Clearance
Mystery Bundle of Books
Looking for something to read during this stressful time? Our Mystery Bundle consists of six books that were assigned for recent BMC courses, a random collection of used and new books from overstock and buyback. Original bookshop retail value of at least $40, so you'll save at least 55% -- and usually much more.
You won't know what you'll get, but each title was vetted by BMC faculty so you know that every book has merit. We are offering serveral versions of this bundle for $18.00 each:
- Nonfiction only
- All categories, nonfiction/fiction mix (books in English only)
- Fiction in French
- Fiction in Spanish
- Mystery Bundles for 2 ($40.00)
- Mystery Bundles for 3 ($60.00)
100 Year Starship, The
Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants - Signed with Patch
A special Independent Bookstore Day exclusive autographed copy of ADA TWIST AND THE PERILOUS PANTS signed by bestselling author Andrea Beaty and a collectible embroidered iron-on patch of stellar scientist Ada Twist are the perfect gifts for curious readers everywhere and fans of The Questioneers!
Aesop's Fables - Novel Journal (CLEARANCE)
Afropessimism
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.
Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."
And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.
Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.
Andy Warhol Journal & Postcards - CLEARANCE
Art of Perpetuation
Vivid explorations of cryogenics, lion baiting, iDollators, dodo birds, SpaceX, and more populate The Art of Perpetuation, a poignant new collection of lyric essays from Alison Powell that troubles the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, man and woman, adult and child. These nine whip-smart essays juxtapose personal narrative-memories of the author's childhood growing up in southern Indiana and experiences as a mother of two-with scientific, historical, and cultural narrative. Throughout the collection, Powell seeks to unearth, to peel back, to lay bare: "To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamel-like shell, is an excavation-to uncover a lie, an infidelity." Dizzying, fragmentary, and provocative, Powell's lyrical investigations dig in deep, coming up for air only to expose the meaningless of naming in a world obsessed with self-perpetuation. "To say a poem is like a body is to say one's self is a machine. To say a body is erasable is to say extinction is a temperate clicking.... And like that, with one hand on the glass and one gloved hand inside the mouth of the woolly rhino, you have done it."
BLACKOUT (P)
Riveting . . . An engrossing, street-level recounting and ambivalent ode to a great city.--Jamie Berger, San Francisco Chronicle
On July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. With the dark came excitement, adventure, and fright in subway tunnels, office towers, busy intersections, high-rise stairwells, hotel lobbies, elevators, and hospitals. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. On block after block, men and women proved themselves heroes by helping neighbors and strangers make it through the night. Unfortunately, there was also widespread looting, vandalism, and arson. Even before police restored order, people began to ask and argue about why. Why did people do what they did when the lights went out? The argument raged for weeks but it was just like the night: lots of heat, little light-a shouting match between those who held fast to one explanation and those who held fast to another. James Goodman cuts between accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments to re-create that night and its aftermath in a dizzying accumulation of detail. Rejecting simple dichotomies and one-dimensional explanations for why people act as they do in moments of conflict and crisis, Goodman illuminates attitudes, ideas, and experiences that have been lost in facile generalizations and analyses. Journalistic re-creation at its most exciting, Blackout provides a whirlwind tour of 1970s New York and a challenge to conventional thinking.Blue Talk & Love
The award-wining collection Blue Talk and Love tells the stories of girls and women of color navigating the moods and mazes of urban daily life. Set in various enclaves of New York City -- including the middle-class Hamilton Heights section of Harlem, the black queer social world of the West Village, the Spanish-speaking borderland between Harlem and Washington Heights, and historic Tin Pan Alley -- the collection uses magic realism, historical fiction, satire and more to highlight young black women's inner lives.
The storylines range widely: a big-bodied teenage girl from Harlem discovers her sexuality in the midst of racial tensions at her Upper East Side school; four young women from Newark, New Jersey, are charged with assaulting the man who threatens to rape them; a pair of conjoined black female twins born into slavery, make their fame as stage performers in the Big City. In each story, the characters push past what is expected of them, learning to celebrate their voices and their lives.
In honor of Mecca Sullivan's being named the recipient of the 2018 Judith A. Markowitz Lambda Award as an emerging LGBTQ writer, Riverdale Avenue Books has released a second edition of her acclaimed collection for which the Lambda judges called Sullivan, "An essential writer of our present moment."
"We are so proud of Mecca for receiving this prestigious award. She made her fiction debut with Riverdale Avenue Books five years ago, when we were both new to the literary scene, and we are publishing an updated second edition with the wonderful quote from Ntozake Shange on the cover to commemorate this achievement," said Publisher Lori Perkins.
*****
"In Blue Talk and Love... the lives of wounded and glorious young gay women of color are portrayed with the delicacy of a mother tending to her terrible wounds...Sullivan enriches our lives with ...characters, who are so rich and impoverished at once." --Ntozake Shange, author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
"An essential writer of our present moment" --Judges for the 2018 Judith A. Markowitz Lambda Emerging LGBTQ Writer Award
Blue Talk and Love's "voice, despite material that seems frankly contemporary, is paradoxically lyrical, nearly Faulknerian." --Rick Moody, judge for the American Short Fiction Short Story Contest