Books
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246 products
Vicky Swanky is a Beauty by Diane Williams, Softcover
Regular price $13.00 Sale price $5.00Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.
In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence.
These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.
Praise for Diane Williams:
"Let's hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one the wittiest and most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that’s not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life. Well, you figure it out. All I know is that this book is an amazement, composed with a stricture that guarantees splendor."
—Sam Lipsyte
"Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird."
—Jonathan Franzen
"She is one of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt."
—Lydia Davis
"The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams."
—Ben Marcus
"These stories are the Giacometti walking man, the Cornell box, that extraordinary object born out of a genius for expressing the inner murmur of the mind. Each page is like throwing open the window in an electrical storm—strange sky, air full of voltage, and inside, a square of brave. Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours."
—Deb Olin Unferth
"Vicky Swanky is a Beauty and Diane Williams is a genius. She is also a hero who 'resurrect(s) glee' in the face off with mortality. Her stories are sensationally complex; sorrow and hilarity, melancholy and wonder mingle, rendering this surpassingly winning collection, her seventh, quite extraordinary."
—Christine Schutt
"'Vicky Swanky' is Williams at her best, shaking us awake again to the persistent strangeness of human life."
—Jenny Hendrix, The Boston Globe
"The shorts in Diane Williams's Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney's) emit an unsettling brilliance, becoming, on repeated readings, even stranger and more revelatory."
—Vanity Fair
“To read these delightful stories is simply to drop in on random encounters as they are occurring—tense, awkward, jokey, fraught.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Even without the cameo appearances by the character ‘Diane Williams,’ it’s unlikely that anyone who’s attempted to tease apart a handful of Williams’s stories will forget her linguistic precision, the ways she whittles sentences into solid gems, or her wonderfully strange way of seeing.”
—The Millions
“There is also the pleasure of Williams’s sentences…dense and different. They pop. They’re part of what makes Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty so enjoyable.”
—ZYZZYVA
“Dark, strange and revelatory”
—Time Out New York
“Equal parts satisfying, mysterious, thoughtful, and quick.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Williams’s steadfast devotion to keep experimenting has yielded another highly entertaining collection that defies any contrary urge to settle down.”
—The National
“In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, we are reminded that Diane Williams is a brilliant writer and that there is absolutely nothing preordained in this world, which is sometimes a truly great thing.”
—Bomb
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Between Heaven and Here by Susan Straight, Hardcover
Regular price $24.00 Sale price $5.00Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.
In August in Rio Seco, California, the ground is too hard to bury a body. But Glorette Picard is dead, and across the canal, out in the orange groves, they’ll gather shovels and pickaxes and soak the dirt until they can lay her coffin down. First, someone needs to find her son Victor, who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock, and someone needs to tell her uncle Enrique, who will be the one to hunt down her killer, and someone needs to brush out her perfect crown of hair and paint her cracked toenails. As the residents of this dry-creek town prepare to bury their own, it becomes clear that Glorette’s life and death are deeply entangled with the dark history of the city and the untouchable beauty that, finally, killed her.
Check out a preview of the book & real-life stories and images that inspired the novel!
Praise for Between Heaven and Here:
“It is only the rarest of novels that cry for a sequel, the most unusual of stories that at once satisfies and leaves the reader aching for more. Susan Straight’s remarkable Take One Candle Light A Room is such a novel. And she has satisfied our desires in Between Heaven and Here, a magnificent novel, that manages to be at once unflinchingly real and transcendently beautiful. Susan Straight is one of the very best American writers. If you haven’t read her, you’re in for a delight and an awakening. If you have, then you’re probably as thrilled as I am that she has taken us back to Rio Seco.”
—Ayelet Waldman
“Susan Straight finds LA’s secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.”
—Walter Mosley
“Straight employs glorious language and a riveting eye for detail to create a fully realized, totally believable world.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“The mysterious murder of a hooker kicks off this exquisitely wrought final installment (after Take One Candle Light a Room) of Straight’s trilogy, set in fictional Rio Seco, California. When Glorette Picard’s longtime admirer, Sidney, discovers her body in a shopping cart in an alley behind a taquería, he fears the wrath or indifference of the police, and so claims her corpse as his responsibility, setting of a storm of consequences. Left behind to weather the world on his own is Glorette’s young son, Victor, who memorizes SAT vocabulary words to drown out the crack dealers, and her uncle Enrique, who takes it upon himself to avenge her death. Straight plunges readers into a whirlwind of dialects, drugs, derelict homes, and delinquent locals as she weaves together the story of Glorette’s life and death, while addressing weighty and timely issues like race, language, and the socioeconomically disenfranchised. Straight deftly avoids clichés and easy outs, and her refusal to vilify or sanctify the numerous members of her cast allows the experiences of each to resonate powerfully.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“And yet, in a novel set in a world in which people are too often stripped of dignity, Straight has accomplished the larger act of ennobling her characters. She sees them clearly and gives them a striking presence on the page.”
—New York Times
“Straight, a 2001 National Book Award finalist for Highwire Moon, has the ability to create straightforward contemporary voices, no pun intended. She does not subscribe to the maximalist school of over-the-top characters, yet she can still dramatize the complex, jagged nature of American culture today. ”
—The Daily Beast
“Despite the tragedies that befall them, Straight’s characters still recognize the splendor of the natural world, from the pepper trees behind the taqueria to the orange blossoms in the alley scenting the midnight air… Straight’s group portrait of this community ought to be recognized as a national artistic treasure. Her focus on this singular place magnifies the hopes and disappointments of so many Americans, so many humans on earth.”
—The Boston Globe
“Susan Straight has remarkable range as a writer. Her voice can be elegant in the rhythms and vocabulary of her narrative, yet also blunt and raw in dialogue… Her work is so intensely alive in its movement, action, and in the speech of her characters that reading it is almost like being caught in the center of a storm: exhausting but exhilarating at the same time.”
—The Rumpus
“How can a novel that is essentially the story of a dead prostitute prove so uplifting? It must be some kind of black magic that only Susan Straight can work… And by the end of this gorgeous and heart-wrenching novel, this family will be your people, too.”
—The Dallas Morning Star News
“A thoroughly engrossing novel, one that operates powerfully in the empty, lonely gaps between people.”
—ForeWord Reviews
“Straight’s writing pulls the reader into a world that is both surreal and yet inescapably concrete, ugly and beautiful all at once. She binds the multifaceted perspectives together into a narrative that is fragmented but still very much whole.”
—BUSTLE
You can select your shipping preferences during checkout. We offer UPS Ground or Next Day Air and USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. We offer local delivery within five miles of the shop. Orders generally ship out within 3 business days of the order being placed. You will receive an email with tracking information once your order is shipped.
Rerun Era by Joanna Howard, Hardcover
Regular price $24.00 Sale price $5.00Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.
Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television.
Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard’s past selves from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women’s libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.
Praise for Rerun Era
You can select your shipping preferences during checkout. We offer UPS Ground or Next Day Air and USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. We offer local delivery within five miles of the shop. Orders generally ship out within 3 business days of the order being placed. You will receive an email with tracking information once your order is shipped.
Spilt Milk, Hardcover
Regular price $22.00 Sale price $5.00Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.
What role does a mother play in raising thoughtful, generous children? In her literary debut, internationally award-winning writer Courtney Zoffness considers what we inherit from generations past—biologically, culturally, spiritually—and what we pass on to our children. Spilt Milk is an intimate, bracing, and beautiful exploration of vulnerability and culpability. Zoffness relives her childhood anxiety disorder as she witnesses it manifest in her firstborn; endures brazen sexual advances by a student in her class; grapples with the implications of her young son’s cop obsession; and challenges her Jewish faith. Where is the line between privacy and secrecy? How do the stories we tell inform who we become? These powerful, dynamic essays herald a vital new voice.
Read excerpts from Spilt Milk courtesy of The Paris Review, Guernica, and Lit Hub.
Praise for Spilt Milk
“(K)eenly perceptive… masterful essays in a fresh, vulnerable voice readers will want to hear more of.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“(M)oves back and forth through time with an elegant quickness that insightfully captures how the past shapes who we are and who we might become.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“In her layered storytelling, (Zoffness) brings empathy to every situation and often finds empathy for herself along the way. Spilt Milk is a generous, warm debut from an already prizewinning writer.”
—Book Page (starred review)
“Each essay is just as thoughtful and smart and well-told as the last one — don’t miss this.
—Alma Magazine
“In Spilt Milk, Courtney Zoffness, with compassionate clarity, exposes herself—her worst fears, her best hopes—to expose her art.”
—The Masters Review
“A slim, tender collection of essays.”
—Good Morning America
“lyrical and brilliant in the way a jewel reveals many facets at different angles.”
—Jewish Boston
“A graceful debut.”
—Kirkus
“In this collection of essays, Courtney Zoffness tackles motherhood in a way that is simultaneously fresh and achingly relatable… Zoffness recreates tender, moving, and poetic moments that will etch their way into your brain and heart for a very long time. We should be so lucky to get more work from the young writer.”
—Apartment Therapy
“Searching and exquisitely-wrought.”
—Brevity Magazine
“I don’t know what I love the most about Courtney Zoffness’s Spilt Milk. The taut originality of the prose? The acuity of its insights? The daring vulnerability? There is so much I want to say about Spilt Milk, but honestly they’re all variations of This is fucking brilliant. Whatever you think this book is, it’s more. A debut writer this talented and skilled is an event in itself.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Pym
“Gentle, playful and laced with subtle wit, these essays are a welcome balm in an insane and un-gentle time.”
—Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior
“Spilt Milk contains the wisdom of a mother, the maturity of an older sister, and the wide-eyed wonder of a small child. It’s a magical gift of a collection.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
“In these ten musical, open-hearted essays, Courtney Zoffness establishes herself as one of our most soulful, clear-eyed narrators. A lucid dream of a book I wished would never end.”
—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Wry and masterful—Spilt Milk examines the multiplicities of self and culture, asking the tough questions with remarkable concision. Courtney Zoffness is a writer of supernatural acuity and wit.”
—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Spilt Milk is current, self-examining, honest, insightful, biting, and funny. Essentially, a perfect book.”
—Jesse Eisenberg, actor and playwright, author of Bream Gives me Hiccups and Other Stories
“Perhaps you have heard that being a mother of small children is hard, especially so right now, and finally, here is a book of essays that don’t cover up the messiness, the oddness, the love and the sadness and the worry all at once. Unsanitized and beautiful.”
—Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here and owner of Books Are Magic
“Courtney Zoffness’s collection is written with a fierce and sometimes funny honesty. Zoffness explores motherhood and daughterhood, and how these early attachments make us and unmake us, how they connect us to others—until they are us.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning
“These bright, knowing essays spill over with intelligence and wit. Courtney Zoffness traces the dizzying conflict faced by parents—the daily ricochet between burden and joy—and, with a sharply lyric voice, discovers hidden connections between this domestic struggle and the larger cultural and political winds shifting around us.”
—Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog
“On one level, Spilt Milk is an extraordinary exploration of the connections, small and large; real and imagined, between childhood and parenthood. On another level, it’s irrefutable proof that Courtney Zoffness is a wondrous calculus of a prose writer: keen, inventive, candid, open-hearted, not to mention one helluva stylist.”
—Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math
You can select your shipping preferences during checkout. We offer UPS Ground or Next Day Air and USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. We offer local delivery within five miles of the shop. Orders generally ship out within 3 business days of the order being placed. You will receive an email with tracking information once your order is shipped.
Phyllis Galembo: Maske
Regular price $45.00 Sale price $20.00maské,meaning
to wear a mask,this album features a selection of more than 100 of the best of Galembo's masquerade photographs to date, organized in country-based chapters, each with her own commentary. Now back in print by popular demand, the book is introduced by art historian and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu (himself a masquerade participant during his childhood in Nigeria), for whom Galembo's photographs raise questions about the survival and evolution of masquerade tradition in the 21st century.
You can select your shipping preferences during checkout. We offer UPS Ground or Next Day Air and USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express. We offer local delivery within five miles of the shop. Orders generally ship out within 3 business days of the order being placed. You will receive an email with tracking information once your order is shipped.
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