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Wednesday, January 13th 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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We would like all our customers to be aware that on Tuesday, 11/17, Governor Pritzker implemented stricter limited capacity rules for retail stores. Unabridged will now be operating at a maximum of 25% capacity, so you may have to wait outside before entering. With the health and safety of our customers and staff in mind, this is a great time to remind you of the fast and safe option of ordering online or by phone, and either pickup your order at the bookstore front door, curbside pickup, or have your order shipped to you, all without waiting in line!
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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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To honor the Black Lives Matter movement, and as part of our yearlong commitment to promoting the work of activists & organizations engaged in the fight against systemic racism, social injustice, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, we are contributing to Care for Real and Equal Justice Initiative 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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Book of the Week:
Detransition, Baby
by Torrey Peters
“An unforgettable portrait of three women, trans and cis, who wrestle with questions of motherhood and family making . . . Detransition, Baby might destroy your book club, but in a good way.”
-Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“Emotionally generous, richly textured, and deeply intelligent.”
-Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?
This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
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Hardcover
Book of the Month
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From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.
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Paperback
Book of the Month
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Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, delivers her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.
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Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell
“How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
In Cleanness, author Garth Greenwell returns to the narrator of What Belongs to You, and expands his survey of shame and longing. As he prepares for departure, the American teacher in Bulgaria recalls several incidents in his search for connection.
Cleanness defies easy categorization; the book eschews the structure of a traditional novel, and the chapters do not have the distinct nature of a collection of stories. Instead, this work of fiction, without a strict chronology, is built by the narrator’s memory of his encounters.
The passions of Cleanness have a patina of violence; wounds caused by sex and love show the consequences of lust, and the alienating effects of such hunger. There are explicit, and extreme, sexual encounters, and there is also tenderness. Greenwell describes an intimacy that makes strangers, to each other and to themselves, of those involved. Sexy, provocative, graceful, Cleanness is both brutal and beautiful. Matty recommends!
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Unworthy Rebublic
The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
by Claudio Saunt
Unworthy Republic is a hard, clear look at the ways Native Americans were dispossessed of their land in the decade after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the deeply intertwined causes of slavery and Native American expulsion and extermination in the south. It is a masterful, unsettling, urgently needed history of the forced migration of 80,000 Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s. Offering a much-needed corrective to the American canon, it shows how a heavy-handed President Jackson, a deadlocked Congress, a lust for profit, southern slaveholders, and northern financiers combined to construct a shameful national legacy. A damning synthesis of federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence, Saunt has written, with searing insight and narrative skill, an unflinching book that chronicles this shameful history, forcing a new reckoning with its legacy, while at the same time, using the historical record, exposing the grand myth of American exceptionalism. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Signed Books
We've got a limited number of signed copies in store now!
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With colder days ahead, and limited capacity shopping in-store, remember - you can call or order for pickup! Skip the line and we'll have your books ready for pickup at the door.
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Click through below to browse more of our favorite books!
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We're updating our website with pages dedicated to some of our favorite sections of the store so you can browse from home! Bestsellers, award winners, bundles of books to keep you reading - click below to browse!
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Our book clubs will resume regular monthly meetings in January! Remember that there is no membership or sign up required to attend our meetings - just pick up your copy of the book in the shop, and come ready for friendly discussion. To maintain a safe environment for discussion, book clubs will continue to hold meetings via Zoom.
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Winers Book Club
Monday, January 18th, 2021
*A club where no one takes themself too seriously*
Join us in reading fun and exciting YA and New Adult books every 3rd Monday of the month. Grab a glass of your favorite wine and be ready to laugh, chat, and discuss the new new! Email unabridgedbookstore@gmail.com, for more info!
This month's selection: This heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River. Join the Winers Book Club to discuss These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong on Monday January, 18th at 7:30pm!
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Fiction Book Club
Tuesday, January 19th, 2021
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!
This month's selection: Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Join the Fiction Book Club to discuss The Jungle by Upton Sinclair on Tuesday, January, 19th at 7:30pm!
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Queer Book Club
Tuesday, January 26th, 2021
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!
This month's selection: A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties, In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. Join the Queer Book Club to discuss In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado on Tuesday, January, 26th at 7:30pm!
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Read to your Plants!
Pick up your books here, then stop by the pop-up shop for 15% off during the month of January!
Or bring your new plant friend to see us, and get 10% off a new book!
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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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