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Wednesday, August 10th 2022
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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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The Calendar Room is Open!
2023 Calendars and Planners are available now, with more arriving daily!
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Japan’s internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and everyday sorrows that surround us in everyday life
First published in Japan in 2003 and never before published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery.
Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is one betrayed by her fiancé who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle’s bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In “House of Ghosts,” the daughter of a yoshoku restaurant owner encounters the ghosts of a sweet elderly couple who haven’t yet realized that they’ve been dead for years. In “Tomo-chan’s Happiness,” an office worker who is a victim of sexual assault finally catches sight of the hope of romance.
Yoshimoto’s gentle, effortless prose reminds us that one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with, and that happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to pause and reflect. Discover this collection of what Yoshimoto herself calls the “most precious work of my writing career.”
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Mercury Pictures Presents examines the human lives swept up by the treacheries of war and colliding historical events in a dazzling, eye-opening novel set in 1940’s Hollywood. Anthony Marra, author of The Constellation of Vital Phenomena (an Unabridged Bookstore favorite!) is a gifted storyteller, and with wit, humor and tenderness gives us a marvelously smart, absorbing, affecting novel, rich in detail, that evokes all the glamour and contradictions of Hollywood in the 1940’s, set amidst the larger backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe and the jingoistic paranoia and censorship that was also enveloping America here at home. Moving between Mussolini’s Italy and 1940’s Hollywood, and centering around the Italian immigrant Maria Lagana, an associate Hollywood producer trying to keep her personal and professional life from falling apart, the novel tells the story of refugees and exiles and other bit players caught up in the sweep of history who land in Hollywood trying to reinvent themselves. Chock full of plot and a resilient and fascinating cast of characters, the book is as cinematic as the movie industry it describes, worthy of its own Hollywood script! Ed loved, loved and highly recommends!
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Intellectually vigorous, provocative, and emotionally stirring, an entertaining and thrilling treasure trove of ideas investigating the body and its consequences, Everybody is a penetrating examination of the body as battleground, the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies, as well as the relationship and centrality of bodies to freedom, pleasure, and power. Drawing ideas from art, music, literature, history, philosophy, and psychology, it is a thrill to watch Olivia Laing make her wide-ranging, brilliant, thought-provoking connections between the body and sex, illness, prison reform, pacifism, civil disobedience, queer activism, being non-binary, environmental direct action, and the power and purpose of protest culture, using for her inspiration a wide array of artists, activists and writers---Wilhelm Reich, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Marquis de Sade, Nina Simone, Agnes Martin, Ana Mendieta, Elias Canetti, Philip Guston, and gay civil rights leader and pacifist Bayard Rustin. Exhilarating, inspiring, and wonderfully readable, I felt enlivened after reading it! Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Nightcrawling is a remarkable debut novel, an accomplishment even more impressive when you look at the author’s backstory-- at age 16, Leila Mottley was named Oakland youth poet laureate, began writing Nightcrawling at age 17, and had it published just before she turned 20, and is now longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize! It is a dazzling and electrifying novel set in the streets of Oakland, gut-wrenching, eloquent, gritty, and suspenseful, a compelling meditation on the powerless, where 18-year-old Kiara tries to navigate the darkest corners of an adult world filled with institutional brutality and corruption and a visceral sense of hopelessness. “Strut, fly, gallop,” Kiara tells us, “There are so many ways to walk a street, but none of them will make you bulletproof.” Nightcrawling is an unflinching portrait of a young, black woman desperately struggling to survive a world of sexual violence, fractured families and interrupted childhoods, a searing testament to the explosive power of storytelling in revealing devastating truths. Ed loved and highly recommends!
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If you want to know a place, you talk to its history.
-Percival Everett, The Trees
A nation’s violent past refuses to be buried in Percival Everett’s new novel The Trees, one of the wildest novels I’ve ever read! Hinging on a series of confounding and gruesome murders in the town of Money, Mississippi (that somehow harken back to the murder of Emmett Till,) The Trees is an amazing feat to pull off--a balancing act between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy, confronting America’s legacy of lynching in a mystery that somehow is at once hilarious and horrifying, where dark social satire bleeds into horror, a rising-up reminiscent of zombie movies that is also a racial allegory grounded in history, shrouded in mystery, and dripping with blood—hard to put down and impossible to forget! It is about the ghosts of the past coming back to haunt us, about our willful ignorance of that past, about retributive justice, about racial violence and moral outrage (or the lack thereof), all in a novel that is darkly comic (laugh-out-loud funny even, Everett has a lot of fun with wordplay and people and place names!), and is powerful, poignant, and provocative. “A highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, and humor” (NPR), longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and one of my favorite novels of the year, Ed loved and highly recommends!
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Thanks to all who joined us for Our Year with Toni Morrison in 2021! In 2022, we're continuing the annual reading initiative with George Orwell, so read along with us each month! Orwell’s fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has assured his contemporary and future relevance. A fierce opponent of authoritarianism, George Orwell is especially relevant in our own Orwellian times, where we have to look no further than Ukraine to witness what a totalitarian dictator is capable of destroying. Each month we will feature, and discount 10%, one of the author's books, alternating between fiction and nonfiction.
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George "Tubby" Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman, a job at which he grimly excels, dutifully paying the mortgage on an average English suburban row house, and supporting an ungrateful family. As the years roll by, he comes to feel like a hostage to his wife and children, regarding them as wardens and himself as a prisoner.
One day, after winning some money from a bet at the races, George steals away from his family to visit the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF—the perfect ending to his failed escape.
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In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Unabridged Bookstore made an ongoing commitment to each month support and contribute to organizations that work towards achieving racial justice in America. Since June 2020, Unabridged has contributed over $26,000 to 26 difference 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.
To honor the Black Lives Matter movement, and as part of our commitment to promoting the work of activists and organizations engaged in the fight for environmental justice and against systemic racism, social injustice, hunger, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, we choose to support the Legal Defense Fund and Transgender Law Center this August:
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In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, we at Unabridged are renewing our support for the work of activists and organizations engaged in progressive causes.
We will continue to honor the Black Lives Matter movement with our monthly effort to highlight and donate to those engaged in the fight for social, environmental, and economic justice, and with reproductive rights at risk across the US, we will make an additional, monthly contribution to Chicago Abortion Fund and Midwest Access Coalition.
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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!
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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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