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March 13th, Unabridged Bookstore Newsletter <>

Wednesday, March 13th 2024

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New This Week:


Very good writers have an ability to make you understand what they're feeling. But the very best writers have an ability to make you understand what you're feeling. And that's where Michael Arceneaux sits, and that's what he does in this new book. It's like he's crawling around inside your head opening file cabinets and telling you what the gibberish you've scribbled on each page in each file means. What a great, fun read. — Shea Serrano


Returning to New Orleans with my favorite punk-rock nun is such a thrill. Sister Holiday is the best kind of detective: unafraid of the darkest parts of human nature, and yet constantly seeking the best in others. Douaihy blends edgy counterculture with sincere faith, violence and nihilism with genuine yearning for human connection, and grit with hope, all in one hell of a mystery. -Gillian Flynn



A TIME Most Anticipated Book - The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude--a moving tale of female desire and abandon


This funny, defiant, and passionate novel will make you want to play Patti Smith’s "Horses" at full volume as a soundtrack while you’re still reading. Some Strange Music Draws Me In is the coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.

— James Hannaham, author of Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta


Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For tracks a Black woman’s interiority with trenchant insight and puckish humor. Parker explores the epigenetic effects of structural anti-Blackness through her powerful meditations on loneliness and depression. She carves out her vulnerability with a poet’s scalpel. —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

Now in Paperback!

Staff Recommendations!

March Book of the Month:

Wandering Stars

by Tommy Orange


“In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange opens us up to these big lives full of hope and triumph and love and freedom—but then the world comes in, history comes in, drugs and nation and bullets and the big and small lonelinesses come in. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down, and that's what Orange is doing here. Anyone can say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but Tommy says the hardest things plain—beyond artifice, beyond confection. That clarity, that radical lucidity, that’s the mark of true genius, a word I use here without hyperbole. Think Kafka, Lispector, Borges. Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives, that makes remaining in the world feel a little more possible. It’s art of the highest order, written by one of our language’s most significant and urgent practitioners.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!


The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.


Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.


In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.

This Week's Bestsellers:

Upcoming Book Clubs!

To help support their fight for racial and economic justice in America, we at Unabridged have chosen to support the Equal Justice Initiative. Each month we will be making a donation and ask that you join us in supporting their work.


In light of recent book banning and censorship attempts in America, in 2024 we at Unabridged have chosen to support the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives in their work to collect, preserve, and make accessible the diverse history and culture of LGBTQ+ communities in Chicago and the Midwest. Each month we will be making a donation and we 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 2024, 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.

In 2024 we’re committing to continue this support, and adding another monthly contribution to help address the needs of new migrant arrivals in Chicago by supporting Project AMOR of the Instituto del Progreso Latino! We hope you will consider joining us to support the important work these organizations are doing for our community and across the country!

From the Book Waiting to Be Read on Your Bedside Table

by Sue D. Gelber,

read at Electric Lit!

8 New Literary Magazines that Advocate for Diversity and Inclusion 

by Kristina Busch,

read at Electric Lit!

New Tote Bags & Mugs

Now available for in-store pickup only!

Don't Forget - Buy a tote bag and get 10% off your purchase each time you visit the store!

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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