Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey

Hardcover $26.95 - 10%

One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass across the reader’s sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA’s lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.

Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
by Miranda July

Paperback $14.00

“These stories are incredibly charming, beautifully written, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and even, a dozen or so times, profound. Miranda July is a very real writer, and has one of the most original voices to appear in fiction in many years. Fans of Lorrie Moore should rub this book all over themselves — she’s got that perfect balance of humor and pathos. There has been no more enjoyable and promising a debut collection in many a moon.”- Dave Eggers

“These delightful stories do that essential-but-rare story thing: they surprise. They skip past the quotidian, the merely real, to the essential, and do so with a spirit of tenderness and wonder that is wholly unique. They are (let me coin a phrase) July-esque, which is to say: infused with wonder at the things of the world.”- George Saunders, author of In Persuasion Nation

“Miranda July’s is a beautiful, odd, original voice — seductive, sometimes erotic, and a little creepy, too.”- David Byrne

“A woman gives swimming lessons in her kitchen — of course! Miranda July can make anything seem normal in these truly original stories. She has first-rate comic timing and a generous view of the human condition. Maybe best of all, there’s joy here, too, often where you would not expect to find it.”- Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Hardcover $37.50 - 10%

A richly detailed descent into the inferno — that is, the years when Richard Milhous Nixon, ‘a serial collector of resentments,’ ruled the land.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know — American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972 — into an often surprising and always fascinating new narrative. This riveting book, full of colorful detail and great characters, brings back to life an astonishing era — and shines a new light on our own.” — Jeffrey Toobin author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“This is a terrific read. What a delight it is to discover the new generation of historians like Rick Perlstein not only getting history correct but giving us all fresh insights and understanding of it.” — John W. Dean Nixon’s White House counsel

“Rick Perlstein has written a fascinating account of the rise of Richard Nixon and a persuasive argument that this angry, toxic man will always be part of the American landscape.” — Richard Reeves author of President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland digs deep into a decisive period of our history and brings back a past that is all the scarier for its intense humanity. With a firm grasp on the larger meaning of countless events and personalities, many of them long forgotten, Perlstein superbly shows how paranoia and innuendo flowed into the mainstream of American politics after 1968, creating divisive passions that have survived for decades.” — Sean Wilentz Princeton University, author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008

The Pesthouse
by Jim Crace

Paperback $13.95

From Publishers Weekly
In this postapocalyptic picaresque from Whitbread-winner Crace (for Quarantine), America has regressed to medieval conditions. After a forgotten eco-reaction in the distant past, the U.S. government, economy and society have collapsed. The illiterate inhabitants ride horses, fight with bows and swords and scratch a meager living from farming and fishing. But with crop yields and fish runs mysteriously dwindling, most are trekking to the Atlantic coast to take ships to the promised land of Europe, gawking along the way at the ruins of freeways and machinery yards, which seem the wasteful excesses of giants. Heading east, naïve farm boy Franklin teams up with Margaret, a recovering victim of the mysterious “flux” whose shaven head (mark of the unclean) causes passersby to shun her. Their love blossoms amid misadventures in an anarchic landscape: Franklin is abducted by slave-traders; Margaret falls in with a religious sect that bans metal and deplores manual labor, symbolically repudiating America’s traditional cult of progress, technology and industriousness (masculinity takes some hits, too). Crace’s ninth novel leaves the U.S. impoverished, backward, fearful and abandoned by history. Less crushing than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and less over-the-top than Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown (to name two recent postapocalyptos), Crace’s fable is an engrossing, if not completely convincing, outline of the shape of things to come.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008
edited by Laura Furman

Paperback $14.95

An annual collection of the twenty best contemporary short stories selected by series editor Laura Furman from hundreds of literary magazines, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 is studded with extraordinary settings and characters: a teenager in survivalist Alaska, the seed keeper of a doomed Chinese village, a young woman trying to save her life in a Ukrainian internet café. Also included are the winning writers’ comments on what inspired them, a short essay from each of the three eminent jurors, and an extensive resource list of literary magazines.

Translucent Tree
by Nobuko Takagi, translated by Deborah Iwabuchi

Hardcover $19.95 - 10%
<img al