked from the imagination of a remarkable new twenty-one-year-old talent, and published to rave reviews in London, is a surprising, affecting, ingeniously crafted little coming-of age novel that has critics calling Richard Milward the voice of the MySpace generation.
As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates, and her mother’s progressing cancer, Eve’s adolescent eyes are opened to a multicolored life of fumbling one-night stands, drug-fuelled clubs, endless varieties of candy-flavored cheap booze, and banal consumerist choices. She barely has time to notice Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve. While contending with sexual frustration, an asshole father, and increasingly compulsive behavior, is Adam too busy furtively reading porn in his bedroom to make his move on Eve?
A paean to the scattershot difficulties of growing up, the complications of friendship, and the consequences of hormones in overdrive, Apples is a deliciously pitch-perfect debut.
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
Paperback $13.95
Buster “Rant†Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.
Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O’Neill
Hardcover $23.95 - 10%
In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans-a banker originally from the Netherlands-finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an “other†New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah-by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.
Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man-of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.
A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World
by Japan Foundation
Paperback $16.95
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s best-selling books, including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, have been translated into over forty languages, and his dreamlike prose delights readers across borders and datelines. What lies behind this phenomenal international appeal? The Japan Foundation asked novelists, translators, artists, and critics from around the world to answer this question. A Wild Haruki Chase presents their intriguing findings. Neuroscience, revolution, a secret Chinese connection . . . you’ll never read Murakami the same way again.
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
by Ted Sorensen
Hardcover $27.95 - 10%
In January 1953 the newly-elected Senator John F. Kennedy hired a young Nebraskan lawyer named Theodore Sorensen as his legislative assistant. Sorensen quickly rose up the ranks in JFK’s senate office, from research aide to speechwriter to campaigner and advisor, eventually working closely with JFK on his speeches and books, including Profiles in Courage, and encouraging JFK’s interest in the vice presidential nomination. Though JFK’s pursuit of that nomination fell short at the 1956 Democratic Convention, he had emerged as a prominent national figure; and JFK and Sorensen traveled over the next three years to all fifty states exploring his prospects for the presidential nomination in 1960. Upon his election, Kennedy appointed Sorensen as his Special Counsel-a role that allowed him to seve as the President’s own lawyer, speechwriter, and trusted confidante.
Sorensen recounts in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK through some of the most dramatic moments in American history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that Sorensen draft a letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world’s first nuclear confrontation. Sorensen was immersed in everything from civil rights to the decision to go to the moon, and he also had a hand in JFK’s most important speeches.
Illuminating, revelatory, and utterly compelling, Counselor is the brilliant long-awaited memoir from a man who shaped the presidency and legacy of JFK as no one else could.
Philosophical Tales
by Martin Cohen, Illustrated by Raul, III Gonzalez
Paperback $19.95
Was Socrates really the saintly figure he became for later philosophy? Why is it doubtful that Descartes ever really uttered, “I think, therefore I am”? And what did Sartre ever have against waiters, anyway? The history of philosophy is filled with great tales - many of them fictions, misrepresentations, falsehoods, lies and fibs. Or are they just misstatements, prevarications, and narratives not entirely based on fact? In the true spirit of a broad philosophical debate, Philosophical Tales dips a toe into the great sea of philosophy to collect, deconstruct, and relate many of history’s great - and not so great - philosophical tales.
Enlightening and entertaining, Philosophical Tales examines a few of the fascinating biographical details of history’s greatest philosophers (alas, mostly men) and highlights their contributions to the field. By applying the true philosophical approach to philosophy itself, the text provides us with a refreshing “alternative history” of philosophy.
But why should someone want to know that Kant rolled himself three times in his sheets each night before sleeping, that Schopenhauer pushed a poor old lady down the stairs, or Marx spent as much time on beer and women as he did in the British Library? By examining the seeming trivialities of philosophers’ lives - and skewering a few cherished myths along the way - Philosophical Tales provides us with illuminating insights that will encourage a more active, critical way of thinking. Blaise Pascal may have put it best when he said, “To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
by Ann Brashares
Paperback $14.00
Riley and Alice, two sisters now in their twenties, and as fiercely different as they are loyal, have spent every summer at their parents’ modest beach house on New York’s Fire Island. Each year, they return to the house and community they have known since they were children—and to Paul, the boy next door. But this summer marks a season of change: budding love and sexual interest, an illness, and a deep secret force all three to confront the increasing complexities of their lives and friendships.
On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine
by Nicolas Rasmussen
Hardcover $29.95 - 10%
Rasmussen documents America’s eighty year love affair with amphetamine and its various permutations. Monumental in scope and research, the book traces the history of this seductive drugs uses for a myriad of illnesses when the true sickness may be inherent to our unique American society. Given our current extraordinary use of this drug, On Speed is an urgent and necessary read. -Lawrence Diller, M.D., author of Running on Ritalin
Sock Monkey
by Arne Svenson & Ron Warren
Hardcover $19.95
McSweeney’s Issue 27
Plunging straight into the grayish, faintly understood area of the art world that involves oddly drawn objects coupled with uncertainly spelled text, McSweeney’s 27 brings together a previously uncategorized cadre of pithy draftsmen, genius doodlers, and fine-artistic cartoonists, and buffets them with essays examining just what it is that these people are doing and why the world should know about it. With work by Art Spiegelman, David Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, and many others, and stories by a wide variety of excellent writers.
1000 Dogs
by Taschen
Paperback $14.99
BIDOUN MAGAZINE ISSUE 14
Magazine $15.00
Esopus 10 (Spring 2008)
Magazine $10.00
ARTIST’S PROJECT: BEREND STRIK
“Untitled, 2008″ (removable insert)
ARTIST’S PROJECT: YVONNE JACQUETTE
“Untitled, 2008″
50 FRAMES: PETER HUTTON’S AT SEA (2007)
Introduction and interview by Scott MacDonald
DAILY REMINDERS
Letters by Robert Guest
ARTIST’S PROJECT: DULCE PINZÓN
“The Real Story of the Superheroes”
NEW VOICES: “PLATE TECTONICSâ€
By Lesley Clayton
DOUG McNAMARA’S BIODIVERSIONS
Interview by Tod Lippy
THE DESERT
By Jen Bervin
MODERN ARTIFACTS 4: DRAWING COMPARISONS
Introduction by Michelle Elligott
1929 IN RETROSPECT
By Angus Trumble
GUARDED OPINIONS 3
By Berhanu Taffa. Edited by Paul VanDeCarr.