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Big Shipments every week! Stop by today and check them out. More to come (updated 7/12/10) ...
Ed loved MOTHER'S MILK - of the 6 Booker Prize finalists that year it was his favorite. The complexities of inheritance (both material and psychological) drive this chronicle of familial and generational change. The dialogue crackles with wit - the family's horrorstruck "rediscovery" of America is priceless. From the opening scene (a remarkable account of being born) to the last scenes (dealing with assisted suicide) The novel is fulol of wit and intelligence and laughter! MOTHER'S MILK is elegant, profound and bittingly funny; it is a small masterpiece!
China - too daunting, too intimidating to tackle as a travel subkect?? Not for J. Maarten Troost, our favorite gonzo traveler and author of THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS. In yet another comic masterwork of travel writing, Troost brilliantly blends humor with insight, history with personal experience, all with a healthy dose of irreverence and a dash of caustic cynicism! Move over Billy Bryson and Paul Theroux -- make way for the edgy wit and irreverently funny style of J. Maarten Troost. Ed loved, loved, loved it! Highly recommended.
Jim Shepard delivers another smashing success of a short story collection. Shepard has the ability to take far-flung/removed settings and transform them into an intimate embrace. Chernobyl, Hadrian's Wall, the Australian Outback - they all mean something and everything. Every story is a tight-knit unit that you never want to end. Brilliant! Stefan highly recommends. (If you love this collection read LOVE AND HYDROGEN by Shepard)
"You were a self-effacing young man - a perfect waiter" cites a character in A PERFECT WAITER, a novel set around a genteel Swiss lakeside hotel just before Hitler's rise to power. With the outside world in the grip of convulsive change, so too is the meticulously ordered world of Erneste and Jakob, young lovers and fellow waiters at the hotel. The grand traditions of an earlier era are coming to an end, and we can almost feel how likewise the love between Erneste and Jakob cannot last. Filled with passion and palpable longing, love, obsession and various betrayals, the novel is elegantly written and quite erotic. Ed loved it! Highly recommended.
"Get acquainted with the most enchanting debut novel of the summer! Written over a decade by the heretofore unknown David Wroblewski and arriving as a bolt from the blue, this is Great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as classic Americana. Absent the few dates and pop-cultural references, its unmannered style, emotional heft and sweeping ambition would it timeless." -- from Janet Maslin of the New York Times.
Rosemary Mahoney was determined to take a solo trip down the hile in a small row boat, and this travel memoir is the evocative account of that adventure. She is an erudite travel companion, and juxtaposes her own thoughts with diary entries from fellow Nile travelers Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale, among others. Ed found this a fascinating and enlightening read before his own trip to Egypt! Ed recommends!
Eula, Idaho, is a cluster of steeples, oak trees, and boxlike homes sandwiched between golden fields and a wide-open sky. It freezes in the winter and bakes in the summer, but the air is so dry that neither extreme gets under your skin. It has never seen a battle, or an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall. Still, life in Eula is anything but simple. Lina and Connie are single mothers, neighbors in Eula's trailer park. Lina, the daughter of migrant Mexican farm workers, is trying to cope with her angry teenage son JesUs, newly returned after living with wealthy white foster parents. Connie, long abandoned, struggles with her literal reading of Old Testament laws against remarriage, especially when a handsome missionary visits her congregation. The women's younger sons, Enrique and Gene, are misfits whose mutual love of science offers stability and respite from schoolyard cruelties. Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving "lake overturn," a real scientific phenomenon in which deadly gases collect and eventually erupt from a lake's depths. In their quest to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals, including the frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a rich but lonely lawyer who finds love outside his marriage just as his wife is succumbing to cancer, and a woman tortured by a past of abuse and addiction who decides to turn things around by offering herself as a surrogate mother. With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.
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MOTHER'S MILK by Edward St. Aubyn
LOST ON PLANET CHINA by J. Maarten Troost.
LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY by Jim Shepard.
A PERFECT WAITER by Alain Claude Sulzer.
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE by David Wroblewski.
DOWN THE NILE by Rosemary Mahoney.
LAKE OVERTURN by Vestal McIntyre|
Copyright 2006, Unabridged Bookstore |