Trade Books for Courses :: Trade Books For Courses: Literature Books

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GraceLand

A Novel

Chris Abani Picador

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

"GraceLand amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition, and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society."—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

Reading Guide

Awards

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee - Fiction
L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist - Fiction
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee - Winner - First Fiction
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Winner - First Fiction
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Finalist - Winner - Debut Fiction

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Trade Paperback : $14.00 Buy	A Better Angel Stories Chris Adrian Picador “Adrian, himself a pediatrician and seminary student, is a lucid, brilliant fortune-teller. He unveils our demons, who, in the wake of their visitations upon these children, reveal something you can only call the face of God.”—Tom Chiarella, Esquire

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Madras on Rainy Days

A Novel

Samina Ali Picador

A Finalist for the Northern California Book Award

"Ali explores cultural conditions with sensitivity, and mercifully does not over-exoticise. Her story is intriguing . . . She is one of a rare breed of writers who take us into the closed world behind a Muslim woman's veil . . . Carefully crafted [and] eminently readable."—Mitali Saran, Far Eastern Economic Review

"This book goes to a place where few, if any, of its predecessors have gone before. . . [This is] a deeply feminist novel with richly drawn and complicated characters."—Ms.

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Awards

Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Finalist - First Fiction
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee - Finalist - First Fiction

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This I Believe

The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women

Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, eds. Holt Paperbacks

"To hold this range of beliefs in the palm of your hand is as fine, as grounding, as it was hearing them first on the radio. Heartfelt, deeply cherished beliefs, doctrines for living (yet none of them doctrinaire). Ideas and ideals that nourish. You can see it in their faces, in the photos in this book. And read it in their words. I'm so proud that NPR helped carry this Edward R. Murrow tradition into a new century. And so glad to have it in print, to encounter again and again."—Susan Stamberg, special correspondent, National Public Radio

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Collected Prose

Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists

Paul Auster Picador

"[Auster] has assembled his youthful [nonfiction] in one stout, handsome silo . . . Seeing the pieces together, you realize they are the work that allowed Auster to see himself as a Writer with a capital 'W.' It's rare these days for a novelist to admit to this desire without mocking it, which explains why Auster has remained the drug of choice for readers who once would have chosen Vonnegut. He read, he wrote, and he hungered. Collected Prose would feel like a tombstone to that time if [Auster] didn't do these things so fervently still."—John Freeman, Dallas Morning News

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Man in the Dark

A Novel

Paul Auster Picador

"This is perhaps Auster’s best book . . . Man In The Dark is so unlike anything Auster has ever written that it doesn’t make sense to compare it with his earlier work . . . Here we have multiple worlds and three generations . . . Auster’s book leaves one with a depth of feeling much larger than might be expected from such a small and concise work of art."—Stephen Elliott, San Francisco Chronicle

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The Bitten

Vampire Huntress Legends #4

L. A. Banks St. Martin's Griffin

"I highly recommend Banks' Vampire Huntress Series for use in courses ranging from high school to college. I have used this series as recommended reading for my graduate students in Women's Studies and they cannot stop talking about these works. Banks' writing is smart, poignant, and engaging. Students aren't able to put the books down. Each novel in the series brims with social critique and commentary. Banks is a perceptive writer who provides a wonderful critique of societal issues, from the impact of drugs to self-responsibility and self-reliance to the choices we all make in life. Students who engage in the work of L. A. Banks will leave the classroom with sharper critical thinking skills and a newfound joy of reading."—Gwendolyn D. Pough, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Writing, Syracuse University, and author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere

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Readers Guides

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The Damned

Vampire Huntress Legends #6

L.A. Banks St. Martin's Griffin

"Each book in this . . . series gets harder and harder to put down. This fifth entry features amazing imagination and a story that is touching and packed with drama from beginning to end."—Romantic Times

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A Long Way Gone

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah Sarah Crichton Books

"What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? . . . The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone, is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine—perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer . . . A Long Way Gone is his first, remarkable book. . . . Beah's memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars . . . A Long Way Gone makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen."—William Boyd, The New York Times Book Review

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Trade Paperback : $20.00 Buy	Untold Stories Alan Bennett Picador "Bennett has taken the vulgarity—not to mince words—out of confessional writing by his humor, compassion (for those who deserve it), and self-deprecation . . . the quietly penetrating decency of this big book is a genuine balm."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

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The Uncommon Reader

A Novella

Alan Bennett Picador

"What if Queen Elizabeth at the age of 70-something were suddenly to become a voracious reader? What if she were to become an avid fan of Proust and Balzac, Turgenev and Trollope and Hardy? And what if reading were to lead her, in turn, to becoming a writer? Mr. Bennett's musings on these matters have produced a delightful little book that unfolds into a witty meditation on the subversive pleasures of reading . . . In recounting this story of a ruler who becomes a reader, a monarch who'd rather write than reign, Mr. Bennett has written a captivating fairy tale . . . that showcases its author's customary élan and keen but humane wit."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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Fieldwork

A Novel

Mischa Berlinski Picador

“With its offbeat style, Berlinski's consummate fieldwork—fictional though it may be—produces an intricate whodunit, both disturbing and entertaining. Even as he confesses to feeling ‘like the baton in a relay race of faulty memories and distant recollections,’ Berlinski meticulously unearths Martiya's ‘good story,’ taking readers on an intoxicating journey filled with missing souls and vengeful spirits.”—Terry Hong, The Washington Post

Reading Guide

Awards

National Book Awards - Finalist

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The Salon

Nick Bertozzi St. Martin's Griffin

"In the Paris of 1907, a salon of later famous Modernists—including Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Erik Satie and their sawed-off, potty-mouthed, frequently naked, hilariously arrogant acquaintance Pablo Picasso—discover a stash of secret blue absinthe that allows its drinkers to travel inside paintings, which may hold the key to the demonic creature who's been dismembering avant-gardists. The setting is fertile territory for speculative historical in-jokes, bawdy and action-packed set pieces—especially artistic experimentation in the tradition of its protagonists—Bertozzi plays it to the hilt . . ."—Publishers Weekly

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Natasha

And Other Stories

David Bezmozgis Picador

A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Commonwealth Prize

"An authority one usually finds only in more seasoned writers."—Meghan O’Rouke, The New York Times Book Review

Reading Guide

Awards

Guardian First Book Award - Nominee - Nominee
L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist - First Fiction

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The Gutenberg Elegies

The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

Sven Birkerts; With a New Introduction and Afterword Faber and Faber, Inc.

"Birkerts' argument is persuasive, not only in its content but in its manner. His writing, which questions and muses at the leisurely pace of human speech, and which evinces both intelligence and feeling, reveals a complex individual personality, providing that vertical kind of connectedness that a thousand e-mail messages cannot."—San Francisco Chronicle

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Art of Time in Memoir

Then, Again

Sven Birkerts Graywolf Press Paper

“Respected critic Birkerts has written an insightful appreciation of the memoir form, works that occupy a growing . . . place in our literary culture. Analyzing five ways different writers have chosen to transform their memories into coherent narrative, Birkerts discerns the underlying principle of the memoir form: balancing two perspectives by revisiting significant events in the past to discover a pattern in one's present life . . . The appeal of this slim volume lies in Birkert's graceful prose and lucid analysis.”—Publishers Weekly

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Words in Air

The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures—his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife . . . The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world."—William Logan, The New York Times

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Notes from No Man's Land

American Essays

Eula Biss Graywolf Press Paper

"I fought with this book. I shouted, 'Amen!' I cursed at it for being so wildly wrong and right. It's so smart, combative, surprising, and sometimes shocking that it kept me twisting and turning in my seat like I was on some kind of socio-political roller coaster ride. Eula Biss writes with equal parts beauty and terror. I love it."—Sherman Alexie

Trade Paperback : $15.99 Buy	Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories Terry Bisson Orb Books "Highly recommended . . . Brilliantly original . . . Every story showcases Bisson's keen intelligence and distinctive gift for deliciously wry prose."—*Booklist*

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The Savage Detectives

A Novel

Roberto Bolaño; Translated by Natasha Wimmer Picador

"When I began reading The Savage Detectives last month, I had already devoured the first three of Bolaño's books to arrive in English—two short novels, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, and the story collection Last Evenings on Earth—and become a devoted fan. But I was still unprepared for The Savage Detectives, the work that made his reputation when it first appeared in 1998, and for which he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Available now in a seamless translation by Natasha Wimmer, this novel is an utterly unique achievement—a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaño's unsettling mix of precision and mystery. It's a lens through which the strange becomes ordinary and the ordinary is often very strange."—Vinnie Wilhelm, San Francisco Chronicle

Bonus

Biographical Essay

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2666

A Novel

Roberto Bolaño Picador

"Bolaño was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as the head of the Swedish Academy has annoyingly but rightly pointed out, don't read much fiction in translation anyway. But when the first of Bolaño's major novels, The Savage Detectives, a massive, bizarre epic about a band of avant-garde Mexican poets, was published in the U.S. last year, it instantly became a cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics. Bolaño's second (and last) major novel is titled 2666, and if anything, it is even more massive and more bizarre. It is also a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year."—Lev Grossman, Time

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Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

The Authorized Adaptation

Tim Hamilton; Introduction by Ray Bradbury Hill and Wang

“A new adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic work Fahrenheit 451, with a fascinating and challenging new introduction by the author, is a vivid reminder of the special power of a graphic novel, of the genre’s ability to do things that words alone can’t . . . If you know the novel, you’ll still be thrilled by Tim Hamilton’s artwork in this new version, which combines a comic-book clarity—the panels are simple and straightforward, without the distraction of a lot of visual razzmatazz—with a deep, humane rendering of the novel’s theme.”—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

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Louis Riel

A Comic-Strip Biography

Chester Brown Drawn and Quarterly

"Louis Riel ties together all the ideas Chester Brown has explored before in disparate ways: the capriciousness and injustice of authority, the relationship between religious fervor and madness, and the relative 'truth' of nonfiction. Louis Riel, as told by Chester Brown becomes a deeply personal, utterly compelling page-turner in the guise of a 19th-century history book."—Time

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Conception

A Novel

Kalisha Buckhanon St. Martin's Griffin

"Conception is Buckhanon's second novel, a work of urban fiction that mixes the usual streetwise tales of woe with casual references to Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and the occasional bit of French . . . The heroine is 15-year-old Shivana, who lives in a Chicago slum and believes that most black women stumble blindly into the same painful trap: meet some man, believe his sweet talk, bear his offspring, then watch him leave . . . Shivana's own mother has followed this scenario, ending up bitter and alone . . . Shivana, seeking love in all the wrong places, finds herself pregnant by the first older man who smiles her way. The question of the novel thus becomes whether she will decide to terminate the pregnancy or to keep the unborn child . . . [Conception is] the work of a gifted young novelist."—Kim McLarin, The Washington Post