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This summer is a season of change for us, friends. In June we bade goodbye to our beloved children's book buyer, Ianni. This month we welcome our new bookseller, Audie! Swing by and welcome her to the neighborhood when you have a chance.
We also have big news for book club enthusiasts: Our established book club, the Lakeview #LitSyndicate, will convene for the 50th time in August, and we've permanently rescheduled to the first Monday of each month . We're also thrilled to debut a brand new book club hosted by our very own golden-eyed commander of wishes, Matty. Read all about it below:
"Queers, rejoice! Now at Unabridged Bookstore, Chicago’s premier go-to-bookstore for the LGBTQ community, a new reading group to explore queer voices in literature! We will hold our first meeting on Monday, August 12 th at 7 pm, and continue to meet the 2 nd Monday of each month to discuss the “classics” of gay fiction, queer themes in contemporary writing, and everything in between. We’re kicking it off with a novel, and an author, remembered for causing much controversy upon publication in 1978: Larry Kramer’s Faggots has had a significant impact on gay culture, as well as queer literature, even after heavy criticism. Join us for our inaugural discussion of this controversial work! "
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See what's happening on our social sites:
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EARLY WARNING: Andr é Aciman will be joined in conversation for FIND ME 'S Chicago book launch on Friday, November 8th at the Nettelhorst School Auditorium! Tickets are available now and include a copy of the book. Purchase yours here .
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"In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love. In Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies." - FSG
Find Me will be released on Tuesday, October 29th.
In hardcover, fiction, 27.00; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
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The Lit Syndicate will meet to discuss Florence in Ecstasy on Monday, August 5th at 7PM.
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"A young woman arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But Hannah is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food―as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God. Hannah joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present: soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past―the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles. A vivid, visceral debut echoing the novels of Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, and Catherine Lacey, Florence in Ecstasy gives us an arresting new vision of a woman’s attempt to find meaning―and find herself―in an unstable world." - Unnamed Press
In paperback, fiction, 16.00; Unnamed Press.
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Our new queer book club will meet to discuss Faggots on Monday, August 12th at 7PM.
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"Graphically sexual and one of the most all-time best-selling gay novels, Faggots is the story of Fred Lemish, who at thirty-nine has built up his body into a fatless state of being in Great Shape. Lemish is ready to find Mr. Right. But from the Everhard Baths to the Pines on Fire Island to that place of myth and story, The Meat Rack, he is looking for his dream lover in all the wrong places. Faggots is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man’s desperate search for permanence, commitment, and love." - Grove Atlantic
In paperback, fiction, 16.00; Grove Press.
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Available July 16th!
The Nickel Boys is a potently concentrated drama pinpointing the brutality and insidiousness of Jim Crow racism, turning on the story of Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, and inspired by horrific events that transpired at the real-life Dozier School for Boys, brutalities that went on for over 110 years. The Nickel Boys is more than a litany of horrors; it is a vehicle where a whole brotherhood of broken boys finally get to tell their story, through the vividly created fictional characters of Elwood and Turner. Whitehead has succeeded in giving us a GREAT novel that ALSO instructs, showing us the backward wickedness that was America, but also showing us the way forward—how to survive trauma and oppression, how to maintain one’s personhood without being broken or permanently diminished. A powerful, devastating story, simply told, that dares to confront the past and jog our collective memory. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!
In hardcover, fiction, 24.95; Doubleday Books .
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Searching for a big, juicy novel to lose yourself in this summer? Look no further! The Most Fun We Ever Had is a multigenerational saga set against the backdrop of Chicago, Evanston and Oak Park. Lombardo slyly (& deliciously!) lampoons Chicago’s white suburban culture. She's a keen observer of human nature, and the dynamics among her characters are fine-tuned, beautifully wrought, and impressively realistic. This deeply satisfying portrait of a family is Chicago's answer to Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere . Katharine recommends!
In hardcover, fiction, 28.95; Doubleday Books.
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With the American ‘justice system’ in crisis, Emily Bazelon suggests a missing piece of the mass incarceration puzzle in Charged . With thorough reporting, Bazelon emphasizes the imbalance of power in the courts, how prosecutors wield nearly limitless influence in sentencing outcomes, and how the “tough on crime” mentality has adversely served the pursuit of justice. Bazelon follows the legal battles of Noura and Kevin, both maintaining their innocence though charged with violent crimes. Through their stories, and many others, she gives insight into mandatory minimum sentence laws, policing practices, District Attorney politics, etc., illustrating the way prosecutors manipulate charges, bail, plea bargains, and often simply intimidate those on the stand to inflate conviction rates.To counter this bleak state, Bazelon shares a sense of hope by highlighting the efforts of reform-minded DAs, those reinventing the job across the country. Particularly interesting and helpful is the appendix “Twenty-One Principles for Twenty-First Century Prosecutors.” This collaboration between the author and a number of legal professionals, academics, and activists includes practical recommendations and nationwide examples, and reads as a guide to those with a “vision for achieving mercy and justice. They are intertwined.” Matty recommends!
In hardcover, non-fiction, 28.00; W.W. Random House.
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In 1998, Patsy leaves her five-year-old daughter, Tru, behind in Jamaica after obtaining a visa to emigrate to the United States, both to live a new life and to reunite with her long lost friend/lover, Cicely. Both life in the United States and Cicely are not what she had hoped, and Patsy struggles with the indignities of living as an undocumented worker. Meanwhile, Tru is growing up in Jamaica and grappling with her own feelings of abandonment. Alternating between the two mother and daughter stories, Nicole Dennis-Benn has created a remarkably sensitive and complicated portrait about two people scarred both by each other and the American dream of a better life. There are so many layers of nuance in this soaring novel; woven within the emotional arcs of the characters are astute and compassionate explorations of black womanhood and queer sexualities. And though Patsy is about how the world sets some people up to fail, it’s ultimately about the journeys that people must take to survive and live on their own terms. A story of sacrifice, regret, self-determination, and freedom, Patsy is rich with imagery and bursting with longing and tenderness. This is an elegant, heart-wrenching, and wise book from an extraordinary writer. Shane loves!
In hardcover, fiction, 26.95; Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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From Lewis Hyde, “one of our country's greatest public thinkers” (Lawrence Weschler), A Primer For Forgetting is a brilliant, original, and provocative work which the author sees as a “thought experiment seeking to nominate places where forgetting is better than remembering,” where the goal is to live “steeped in history but not in the past,” where “forgetting is radical nonaction.” The author's collage of entries—richly drawn from philosophy, mythology, ancient and modern literature, religion, psychology, art, history as well as his own life—form a free association of juxtaposed anecdotes, stories, meditations, and aphorisms about the meaning of forgetfulness. An eclectic and insightful miscellany of playful, spirited, provocative reflections that is thought-provoking and poignant, an elegant exercise in philosophy and form celebrating “forgetting” as a force for social justice, creative potency, personal growth and healing trauma (both personal and collective.) ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!
In hardcover, non-fiction, 28.00; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
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Was unrequited desire the cause of Socrates' philosophical inquiries? Should the fiercely intelligent Aspasia be acknowledged as one of the founders of our philosophical tradition? using often overlooked, misinterpreted, and scattered ancient sources other than Plato and Xenophon, celebrated classicist, Armand D'Angour, paints a different picture of Socrates: that of a young man, brave soldier, athletic, and (oversexed) passionate lover, but also intense thinker. There's so much more: Alcibiades (of course!), the Samian expedition, Aristophanes... that add to the biography. This is not written for the scholar but for the average reader so don't be afraid to pick it up. I found it an absolutely delightful, engaging, and well researched read. "An erudite guide to the intellectual culture of the time." Ianni recommends!
In hardcover, non-fiction, 28.00; Bloomsbury Publishing.
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“Are we in control of our destiny, or do invisible forces manipulate us?” In Mac's Problem , Enrique Vila-Matas constructs his latest metafictional funhouse, a lively ride through a writer's mind. Mac, newly unemployed, takes up writing a diary, with one stipulation—that it NOT turn into a novel. But when Mac decides to rewrite an early novel of fellow Barcelona author Andre Sanchez (narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices!), Mac finds his stories have a strange way of imitating life—or is life imitating the stories?—and as the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality and more immersed in literature. Vila-Matas is a writer’s writer, and clearly relishes abandoning the traditional ideas on which the novel is built (“the novel is a medium that needs to adapt itself to the essential ambiguity of reality,”) filling Mac's Problem with tips and maxims for would-be writers, and references his own favorite authors (Pessoa, Borges, Samantha Schweblin, Poe, Hemingway, Jean Rhys, Bernard Malamud.) It is a playful, poignant, post-modern, part-surrealist, comical take on life imitating art imitating life (“fiction and reality, an old married couple,”) and how certain stories appear in our own lives and how the path they follow ends up merging with our own. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!
In paperback, fiction, 16.95; New Directions Publishing Corporation.
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A youthful Bujar runs away from home as his family and country fall apart. Agim, his best friend, must also flee after being caught in girl’s clothes. Years later we see an older Bujar, queer, transient, and alone. Statovci teases out the middle years, Bujar’s journey to escape Albania, and the fate of Agim. Crossing is full of legends and lies; the myths that Bujar’s father tells of their ancient homeland, Agim’s beliefs about the wider world, Bujar’s attempts to create a new life. Caught between heritage, desire, and collapse, they reject traditions: “Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw.” Bujar’s dissatisfaction forces him to try on new personas, he swims through multiple genders, nationalities, personal histories, and lovers. This romp, comic at times, devastating at others, takes him all over the world. In Crossing , there is satire, an aching alienation of each character, and a barely contained violence that erupts as humorous, even romantic, scenes take brutal turns. This is a story of exile – from country, from the body, from others. Here, human made borders dissect geography and sex, creating strict categories for the people they contain. Statovci writes of the consequences for the immigrants who would cross them. Matty recommends!
In paperback, fiction, 25.95; Pantheon Books.
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“Life is more than an economic venture,” says Jenny O’Dell in How To Do Nothing , where she rails against “the colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency” and the “financial incentivization of chatter,” calling instead for a radical refocusing of our attention, an aesthetic reconception of the world where attention isn’t monetized. She’s looking for an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety, a way to fill our lives with meaning, purposefulness and real connection, encouraging the reader to pay attention to the rich variety of the world as an antidote to the addictive products and platforms that technology provides and a commercial social media that mines our attention for profit. Besides her own arguments for balancing, prioritizing and resisting the demands for our attention, O’Dell offers insights from philosophers, psychologists, artists, technocrats and naturalists in a book that feels liberating to read. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!
In hardcover, non-fiction, 25.99; Melville House Publishing.
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After working on The Faggots and Their Friends for years and not finding an agreeable publisher, Larry Mitchell finally started his own press, Calamus books, and published this book in 1977. Long out of print, Nightboat books has finally reissued this cult classic which is simultaneously a time-capsule literary artifact and a timeless work of art. Both a fable and a queer declaration, this text perfectly straddles whimsy and beauty, humor and insight, escapism and revolutionary manifesto. Embodying many of the beliefs and secular spirituality of the later Radical Faerie movement, the anti- heteropatriarchal and anti- assimilationist politics of The Faggots and Their Friends is shockingly relevant today, and its explorations of chosen families, queer communities, and living and loving with complete freedom is inspiring. This book celebrates queer outlaws and outcasts, not despite of their marginalized status, but precisely because of it. Shane recommends this moving and magical little gem.
In paperback, fiction, 16.95; Nightboat Books .
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Now in paperback!
It's September in New York City at the dawn of the new millennium, and the unnamed protagonist of this pitch-black comedy is fatigued. This beautiful, recently orphaned twentysomething has fallen into a depressive spiral, and to her mind the path to reinvention is paved with narcotics. With the help of a prescription-happy, totally unhinged psychiatrist, she sets out to drug herself to sleep for the next year. Unburdened from the need to work by her late parents' fortune, the next months of her life are characterized by an unchecked drug binge, fueling her freewheeling nihilism and general disdain for humanity. This is a bleak book, but fortunately Moshfegh is an able humorist, and the story's cynicism is tempered by enough LOL-worthy moments to keep you chuckling throughout. A searing send-up of the conspicuous consumption of the late 1990s, MYOR&R encapsulates the rampant consumerism and internalized misogyny that plague American society to this day.
Katharine recommends this drily hilarious, mesmerizing novel.
In paperback, fiction, 16.00; Penguin Books.
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Now in paperback!
Frances Price, a sixty-five-year-old socialite (think Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development) gained infamy among the Manhattan élite twenty years ago for discovering the body of her husband in their bedroom and then going skiing for the weekend. Having burned through a vast fortune and to escape further scandal and insolvency, she flees to Paris with her adult son (“a lugubrious toddler of a man”.) Soon, a coterie of oddballs arrive to enliven the story and move the action along, often in comic, even ridiculous ways. While some readers will think that nothing much really happens (until the end), all will stay throughout for De Witt’s caustic social commentary, his magnificent wit, and crackling wordplay that skewers the affectations and hypocrisy of the upper classes. This DELICIOUS “Tragedy of Manners” sparkles with some of the vilest, most unlikeable, and pathetic characters. Sure, we wouldn’t want to hang out with them but we’d want to know how they end up anyway and may even, perversely, find ourselves rooting for them. IANNI RECOMMENDS
In paperback, fiction, 16.99; Ecco Press .
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Now in paperback!
Deborah Eisenberg's first new collection of short stories since 2006 addresses the depth and variety of human experience with clarity, tenderness, and humor. Eisenberg nimbly negotiates between her characters' shifting identities (private and public, personal and political, emotional and psychological), pinpointing sites of overlap and contradiction and plumbing them for all they're worth. I was consistently astonished by the wit and acuity permeating each of these stories. Katharine loves this book!
In paperback, fiction, 16.99; Ecco Press.
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Now in paperback!
Admittedly, this is not the kind of novel I usually read. But I was intrigued by the author’s biography (he wrote the book in prison, where he is serving 11 years for bank robbery) and the hype surrounding it proved irresistible. Semi-autobiographical, it chronicles the journey of a college kid in love turned heroic army vet with severe PTSD, who descends into a spiral of drugs and crime. Despite the criticism that there are no real character arcs or that the women are never fully realized, the rapid-fire and propulsive prose drew me right in. More than just a “junkie novel”, I found this to be a raw and devastating portrait of misplaced idealism, the senselessness of war and the horrors of untreated trauma and opioid addiction. Fans of Denis Johnson ought to read this astonishing debut! IANNI RECOMMENDS
In paperback, fiction, 16.95; Vintage.
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***Featured Backlist***
Find copies of Signs Preceding the End of the World on our Staff Picks shelf
Signs Preceding the End of the World is a slim but complex novel, a powerful and arresting feat of storytelling. This evocative Book concerns a young woman, Makina, and her border crossing from Mexico into the U.S. More than just a geographical transition, the story deals with many journeys and crossings, both literal and figurative, exploring the bonds of families, xenophobia, and the intersections of borders and cultures. Herrera's casual tone and seemingly simple, stark prose is bursting with poetry, rich and visceral, at once grounded yet surreal, beautiful and nightmarish. A soaring, multi-layered epic. Shane loves!
In paperback, fiction, 13.95; And Other Stories.
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