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Wednesday, March 22nd 2023
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Regular Hours:
Open Everyday: 10am - 7pm
For online orders, you will be notified by email when your order is ready;
please wait for your confirmation email &
read carefully before coming to the store for pickup!
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Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn't predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride.
- Ling Ma, author of Severance
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Reading Poverty, by America, I felt like Matthew Desmond was sitting at my kitchen table, explaining the complexities of poverty in a way I could completely understand. This book is essential and instructive, hopeful and enraging.
- Ann Patchett
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This is a beautifully woven set of short stories, each of which are inspired by a beloved pop song.... It’s a compelling format with little margin for error and which, if executed correctly, works to magnificent effect. Thankfully, Garricks is a supreme storyteller, and he manages to take us on an absorbing tour of joy and loss. Each of his tales is to be savoured; each concept has the depth of a novel... a magical delight.
- Hari Kunzru, award-winning author of White Tears
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Utterly brilliant, hilarious, and original, these strange jewels. Anyone whose hand alights on this book and does not open it is missing out on the best work of our time.
- Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
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A taut and riveting tour behind the curtain of an America that is unknown to us, but in which we all live. Kerry Howley is an astute, funny, contemplative, and relentless guide whose eye misses nothing. I would follow her anywhere.
- Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and Body Work
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It feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X, Catherine Lacey somehow—magically—makes the nearly impossible look easy.
- Lauren Groff
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In these reports from America’s different corners there comes a feeling for why we’re so broken and what it might take to heal. Brilliant, lucid, incisive, meticulously reported—Jeff Sharlet is at his best here even when we are not.
- Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
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Bold, audacious, and stylish, Esther Yi is a marvelous writer who reminds me of Yoko Tawada and Marie NDiaye. Esther Yi takes our contemporary human culture, dismantles it, and makes it into something new. The clarity of her absurd vision is singular and important.
- Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
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I was wowed AND entertained by Rebecca Makkai’s new novel I Have Some Questions For You, a tale of justice gone (potentially) awry that is part literary murder mystery, part boarding school drama, part forensic whodunit, where a current class podcast project becomes the pretext for reopening a murder investigation of a crime that happened on campus 25 years ago. The campus setting makes for a swirling cauldron of innuendo, rumors, and shifting scenarios and a taut mystery that is compulsive and well-plotted, deftly balancing an extended cast of characters, while asking the question, “How can we ever truly know or discover the truth?” It is a riveting thriller that also challenges prevailing cultural values. Makkai brilliantly places the fictional murder in a societal context of violence against women, our obsession with true crime, the notion of contemporary justice in America, and the outsized impact social media has in our increasingly-online culture, making the story especially intriguing, thought-provoking and pertinent as it navigates today’s contemporary world of double standards, cancel culture, and the eroding boundaries and shifting lines of adolescence, grappling with the complex notions of empowerment, agency and victimization. Suspenseful and provocative, Ed loved and highly recommends!
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The enduring dignity it gives to so many facets of girlhood secures its place as a classic.
- Lauren LeBlanc, The Atlantic
In Joanne Greenberg's semi-autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia after attempting to take her own life and spends the next three years of her life in a psychiatric hospital, fighting to find a path back to sanity. Originally published in 1964 (a year after The Bell Jar), and now available in 2023 as a Penguin Classic, it stands as an enduring and unforgettable portrait of mental illness, a fearless coming-of-age novel in which Greenberg makes visceral the agony of psychosis, and the complex reality and justifications for retreating into the security of madness. I actually first read this novel in high school English class (50 years ago in 1971!) but I found it is even more resonant and astonishing rereading it today. The voice is raw, courageous, and at times breathtaking in describing the inner darkness of Deborah’s psyche, while at the same time holding a candle to ‘reality’ and the so-called ‘sane world’. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is neither glamorous nor tragic, but rather a timeless and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, is a classical pirate fantasy, set in a time period and a part of the world that are both rich in history and widely ignored by the genre. In the 12th century Indian Ocean, tales of the pirate Amina abound, but she is now 10 years retired after the birth of her daughter. However, when a rich, influential noblewoman finds her and extorts her into agreeing to rescue her kidnapped granddaughter from the clutches of an evil Frank sorcerer, Amina is drawn back into the life she thought she’d left forever. As she gathers her old crew and sets sail into the unknown, she realizes that the call to adventure is still strong, and maybe there is room in her life for more than survival in hiding. Action-packed, full of wondrous magic, and propelled by the sassy, competent, and magnetic voice of its protagonist, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is a fantastic pirate adventure that will leave you both satisfied, and eager for more! Simeon recommends!
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When her husband, Owen, vanishes after the Feds crack down on his tech company, Hannah is left with a bag of cash and instructions to protect her teenage daughter, Bailey. Though his disappearance seems akin to a confession, Hannah thinks otherwise. All she knows is that she needs to find Owen and discover the truth. Author Laura Dave takes the reader on a fast=paced thrill ride filled with great characters and a plot that kept me guessing. A solid suspense novel that delivers the goods, Owen (the bookseller) recommends!
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Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns is a steamy, action-packed, neo-Steinbeckian joyride, and Sam thinks you should read it!
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Miss Memory Lane, by Colton Haynes, is a haunting and vulnerable story of a child born different among adults battling their own demons. People who were in turn negligent, and taking advantage of him, instead of building him up. A journey of an adult who inherited all those demons as he tackled a world of cynicism and indifference, only to reach a point where the choice became one between his own sanity and death.
At times brutal and at other times painfully innocent, this memoir is an un-funhouse mirror in which one can see oneself just as easily as Colton himself. Some of us have been the ones objectifying him and so many others, with no concern for the humanity behind the chiseled abs and square jaw. Others have experienced the same soulless regard – a cumulative abusive coldness that a few individuals carry explicit blame for, yet we all partake in at times.
Miss Memory Lane is an ultimately hopeful experience, but one that leaves a scar. It is not an easy read, but it is a read you will come out of with more understanding and empathy than when you began.
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Trespasses is a remarkable, gripping, emotional and moving novel, set in a small town in Northern Ireland amidst the backdrop of ‘The Troubles’, where violence is inseparable from daily life, where its matter-of-fact-ness belies the calamitous effect it has on people’s lives. It is a human tale of love and troubled entanglements, a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community where there are no safe places and where no one is left untouched by the loss and grief and violence that informs daily life there. It’s a testament to Louise Kennedy’s authorial skill that we come to love and care so much about the characters, and with her fine-tuned sense of humor and pathos, and her marvelous attention to the small, quiet details in describing these characters and the texture of their world, the reader is drawn into a story that has a propulsive energy and rising sense of tension and emotional catharsis as it races towards its conclusion. The novel is at once beautiful and devastating, brilliant and unsettling. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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The Wingate Prize, started in 1977, is a literary award given to the best book, fiction or non-fiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader.
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In The Island of Extraordinary Captives, author Simon Parkin illuminates the long-ignored injustices of Britain’s World War II concentration camps by focusing on some of the prominent individuals confined at Hutchinson Internment Camp on the Isle of Man from 1940-1944. The book in general is a moving indictment of indiscriminate internment during wartime (most American are more familiar with the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans on the west coast during WWII), and specifically the even more absurd and cruel mass incarceration at the Hutchinson Camp--most of the detainees were themselves innocent asylum seekers (artists, intellectuals and Jews) seeking refuge from Nazi oppression in Germany! Taut and compelling, The Island of Extraordinary Captives brings history to life in vivid detail by focusing on certain individuals and each of their harrowing stories, including that of Peter Fleischmann, an orphan who, at 16 years old, came over to England from Germany as part of the Kindertransport, and then, at age 17, was interned at Hutchinson Camp as an “enemy alien”. And while the narrative makes clear how much these detainees suffered during their forced imprisonment, it also focuses on the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of great adversity, and on the remarkable resilience and creativity with which the internees responded. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Unabridged Bookstore’s Commitment to support
Anti-Racism & Reproductive Rights
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In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, in 2023 we at Unabridged have chosen to support 2 organizations in their fight for racial and economic justice in America. Each month we will be making a donation to the Equal Justice Initiative and Poor People’s Campaign and ask that you join us in supporting their work.
In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are at risk across the United States. In 2023, we at Unabridged have chosen to support 2 local organizations in the fight to protect a person’s right to choose. Each month we will be making a donation to The Chicago Abortion Fund and Midwest Access Coalition and ask that you join us in supporting their work.
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