Reading Series 22-23

Brooklyn

Brooklyn
$16.99
$12.00
$12.00 - $16.99
Colm Tóibín's New York Times bestselling novel--now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture--is "a moving, deeply satisfying read" (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

"One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

Author "Colm Tóibín...is his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power" (Los Angeles Times). "Written with mesmerizing power and skill" (The Boston Globe), Brooklyn is a "triumph...One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations" (USA TODAY).

ISBN/SKU: 
9781439148952
Publication Date: 
March 2, 2010
Author: 
Publisher: 

Goldenrod

Goldenrod
$20.00
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY NPR

​"To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment." --Time
"A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet." --People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of Keep Moving and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her "meditations on kindness and hope" (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life--a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son's pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road--she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone "doesn't observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands."​

Slate called Smith's "superpower as a writer" her "ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty." The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982185060
Publication Date: 
July 27, 2021
Author: 

Guest at the Feast

Guest at the Feast
$28.00
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub!

From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature.

"IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS." So begins Colm Tóibín's fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, "the age of one ball." The second essay in this seductive collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and '60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, the setting for many of Tóibín's novels and stories, including Brooklyn, The Blackwater Lightship and Nora Webster. Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality.

In Part Two, Tóibín profiles three complex and vexing popes--John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. And in Part Three, he writes about a trio of authors who reckon with religion in their fiction. The final essay, "Alone in Venice," is a gorgeous account of Toibin's journey, at the height of the pandemic, to the beloved city where he has set some of his most dazzling scenes. The streets, canals, churches and museums were empty. He had them to himself, an experience both haunting and exhilarating.

A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a supremely creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.

Table of Contents

PART ONE
Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall
A Guest at the Feast
A Brush with the Law

PART TWO
The Paradoxical Pope
Among the Flutterers
The Bergoglio Smile: Pope Francis
The Ferns Report

PART THREE
Putting Religion in Its Place: Marilynne Robinson
Issues of Truth and Invention: Francis Stuart
Snail Slow: John McGahern

EPILOGUE
Alone in Venice

ISBN/SKU: 
9781476785202
Publication Date: 
January 17, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Mutiny

Mutiny
$20.00
Winner of the 2022 American Book Award
Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub

From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with a lucid, unmitigated humanity (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewal

Mutiny a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780143136934
Publication Date: 
September 7, 2021
Author: 
Publisher: 

Punks

Punks
$20.00

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, PUNKS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, PUNKS weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that we sing as hard as we live. At home in countless poetic forms, PUNKS reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

John Keene's PUNKS is utterly brilliant. The range, vision, depth and humanity he brings to the page are as galactic as Banneker's astral wanderings, as crisp as the chordal cutting of a searching horn, as courageous and small as a nose wide open. Keene's masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. Amen to this exploration!--Tyehimba Jess

Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781737277521
Publication Date: 
December 1, 2021
Author: 
Publisher: