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Wednesday, November 24th 2021
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Some email providers, including Gmail, may "clip" this newsletter.
To view our complete newsletter, click "view entire message" at the bottom of your screen!
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The City of Chicago has announced new guidelines, and will now require masks to be worn indoors regardless of vaccination status beginning Friday, August 20th.
Regular Hours:
Open Everyday: 10am - 7pm
for In-Store Shopping and Pickup!
For orders placed online, 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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The annual Small Business Saturday is November 27th, 2021. As a thanks for shopping at Unabridged Bookstore, everyone gets 10% off purchases in-store and online, all day long! We will be featuring our favorite books of the year, and debuting our newest Tote Bags designed by David Lee Csicsko! Visit us for the perfect reading recommendations for everyone on your shopping list!
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Counting down to the end of the year and picking our top books of 2021
Scroll on to read about some of the staff's favorite books of the year,
and click below for the whole list!
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This is the love story of Fly, a Black American musician, and Stela, a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, in 21st century New York City. But of course it's not so simple as that. In Monster in the Middle, Tiphanie Yanique has created a story cycle which breaks open the usual love story (something that happens only between two people) and invites in the whole village (and all the past villages, too!). Like a mash-up of Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, this book weaves an intricate web of micro and macro level stories. As much an exploration of form as it is of love, this story cycle feels like an open-faced clock with countless tiny gears. It's tough – but also complex, rich, and shimmering. Audie recommends!
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This urgent and mesmerizing collection explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in poems that range from sincere to slyly humorous to audacious. In a voice as distinct as it is forthright and full-throated, Long examines the complications that can arise in mixed-race families and relationships the generationally inherited traumas of anti-Black racism and violence, and the lingering effects of European colonialism on Black and brown bodies. Dazzling, revelatory, and deftly lyrical, My Darling from the Lions announces an incandescent new voice in contemporary poetry.
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Whereabouts offers a window into the interior life of an unnamed, solitary narrator in her forties who teaches at a university and lives alone in an unnamed Italian city. Lahiri’s disarmingly simple sentences draw you in, and the short, staccato chapters add up to a satisfying, cohesive whole, a complex portrait of a woman profound in its simplicity. Through her everyday observations, remembrances, and reflections, whether describing life in the piazza below her window or a sunrise above her rooftop, this evocation of the narrator’s inner life over the arc of four seasons comprises a snapshot of a quiet life that is a hymn to the quotidian. Lahiri, who now lives in Italy, wrote this book in Italian, and translated it herself into English; it represents a new level of artistic achievement for the author, one in which each sentence is to be savored, where we the reader can delight in the gift of her use of language, a book to be read for the pure joy of reading. (One reviewer called “each word a gleaming gemstone,” and another said it “elevates the quotidian to the sublime.”) Ed loved and highly recommends!
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The world had become something no school child should be allowed to discover.
Like what he did in his brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory, Richard Powers now gives us a new, even more deeply personal take on the growing environmental catastrophe that is engulfing us in his newest novel Bewilderment. At the heart of this book is the ferocious love between a father and a son, between Theo and Robin, and what it means to be truly human, to truly possess the emotional intelligence necessary to see the universe around us with all the awe, fascination, and wonder of a child, and what it might mean to lose that childlike sense of ‘bewilderment’. The book is both beautiful and heartbreaking, touching upon the weighty themes of loneliness, tragedy, and grief, but also an example of how great storytelling can build understanding and empathy, and how it can make personal the political. Even more nuanced, vivid, and haunting than Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (who Richard Powers credits for the inspiration for this novel in a moving introduction!), Ed loved and highly recommends!
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In Harlem Shuffle, 2-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead takes us on a wild ride in pursuit of the American dream. It is Harlem, 1959, and Ray Carney is just trying to provide for his family, an “upstanding” businessman selling used furniture out of his shop on bustling 125th Street, yet not adverse to selling the odd piece of stolen goods that may have just fallen off the truck (he’s “only slightly bent when it comes to being crooked.”) But Ray can’t quite wrest free of his criminal roots, getting further entangled in the schemes of his cousin Freddie, and drawn further into a world of grudges and payback and con jobs and heists that never go as planned, discovering just how much grabbing a piece of the American dream will cost him. The world of NYC and Harlem in the early 1960’s is all perfectly recreated here in loving detail, and readers will be captivated by a Dickensian-cast of colorful, idiosyncratic characters--con men and two-bit hustlers, uptown hoods and the downtown powers-that-be, corrupt police officers and regular folks just trying to get by. The dialogue, plotting, pacing, storytelling, imagery—it all works, a love letter to Harlem that also serves as a morality tale about the elusive promise of getting ahead in America. Wildly entertaining and a joy to read, Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Part of what makes this book so radiant is Simard’s conceptualization of “The Mother Tree”-- an old-growth matriarch standing at the center of the forest that acts as a hub of nutrients shared by trees of different ages and species linked together via a vast underground mycorrizal fungal network. Her scientific arguments are elegantly detailed here alongside a deeply personal memoir, her family story and that of the forest tightly interwoven, part enthralling scientific study, part luminous storytelling, a love letter to trees that is also a poem of gratitude to her ancestors. Join the author on her deeply personal journey of scientific/self-discovery, learning about how forests grow, the effects of clear-cut logging, cooperation and collaborative relationships in the forest, ecosystem disruption, how forest ecosystems are similar to human societies, and how forests are complex adaptive systems where trees have agency—how they perceive, relate, communicate, cooperate, and recognize kin. All quite remarkable! Diversity matters. Everything is connected. Take this “walk in the woods” with Suzanne Simard and it will forever change the way you look at trees and forests. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Complicated intimacies, layers of big feeling, and scenes of quiet beauty offer witness to trans women as they approach and struggle with adulthood in this new suite of short stories from Casey Platt. Immediately accessible and deeply moving, this is a gorgeous collection about desire, temporality, and love.
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We became a different kind of wallflower—not shrinking violets but judgmental pansies.
Investigating the relationship between a place and a sense of identity, Jeremy Atherton Lin takes a tour through the gay bars of his own nights out, and the queer spaces of our shared past. Memoir, travelogue, history text; this book is a horny, glitter-covered mashup. Poetic and personal, philosophical and political, Gay Bar is both a bar crawl through the author’s memories and a record of queer community’s need of a home.
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This is an engrossing “killer on the loose” whodunit thriller, set at a posh resort in the Swiss Alps, during a blizzard. A bit gruesome, very suspenseful, and ideal for a snowy weekend.
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I absolutely love this charming and heartfelt collection of interlinked stories by Jaime Cortez. Set in 1970s California at a migrant workers’ camp, the reader follows Gordo, a young, Mexican American boy coming of age. Cortez’ talent lies in using Gordo’s innocence and misfit antics to deal insightfully and sensitively with complex issues (homophobia, bullying, classism, xenophobia), while still keeping things entertaining. It’s a tricky tightrope walk between comedy and tragedy, joy and heartbreak, and Cortez navigates this beautifully. There is just so much life, compassion, vulnerability, and emotional honesty bursting from every page of this incredible collection.
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Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters, is an exercise in stark contrasts. Deliciously wicked, and unapologetically vulnerable. Kinky, while centered on family. At once revealing, and respectful of boundaries, it is an insider’s look into the lives of two trans women, and the messy way in which those lives intertwine. Reese and Amy used to be a couple. Until Reese nuked the relationship, setting a course for Amy’s detransitioning. Years later Amy - now Ames – pulls his ex-lover out of her ironically aware self-destructive life to offer her the one thing she believes will truly make her a woman – a child that he inadvertently conceived with his cis hetero female boss. Torrey Peters takes a hard look into the edgier aspects of trans identity, from fetish culture to the fraught subject of detransition. And she does this without stumbling into voyeurism or salaciousness. But also without looking away from the harder conversations. Detransition, Baby is a sexy and provocative look into the quest for self-discovery of queer families, and an absolute gem of a novel.
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Signed Copies back in stock!
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List Price: $50.00
20% Off Pre-Orders: $40.00!
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List Price: $100.00
20% Off Pre-Orders: $80.00!
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List Price: $89.95
20% Off Pre-Orders: $71.96!
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In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
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A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.
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The gripping story of the year that transformed the Supreme Court into the court of Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning law columnist for The New York Times
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The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America
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Remember that there is no membership requirement to attend our meetings - just pick up your copy of the book in the shop, and come ready for friendly discussion!
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*A club for all things speculative – from Science Fiction, to Fantasy, and maybe even a pinch of Horror*
Join us every 1st Tuesday of the month for a serious discussion of cool speculative works, or to just geek out over the pewpewlaserbeam! From cutting edge to classics, the goal is to have fun and explore as far as exploration will go!
TThis month's selection: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin! Join the Speculative Book Club on Tuesday, December 7th at 7:30pm!
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Join our Fiction Book Club in a monthly meeting to discuss a wide array of literary fiction. With an eclectic mix of authors, themes, periods, and styles, this group will explore both classic and contemporary literature. Email matt@unabridgedbookstore.com for more info, or click here to sign up.
Join the Fiction Book Club to discuss The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek on Wednesday, Dec. 8th at 7:30pm!
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A reading group focusing on literature through a queer lens, hosted monthly at Chicago’s premier bookstore for the LGBTQ+ community. Alternating between the “classics” of gay fiction and contemporary, historically underrepresented voices, we read to explore queer experience across literary genres and eras! Email matt@unabridgedbookstore.com for more info, or click here to sign up.
This month's selection: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune! Join the Queer Book Club on Wednesday, Dec. 15th at 7:30pm!
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It has been over a year since the murder of George Floyd, and over a year since Unabridged Bookstore made an ongoing commitment to each month support and contribute to organizations that work towards achieving racial justice in America, as well as promoting social, environmental and economic justice. From June 2020 thru May 2021, Unabridged Bookstore has contributed over $22,000 to 21 different organizations, and we are now re-dedicating our ongoing commitment to support these kinds of organizations each month. Thank you for joining us in this commitment.
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To honor the Black Lives Matter movement, and as part of our commitment to promoting the work of activists & organizations engaged in the fight for environmental justice and against systemic racism, social injustice, hunger, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, we are contributing to Broadway Youth Center and Project Nia this month. Click above to read more about each organization and how they work to achieve meaningful and lasting change in our community, then make your own contribution! For more info about previous months' partnerships, and to read our full statement, click here!
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Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
This year we are celebrating the life and legacy of Toni Morrison with a monthly reading initiative. Among her many honors, Morrison was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also the first black female editor at Random House before gaining acclaim for her own writing. This month's featured title is Home:
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black man
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purpose in search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and--above all--what it means to come home.
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The National Book Foundation was founded in 1989 to administer the National Book Awards, which has been one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the country since 1950. The Foundation also produces numerous educational and public programs that help connect readers to books in new and meaningful ways. Congratulations to this year's winners!
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In the fall and spring of each year, the One Book program offers Chicagoans the opportunity to come together around a thought-provoking book and its related themes. A deeply engaging debut novel about a morality clash in an insular Chicago neighborhood, Bedrock Faith is the 2021 One Book, One Chicago title, selected by the Chicago Public Library!
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Gift Cards are available for purchase on our website, by phone, and in-store, and can be used to shop the same ways! We can mail a gift card to you, to your friends and family, or we can hold it here in the shop where it will be ready on your next visit. Click here to send a Gift Card!
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Another great way to support indie bookstores, sign up at Libro.fm! Check out this list of featured audiobooks, and Libro.fm will give 100% of the sale to support Unabridged!
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And don’t forget to share what you’re reading! Follow us and share your thoughts on:
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