Reading Series 26-27
Someone Like Us
$17.00
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah--a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
ISBN/SKU:
9780345805676
Publication Date:
October 21, 2025
Publisher:
Spit Back a Boy: Poems
$21.95
Iain Haley Pollock's poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, "Sea, you is ugly," from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book--in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: "I flung my almost white self / into my mother's embrace--that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker." Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator's hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.
Even when these poems soften, they can't be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock's collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.ISBN/SKU:
9780820339085
Publication Date:
June 15, 2011
Publisher:
We Love You, Charlie Freeman
$21.99
A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE 2017 YOUNG LIONS AWARD Don't miss Kaitlyn Greenidge's second novel, Libertie, which is available now! "A terrifically auspicious debut." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Smart, timely and powerful . . . A rich examination of America's treatment of race, and the ways we attempt to discuss and confront it today." --The Huffington Post The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. But when Charlotte discovers the truth about the institute's history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past invade the present in devious ways. The power of this shattering novel resides in Greenidge's undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history's long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America's failure to find a language to talk about race. "A magnificently textured, vital, visceral feat of storytelling . . . [by] a sharp, poignant, extraordinary new voice of American literature." --Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
ISBN/SKU:
9781616206444
Publication Date:
January 31, 2017
Publisher:
WE THE ANIMALS (P)
$14.50
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts.
In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.
"A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver's or Jeffrey Eugenides's voice did when we first heard it."--The Washington Post
Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another.
From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.
"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It resembles no other book I've read."--Michael Cunningham
"A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book."--NPR, Weekend Edition
ISBN/SKU:
9780547844190
Publisher:
World After Rain
$16.95
A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as "incandescent" In this stunning new poem, Canisia Lubrin's signature epic vision is distilled into a elegy to her mother, along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment that belongs as much to history as to today. Her lucid attention to what might be the oldest metaphor for grief is drawn from the searing gravity and resonance of the modern poet's decisive, interior, and inexpressible meditation on love, time, and loss in the excesses of life's ambitions. woman from fine-print time, disclose to the world:
the forecast of our noontime births outdoors; how I distrust
every form of authority, chiefly my own astonishment
this poisoned wish is why I love, I bow to deserts,
these claychildren of forests everywhere
I love the rain, this is no secret, I love the solar wind;
hold their elliptical life in the wasteland of our third mouths
where flowers are invisible and bones are sanded and amusing,
and every heliopause cloud senses our head, how we astonish
our memories vining where no shade is enough,
since many who'll feed me will refuse me their names,
and good, who knows what bargains I would make
with their meanings . . .
the forecast of our noontime births outdoors; how I distrust
every form of authority, chiefly my own astonishment
this poisoned wish is why I love, I bow to deserts,
these claychildren of forests everywhere
I love the rain, this is no secret, I love the solar wind;
hold their elliptical life in the wasteland of our third mouths
where flowers are invisible and bones are sanded and amusing,
and every heliopause cloud senses our head, how we astonish
our memories vining where no shade is enough,
since many who'll feed me will refuse me their names,
and good, who knows what bargains I would make
with their meanings . . .
ISBN/SKU:
9781593768195
Publication Date:
February 3, 2026
Publisher: