Here's what we're considering for pitching this year.
Connie
Table for Two, Amor Towles
From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a
richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles.
The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set
in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the
turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the
fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at
the heart of modern marriages
In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September,
1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her
parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve
in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of
Hollywood’s golden age
Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the
direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next.
Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to
Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
The New York Times bestseller from the Grammy-nominated indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an
unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean
mother, and forging her own identity in the wake of her loss.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more
than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only
Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high
expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny
apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing
gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness
began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced
a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her
mother had given her.
Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage.
Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and
reread.
Karen
A book by Anne Lemotte. One possibility is
Rosie.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Mercies; and Stitches, a wise and witty novel about motherhood.
Look out for Anne's next book, Hallelujah Anyway, coming in 2017.
In Anne Lamott’s wise and witty novel, the growing pains of motherhood are portrayed with rare humor and honesty. If Elizabeth Ferguson had her way, she’d spend her days savoring good books, cooking great meals, and waiting for the love of her life to walk in the door. But it’s not a man she’s waiting for, it’s her daughter, Rosie—her wild-haired, smart-mouthed, and wise-beyond-her-years alter ego. With Rosie around, the days aren’t quite so long, but Elizabeth can’t keep the realities of the world at bay, and try as she might, she can’t shield Rosie from its dangers or mysteries.
As Rosie grows older and more curious, Elizabeth must find a way to nurture her extraordinary daughter—even if it means growing up herself.
Katherine
Tom Lake, Ann Patchett
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The Guardian
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
The audio book is narrated by Meryl Streep.
Has some tie ins to Our Town and has spoilers for Our Town.
Kathy
The Book of Delights, Ross Gay
- National Book Award finalist
- National Book Critics Circle Award winner
- A New York Times Bestseller
- Named one of the Best Books of 2019 by the Washington Independent Review of Books and Shelf Awareness
- Named a best reviewed book of 2019 by Lit Hub
- Named one of five books every high schooler should read by the School Library Journal
- Named one of “8 Books We Can’t Stop Thinking About,” Vanity Fair
The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay.
The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. A genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year, the first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room.
But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.
How It Went, Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership, Wendell Berry
Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present moment.
For those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry’s offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it’s taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that’s what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.
These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy’s life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.
- Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
- Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
- A New York Times bestseller
“Smith’s thrilling cultural insights never overshadow the wholeness of her characters, who are so keenly observed that one feels witness to their lives.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“A sweeping meditation on art, race, and identity that may be [Smith’s] most ambitious work yet.” —Esquire
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
The Fraud, Zadie Smith
Written in typical Zadie Smith fashion, The Fraud is a page-turning historical novel about Victorian England.
More specifically, this entrancing new work follows the famed Tichborne Trial - a historic legal case that remains controversial, even to this day. Though Smith's novel focuses on this trial, and the turbulence surrounding it, The Fraud is, at its core, a novel about the rectification of two opposing realities: that of truth and fiction, fraudulence and authenticity, and the people that exist at the extremes of both. The perfect next read for anyone in search of a captivating historical novel with contemporary commentary, The Fraud strikes a perfect balance.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.
"It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNN
Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.
“A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” –Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf - CLASSIC
Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past--the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life making it one of the most "moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century" (Michael Cunningham).
In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.
This was on Katherine's long list last year.
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley - CLASSIC
Originally published in 1932, Huxley's terrifying vision of a controlled and emotionless future "Utopian" society is truly startling in its prediction of modern scientific and cultural phenomena, including test-tube babies and rampant drug abuse.
Steph
The Stranger, Albert Camus -- CLASSIC
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.
Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.
“The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.”
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
- WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
- WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
- New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century
- An Oprah’s Book Club Selection
- A #1 Washington Post Bestseller
- A New York Times "Ten Best Books of the Year"
"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
"May be the best novel of [the year]. . . . Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.
Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
Despair, Nabokov -- CLASSIC
The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.
“A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek
“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike
“One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York Times
Despair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another masterly portrait in the fascinating gallery of living characters Vladmir Nabokov has given to world literature. In his pseudo wordliness, his odd genius, Hermann is one with such other heteroclitic neurotic Nabokovian creations as Humbert Humbert and Charles Kimbote. Rapt in his own reality, incapable of escaping or explicating it, he is as solitary in his abyss as Luzhin or Charlotte Haze of Lolita.
Despair is illuminated throughout by the virtuosity and cunning wit that are Vladimir Nabokov’s hallmarks.
Light in August, William Faulkner -- CLASSIC
From the Nobel Prize winner—one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a novel set in the American South during Prohibition about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality.
James, Percival Everett --- Probably can't get copies this year, but maybe the library will have oodles of copies and a book club kit for it.
- AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
- SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
- Shortlisted for THE BOOKER PRIZE
- KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view
In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg • A Best Book of the Year of the Year so Far for 2024: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, W Magazine, Bustle, LitHub
"Genius"—The Atlantic
"A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."—Chicago Tribune
"A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."—The Boston Globe
"Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."—The New York Times
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town.
As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O'Brien
This riveting novel of love and mystery from the author of The Things They Carried examines the lasting impact of the twentieth century’s legacy of violence and warfare, both at home and abroad. When long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.
Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship, Catherine Raven
- Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
- 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner
- Shortlisted for the John Burroughs Medal
- Finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
- Shortlisted for a Reading the West Book Award
- New York Times Bestseller
- A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
- 2021 Summer Reading Pick by Buzzfeed, New York Times Book Review, Kirkus, Time Magazine, Good Morning America, People Magazine, The Washington Post
When Catherine Raven finished her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana. She was as emotionally isolated as she was physically, but she viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. In the meantime, she taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone National Park.
Then one day she realized that a mangy-looking fox was showing up on her property every afternoon at 4:15 p.m. She had never had a regular visitor before. How do you even talk to a fox? She brought out her camping chair, sat as close to him as she dared, and began reading to him from The Little Prince. Her scientific training had taught her not to anthropomorphize animals, yet as she grew to know him, his personality revealed itself and they became friends.
From the fox, Catherine learned the single most important thing about loneliness: we are never alone when we are connected to the natural world. Friends, however, cannot save each other from the uncontained forces of nature.
Fox and I is a poignant and remarkable tale of friendship, growth, and coping with inevitable loss—and of how that loss can be transformed into meaning. It is both a timely tale of solitude and belonging as well as a timeless story of one woman whose immersion in the natural world will change the way we view our surroundings—each tree, weed, flower, stone, or fox.
