15 South Dubuque St. • Iowa City, IA 52240 • 319-337-2681 • 800-295-BOOK • Open 9:00 a.m. daily
These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."
Reviving the message of M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, Tamar Adler writes about summoning mouth-watering meals from the humblest of ingredients. Part cookbook, part cooking philosophy, Adler simplifies the cooking process while at the same time elevating something as basic as an egg, stale bread, or even the rinds of cheese. One of the best food-related books I've ever read.
This novel takes place in the beautiful wilderness of Alaska in the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have built their home with grit and labor. They are determined to succeed. Things become very difficult and they feel almost defeated until a little girl with her red fox appear from the woods.
A fairy tale come to reality.
Well over half of Left Coast Roast is a coffee enthusiast’s travel-guide to West Coast coffee. Author Hanna Neuschwander includes 55 nerdy roaster dossiers that chart the coast’s current and historic coffee cultures. The book is also a coffee primer. It explains coffee jargon, the seemingly mysterious seed-to-bean processes, and how one can roast and brew coffee at home. For anyone interested in coffee or wanting to be, Left Coast Roast is a bookshelf essential.
Before you disregard this beautiful sparkly silver book as teen pop-dom fluff, open it and sample Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne's prose. What I like best about this novel is Jonny's voice. While the obvious cultural inspiration for the character is Justin Beiber, likeable 11 year old pop prodigy Jonny doesn't immediately call to my mind any other literary protagonists. He is smart and funny, but never wise beyond his years or precious. I agree with Publisher's Weekly, which said, "Masterfully executed...the real accomplishment is the unforgettable voice of Jonny. If this impressive novel, both entertaining and tragically insightful, were a song, it would have a Michael Jackson beat with Morrissey lyrics."
This book was refreshingly fun to read, and left me thinking slightly differently about celebrity culture.
Evans' fresh and forceful biography hacks hrough half a century of misconception and smokescreen obscuring essential truths about Iowa's most famous artist, Grant Wood. Thoroughly researched, generously illustrated and vastly readable Evans' book helps us decode not only Wood the individual's art and life (particularly the effecs of his closest homosexuality) but also the fascinating rise and fall of the American Regionalist Movement that Wood came to symbolize. Evans exposes the conflicting agendas that the art world, themedia and the gerneral public wanted this supposedly all-American home-grown art-and artist-to serve.
A mysterious young actress with a fatal diagnosis, a hopeful young Italian pensione keeper, a reprobate Hollywood producer and his frustrated assistant, Richard Burton at the beginning of his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, a post-WWII American soldier trying to write his depression away, a no-longer young musician trying to make a comeback at The Fringe…This richly imagined novel uses shifts in time, place, and narrative to form many avenues to traverse the fates of its several struggling characters. Reading it may make you wonder if you have been “pitched” a movie about the Donner party, but a backwater theater stages such a beautiful pivot in the plot…
Richard Russo blew me away with this memoir about his relationship with his mother, a self-proclaimed independent woman from a run-down upstate New York town. Russo writes with a poignant simplicity, making us care about his relationship with a more than difficult woman. We follow them from Gloversville, NY, to Arizona, to Illinois, to Maine, all the while watching Russo struggle with doubts about how he cares for her. It is so easy to be inside of the author's head, to see through his eyes, and yet see much more than he does. We want to help him, help her, shake their shoulders. A very thoughtful, funny, heartbreaking book, for anyone who's ever had a relationship with anyone. So, everyone.
Justin and Angela Kennedy are doing fine. Better than fine-they have wealth, position, love, children, and a limitless future. Into their lives comes Frankie Crowe, an ambitious criminal tired of risking his life for small change. Together with a crew of singularly dangerous men, Frankie decides that a kidnapping could be the first step toward a better life. Set in modern Dublin, Little Criminals is a story that bristles with tension and expectation, a story about what happens to the fragile things-friendship, love, compassion-when all rules are broken. If you like the gritty, working class Dublin crime novels, you’ll love Kerrigan. He has three books. Little Criminals, Midnight Choir, and, most recently, Rage.
In Beckett's trilogy, he almost writes without characters, scenes or plots, relying instead on each sentence to propel these novels forward into the oblivion of the writer's imagination. Perfect for a serious yet sensitive laugh, as readers might expect from a writer who was stabbed in the heart by a pimp in his younger years.
This is a brief, but beautiful little novel made from the simplest stuff. The narrator is a bartender in late middle age. The suburban bistro he works at is falling apart and over the course of a few days he tries to patch things together. In the process he ruminates over his position and life in general. This is Fabre’s ninth novel but the first in English translation.
A true-life tale of man and horse literally leaping over inconceivable hurdles to fulfill their dreams. This is the story of immigrant Harry de Leyer and his rescued plow horse Snowman and their quest to win the jumping championship in the prestigious National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. This is one of the most heart-felt stories of the bond between a man and his horse that I have ever read and I've read them all. Great reading for anyone in search of that rush you get watching anyone succeed against impossible odds.
There seem to be an abundance of "end of the world" tales lately, but White Horse presents us with a terrifying and intense experience. A plague has killed off 90% of the population. The war between China and the US has depleted resources. Scientific experiments with weather have irreparably damaged the climate. Of the 10% of humans that survived the disease, half seem untouched while the other half have suffered horrific mutations. Our heroine, Zoe, guides us through this nightmare of a landscape, alternating her narration between "before" and "after" chapters. She is determined to stay alive as she works her way from America to Greece, hoping against hope to reunite with her lover before her baby is born. Fierce, violent, shocking, this is a haunting book. And even though it's part of a projected trilogy, White Horse has resolution and closure. An amazing debut from Ms. Adams.
The second installment of the Fillory series. Quentin learns, once again, that everything has a price to be payed and often an appallingly costly one. A somewhat different tone than The Magicians
15 South Dubuque St.
Iowa City, IA 52240
319-337-2681
800-295-BOOK
Open 9-9 Mon-Sat
9-6 Sun
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