 Check out the site: www.worldwithoutus.com
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
>> Read an Excerpt
The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists – who describe a pre-human world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths – Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn’t depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly-readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.
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We are currently in the process of an expansion that will double the size of BookCourt.
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Coming soon:
Sale Books & Remainders on basement level
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All Non-Fiction titles moved to ground level
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A dedicated events space for readings & performances
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Triple the amount of children’s books
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Small cafe & bar with an accompanying outdoor garden
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Every book section expanded as well as new ones added
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WE THANK YOU!
CHECK OUT the BookCourt Expansion PHOTO GALLERY-Click Here
Related press on what we’re doing:
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
THE BROOKLYN PAPER
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Please come and drink some champagne with us tonight as we celebrate the release of Jonathan Lethem’s newest, You Don’t Love Me Yet. Jonathan will be here to sign copies! This is a 24 hour notice event.
MONDAY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT …. OR, Way, way early on Tuesday at 12AM.
YOU DON’T LOVE ME YET
From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art.
Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting—and fall desperately in love.
Consumed by passion, Lucinda manages only to tear herself away from the Complainer to practice with the alternative band in which she plays bass. The lead singer of the band is Matthew, a confused young man who works at the zoo and has kidnapped a kangaroo to save it from ennui. Denise, the drummer, works at No Shame, a masturbation boutique. The band’s talented lyricist, Bedwin, conflicted about the group’s as-yet-nonexistent fame, is suffering from writer’s block. Hoping to recharge the band’s creative energy, Lucinda “suggests” some of the Complainer’s philosophical musings to Bedwin. When Bedwin transforms them into brilliant songs, the band gets its big break, including an invitation to appear on L.A.’s premiere alternative radio show. The only problem is the Complainer. He insists on joining the band, with disastrous consequences for all.
Brimming with satire and sex, “You Don’t Love Me Yet “is a funny and affectionate send-up of the alternative band scene, the city of Los Angeles, and the entire genre of romantic comedy, but remains unmistakably the work of the inimitable Jonathan Lethem.
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The new Haruki Murakami novel, After Dark, will be on sale May 14th, 2007
$22.00 -10% Hardcover Knopf / Random House
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “Kafka on the Shore.”
At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.
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THESE NEW TITLES JUST IN!
Wholphin No. 3: DVD Magazine of Rare and Unseen Short Films
by Brent Hoff
$15.95 DVD McSweeney’s Publishing
This third issue of Wholphin features the early, rediscovered work of Alexander Payne and Dennis Hopper; new-found talent from abroad, including Jonas Odell and Alice Winocour; the strangest Japanese film we’ve ever seen, from the three-man directing team Naisu No Mori; a documentary about a thirteen-year-old Yemeni girl who refuses to wear her veil; and “The Popcorn Effect” of trap-jaw ants.
This issue also includes a bonus disc featuring Part Two: “The Phantom Victory” of Adam Curtis’s powerful documentary, The Power of Nightmares.
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Nine Novels by Younger Americans
by Sara Bradshaw, Rachel Barber, Daniel Cowen, Sarah Meira Rosenberg, Dylan Suher, Lucas Gonzalez, Julia Mayer, Carolyn Maughan, and Samantha Lipman.
With a forward by Richard Powers
Paperback $18.00 826 Books
This anthology collects nine exceptional novels that were written by high school students from New York City during the summer of 2005 in 826NYC’s Young Adult Writers’ Colony. Ranging from comedic, to fiercly political, to deeply personal, these novels are immensely entertaining and forecast a bright future for this brand new generation of novelists. As novelist Richard Powers says in his foreword, “There comes a time when we must decide whether we love the world enough to hand it over to its next lover . . . [This is a book of] nine worlds that nine people could not find and so had to make themselves. Here it is before you: how the story ends this time. And how it starts again.”
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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Paperback $13.95 Random House
Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This book is a memoir of Dunne’s death, Quintana’s illness, and Didion’s efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense. “She’s a pretty cool customer,” one hospital worker says of her, and, certainly, coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion’s writing. The other part was the dark side of cool, the hyper-nervous awareness of the tendency of things to go bad. In 2004, Didion had her own disasters to deal with, and she did not, she feels, deal with them coolly, or even sanely. This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it’s also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.
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Ten Days in the Hills
by Jane Smiley
Hardcover $26.00 -10% Random House
 A glorious new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner: a big, smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship and betrayal—and the allure of the movies. With Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” as her model, Jane Smiley takes us through ten transformative, unforgettable days in the Hollywood hills.It is the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards. Max—an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned—and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy from last night’s red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq, recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and guests like these demand attention. There is Max’s ex-wife, “the legendary Zoe Cunningham,” a dazzling half-Jamaican movie star, with her new lover, the enigmatic healer, Paul (fraudulent? enlightened?). Max’s agent, Stoney, a perhaps too easygoing version of his legendary agent father, can’t stay away, and neither can Zoe and Max’s daughter, Isabel, though she would prefer to maintain her hard-won independence. And of course there is the next-door neighbor, Cassie, who seems to know everyone’s secrets.
As they share their stories of Hollywood past and present, watch films in Max’s opulent screening room, gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms, the tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers an exquisitely woven, virtuosic work—a Hollywood novel as only she could fashion it, told with bravura, rich with delightful characters, spiced with her signature wit. It is a joyful, sexy, and wondrously insightful pleasure.
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The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
Paperback $20.00 Random House
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Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
Paperback 13.95 Random House
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New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century
by Jed Perl
Paperback $18.95 Random House
In this landmark work, Jed Perl captures the excitement of a generation of legendary artists–Jackson Pollack, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly among them–who came to New York, mingled in its lofts and bars, and revolutionized American art. In a continuously arresting narrative, Perl also portrays such less well known figures as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, and the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, as well the writers, critics, and patrons who rounded out the artists’world.Brilliantly describing the intellectual crosscurrents of the time as well as the genius of dozens of artists, “New Art City” is indispensable for lovers of modern art and culture.
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Changing Light: A Novel
by Nora Gallagher
Hardcover $22.00 -10% Pantheon
 Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel, “Changing Light”, is a love story set in Los Alamos during the summer of 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.During the last summer of the war, in the beautiful New Mexico desert, a man and a woman come together: Eleanor Garrigue, a young painter from New York, and Leo Kavan, a neutron physicist. The story begins when Eleanor finds a delirious man lying by the river near her house. She takes him in and cares for him. In this novel of secrets, we learn before Eleanor does that Leo is AWOL from Los Alamos after witnessing a fatal radiation accident that has forced him to confront the moral implications of his work on the bomb. And we know, too, what Leo does not know: Eleanor is married, and has fled to New Mexico to escape her husband.
As Eleanor and Leo slowly reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady art world in New York to Einstein’s Berlin, from the bomb labs in the English countryside to the hidden city of Los Alamos. Nora Gallagher perfectly evokes the veil of secrecy and tension surrounding the Manhattan Project, the constant hum of fear alongside the remarkable fearlessness of the scientists in the laboratories.
As Leo and Eleanor privately struggle with the losses the war has pitched into their lives, the two find unexpected solace in each other. Their story is all the more poignant because it can only flourish in a brief interlude–an interlude of brilliant madness and irrevocable change. As the scientists engage in literally “changing light,” Leo and Eleanor are connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.
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Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World
by Margaret Macmillan
Hardcover $27.95 -10% Random House
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This is Hong Kong
by Miroslav Sasek
Hardcover $17.95 -10% Universe
 Like the other Sasek classics, this is a facsimile edition of the original book. The brilliant, vibrant illustrations have been meticulously preserved, remaining true to his vision more than 40 years later. Facts have been updated for the 21st-century, appearing on a “This is . . . Today” page at the back of the book. These charming illustrations, coupled with Sasek’s witty, playful narrative, make for a perfect souvenir that will delight both children and their parents, many of whom will remember the series from their own childhoods. “This is Hong Kong”, first published in 1965, captures the enchantment and the contrasts of Hong Kong in the sixties. Roaring jets bring in the tourists; bamboo rickshaws taxi them through exotic streets fragrant with incense, roasting chestnuts, and honey-glazed Peking duck. Sasek shows you the sweeping panorama of gleaming Kowloon Bay framed by misty mountain ridges, then moves in for close-ups of laborers and hawkers, refugees from the mainland, and sailors of flame-red junks, and the strange “water people” who, it is said, never set foot on dry land.
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This is Rome
by Miroslav Sasek
Hardcover $17.95 -10% Universe
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Thanks for reading!
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THESE JUST IN:
Photo by Sammy Davis, Jr. by Burt Boyar
Hardcover $49.95 -10% Published by Regan Books
 Sammy Davis Jr.—iconic, legendary, in a word, classic. While the world has long known of Davis’s unparalleled abilities to sing, dance, and act, only his closest friends and associates knew of his amazing talent and passion for photography. Now, in this collection of never-before-seen photos, Burt Boyar, Davis’s longtime friend, exposes these memorable images for generations of his fans, portraying a side of Davis that has long remained a secret to the world at large. Here are Davis’s candid shots including his closest friends—Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Sean Connery, and Paul Newman—not to mention scores of the twentieth century’s biggest stars captured at their most casual and revealing moments.
But beneath this public veneer is also a strikingly private side of Davis, one that gives a glimpse into his difficult past and long road to success. Tracing Davis from his humble origins, the moments captured here demonstrate the struggle that he faced as an African-American performer during racially divided times and show the difficulties of being one of the country’s most revered celebrities when his mere presence signaled the changes taking shape across America.
Accompanying these unforgettable images are Boyar’s intimate remembrances of Davis, as he gives a history and a context for many of Davis’s striking photographs. Together with the photos, Boyar’s words offer a side of the performer far removed from his Rat Pack persona—one that is at once touching and fascinating.
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Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage
by Pete Dexter
Hardcover $25.95 -10% Published by Ecco
 In the 1970s and 1980s, before he earned national acclaim for his award-winning novels, Pete Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, Dexter cut directly to the heart of the American character at a time of national turmoil and crucial change. With haunting urgency, his columns laid bare the violence, hypocrisy, and desperation he saw on the streets of Philadelphia and in the places he visited across the country. But he reveled, too, in the lighter side of his own life, sharing scenes with the indefatigable Mrs. Dexter, their young daughter, and a series of unforgettable creatures who strayed into their lives. No matter what caught Dexter’s eye, it was illuminated by his dark, brilliant humor.
Collected here for the first time are eighty-two of the best of those spellbinding, finely wrought pieces—with a new introduction by the author—assembled by Rob Fleder, editor of the bestselling “Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Book”. “Paper Trails” is searing, heart-breaking, and irresistibly funny, sometimes all at once. As Pete Hamill says in his foreword, these essays “are as good as it ever gets.”
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The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory
by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page
Hardcover $26.95 -10% Published by Collins
 Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. In fact, recent research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality.
The field of archaeology has changed dramatically in the past two decades, as women have challenged their male colleagues’ exclusive focus on hard artifacts such as spear points rather than tougher to find evidence of women’s work. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer are two of the world’s leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving. In “The Invisible Sex”, the authors present an exciting new look at prehistory, arguing that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.
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The Collected Poems: 1956-1998
by Zbigniew Herbert
Hardcover $34.95 -10% Published by Ecco
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A Worldly Country: New Poems
by John Ashbery
Hardcover $23.95 -10% Published by Ecco
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Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
by James L. Swanson
Paperback $15.95 Published by Harper Perennial
 The Greatest Manhunt in American History For 12 days after his brazen assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was at large, and in “Manhunt”, historian James L. Swanson tells the vivid, fully documented tale of his escape and the wild, massive pursuit. Get a taste of the daily drama from this timeline of the desperate search.
April 14, 1865 Around noon, Booth learns that Lincoln is coming to Ford’s Theatre that night. He has eight hours to prepare his plan.
10:15 pm: Booth shoots the president, leaps to the stage, and escapes on a waiting horse.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton orders the manhunt to begin. April 15 About 4:00 am: Booth seeks treatment for a broken leg at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s farm near Beantown, Maryland. Cavalry patrol heads south toward Mudd farm.
Confederate operative Thomas Jones hides Booth in a remote pine thicket for five days, frustrating the manhunters. April 19 Tens of thousands watch the procession to the U.S. Capitol, where President Lincoln lies in state. Wild rumors and stories of false sightings of Booth spread. April 20 Stanton offers a $100,000 reward for the assassins, and threatens death to any citizen who helps them.
After hiding Booth in Maryland, Jones puts him in a rowboat on the Potomac River, bound for Virginia. More than a thousand manhunters are still searching in Maryland. In the dark, Booth rows the wrong way and first ends up back in Maryland. April 20-24 Booth lands in the northern neck of Virginia, and Confederate agents and sympathizers guide him to Port Conway, Virginia. April 24 Booth befriends three Confederate soldiers who help him cross the Rappahannock River to Port Royal and then guide him further southwest to the Garrett farm.
Union troops in Washington receive a report of a Booth sighting. They board a U.S. Navy tug and steam south, right past Booth’s hideout at the Garrett farm. April 25 The 16th New York Calvary, realizing their error, turns around and surrounds the Garrett farm after midnight that night. April 26 When Booth refuses to surrender, troops set the barn on fire, and Boston Corbett shoots the assassin. Booth dies a few hours later, at sunrise. April 26-27 Booth’s body is brought back to Washington, where it is autopsied, photographed, and buried in a secret grave.
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In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel
by Sarah Dunant
Paperback $13.95 Published by Random House
 My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment. Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid.
A story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, In the Company of the Courtesan paints a portrait of one of the world’s greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page. …..
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Paperback $15.00 Published by Henry Holt
 Regime change did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of the dangers inherent in these operations. In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. He also shows that the U.S. government has often pursued these operations without understanding the countries involved; as a result, many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences. In a compelling and provocative history that takes readers to fourteen countries, including Cuba, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and Iraq, Kinzer surveys modern American history from a new and often surprising perspective.
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Averno: Poems
by Louise Gluck
Hardcover $22.00 -10% Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. “Averno” is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What “Averno” provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.
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McSweeney’s Issue 22
edited by Dave Eggers
Hardcover $24.00 -10% Published by McSweeney’s
“McSweeney’s Issue 22″ is a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form. In section one, poets (yes — poets!) including Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, and D. C. Berman initiate poet-chains, picking a poem of their own and one by another poet. The next poet will then do the same, and then again, and again, and so on. In section two, Fitzgerald (yes — F. Scott Fitzgerald!) provides a list of unused story premises first cataloged in “The Crack-Up”; his mission is completed by writers like Diane Williams and Nick Flynn. In section three, finally, the president of France’s (yes — France!) legendary Oulipians offers a rare glimpse into his group’s current experiments with linguistic constraint. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
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The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics
by C. S. Lewis
Paperback $24.95 Published by Harper Collins
Seven Spiritual Masterworks by C. S. Lewis!
This classic collection includes C. S. Lewis’s most important spiritual works:
-Mere Christianity
-The Screwtape Letters
-The Great Divorce
-The Problem of Pain
-Miracles
-A Grief Observed
-The Abolition of Man
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A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
by Andre Roberts
Hardcover $35.00 -10% Published by Harper Collins
 In 1900, where Churchill ended the fourth volume of his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, the United States had not yet emerged onto the world scene as a great power. Meanwhile, the British Empire was in decline but did not yet know it. Any number of other powers might have won primacy in the twentieth century and beyond, including Germany, Russia, possibly even France. Yet the coming century was to belong to the English-speaking peoples, who successively and successfully fought the Kaiser’s Germany, Axis aggression and Soviet Communism, and who are now struggling against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Andrew Roberts brilliantly reveals what made the English-speaking people the preeminent political culture since 1900, and how they have defended their primacy from the many assaults upon them. What connects those countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a first language—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Ireland—is far greater than what separates them, and the development of their history since 1900 has been a phenomenal success story.
Authoritative and engrossing, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900″ is an enthralling account of the century in which the political culture of one linguistic world-grouping comprehensively triumphed over all others. Roberts’s “History” proves especially invaluable as the United States today looks to other parts of the English-speaking world as its best, closest and most dependable allies.
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These new arrivals have just hit our shelves!
The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani
Paperback $14.00
From the author of the award-winning “GraceLand” comes a searing, dazzlingly written novel of a tarnished City of Angels.
Praised as singular (”The Philadelphia Inquirer”) and extraordinary (”The New York Times Book Review”), “GraceLand” stunned critics and instantly established Chris Abani as an exciting new voice in fiction. In his second novel, set against the uncompromising landscape of East L.A., Abani follows a struggling artist named Black, whose life and friendships reveal a world far removed from the mainstream. Through Black’s journey of self- discovery, Abani raises essential questions about poverty, religion, and ethnicity in America today. “The Virgin of Flames”, a marvelous and gritty novel filled with indelible images and unforgettable characters, confirms Chris Abani as an immensely talented writer.
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The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna
Paperback $15.00
A legend, a land once seen and then lost forever, Thule was a place beyond the edge of the maps, a mystery for thousands of years. And to the Nazis, Thule was an icy Eden, birthplace of Nordic purity. In this exquisitely written narrative, Joanna Kavenna wanders in search of Thule, to Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard, unearthing the philosophers, poets, and explorers who claimed Thule for themselves, from Richard Francis Burton to Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Marked by breathtaking snowscapes, haunting literature, and the cold specter of past tragedies, this is a wondrous blend of travel writing and detective work that is impossible to set down. RVIEW: Thule, real or not, is ripe and beguiling material for a literary and geographic adventurer, and Kavenna is formidable on both fronts. . . . Highly cerebral, erudite, refreshing. (”The New York Times Book Review”)
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A Strong West Wind: A Memoir by Gail Caldwell
Paperback $13.95
In this exquisitely rendered memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. A Strong West Wind begins in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle–a place of both boredom and beauty, its flat horizons broken only by oil derricks, grain elevators, and church steeples. Its story belongs to a girl who grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, who took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who lit out for the territory, turned out to offer a blueprint for her own future. Caldwell would grow up to become a writer, but first she would have to fall in love with a man who was every mother’s nightmare, live through the anguish and fire of the Vietnam years, and defy the father she adored, who had served as a master sergeant in the Second World War.
A Strong West Wind is a memoir of culture and history–of fathers and daughters, of two world wars and the passionate rebellions of the sixties. But it is also about the mythology of place and the evolution of a sensibility: about how literature can shape and even anticipate a life.
Caldwell possesses the extraordinary ability to illuminate the desires, stories, and lives of ordinary people. Written with humanity, urgency, and beautiful restraint, A Strong West Wind is a magical and unforgettable book, destined to become an American classic.
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Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario
Paperback $14.95
In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.
Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.
Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.
With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
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Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life by Allen Shawn
Hardcover $24.95 -10%
A droll, inquisitive, and poignant memoir of agoraphobia from a member of one of New York’s premier literary families.
Allen Shawn is afraid of heights, water, fields, parking lots, tunnels, and unknown roads. He avoids taking subways, using elevators, or crossing bridges. In short, he is afraid of both closed and open spaces and of any form of isolation. Yet this is a memoir of enormous bravery.
Shawn grew up in a lively but mysterious world. He is the son of the famous, longtime “New Yorker” editor William Shawn and brother to the brilliant playwright and actor Wallace Shawn. His twin sister is autistic, and when they were eight years old, she was put in a home. Though it was kept from him until he was in his thirties, his father led a double life that introduced strict taboos to his household. Shawn examines these influences, his father’s and mother’s phobias, and his own struggle with agoraphobia with generosity, wit, and insight, attempting to decipher the psychological and biological puzzles that have plagued him for so long.
Interwoven with both Freudian psychology and cutting-edge brain research, Shawn has written a profound examination of familial love and the universal struggle to face our demons.
…
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
by Leonard Susskind
Paperback $15.99
I’m not a physicist, but I could say that my interest in science stemmed from my background as an Engineer in electronics. And no need to go over the scientific aspects mentioned in the book since others have done a good job. Yet, I was surprised at a scientist, or rather the father of the String Theory, and quite knowledgeable in Quantum Mechanics, would treat man as a separate being from the universe. When we say that the universe is fine tuned to suite us, who is “us”? Aren’t we a part of this universe in quantum physics perspective? And although I liked his scientific analogy a great deal and I learned a lot, not to say that I completely understood it, but his Anthropic views and conclusions threw me off balance. I’m sure that he has much more explaining to do before he could come to this conclusion. But generally speaking; if you are interested in science of quantum physics, it is a page-turner and the writer’s ability to bring the complexities of this field to a layman’s lever was amazing. And one more thing; the title was misleading when the writer used the word “illusion” in juxtaposition with”intelligent design” (Customer review)
…
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
Paperback $15.00
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.
Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schoolsespecially for girlsthat offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortenson’s quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, “Three Cups of Tea” combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
…
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Paperback $16.95
When Consuelo Vanderbilt’s grandfather died, he was the richest man in America. Her father soon started to spend the family fortune, enthusiastically supported by Consuelo’s mother, Alva, who was determined to take the family to the top of New York society—forcing a heartbroken Consuelo into a marriage she did not want with the underfunded Duke of Marlborough. But the story of Consuelo and Alva is more than a tale of enterprising social ambition, Gilded Age glamour, and the emptiness of wealth. It is a fascinating account of two extraordinary women who struggled to break free from the world into which they were born—a world of materialistic concerns and shallow elitism in which females were voiceless and powerless—and of their lifelong dedication to noble and dangerous causes and the battle for women’s rights.
…
Inheriting the Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East by Jennifer Miller
Paperback $14.95
Writing with fierce honesty, Jennifer Miller has created an extraordinary synthesis of history, reportage, and coming-of-age memoir in Inheriting the Holy Land. Her groundbreaking perspective on the conflict is presented through interviews with young Israelis and Palestinians and conversations with some of the most influential officials involved in the Middle East, including Shimon Peres, Yasir Arafat, James Baker, Benjamin Netanyahu, Colin Powell, Ehud Barak, and Mahmoud Abbas. This book will open eyes, open hearts, and open minds.
Miller grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., surrounded by the chaotic politics of the Middle East. Her father was a U.S. State Department negotiator at the Oslo and Camp David peace summits, and dinnertime conversation in the Miller household often included discussions of the Middle Eastern conflict. When Miller joined Seeds of Peace, a program that brings Middle Eastern kids to Maine for intensive sessions of conflict resolution, her real experience with the Middle East began. As she befriended young Palestinians, Israelis, Egyptians, and Jordanians, Jennifer came to realize that their views were missing from the ongoing debate over the Holy Land. By helping these young voices be heard, she knew she could reveal something vitally new and deeply challenging about the future of this torn region.
Miller, however, learned fast that it was one thing to hang out at the idyllic Seeds for Peace camp in Maine and quite another to confront young people on their own turf–in the alleys of East Jerusalem, behind the armed gates of West Bank settlements, in the teeming refugee camps of Gaza. Friendships that had blossomed in the United States withered in the aftermath of yet another suicide bombing. Big-hearted teens on both sides of the conflict shocked Miller with the ferocity of their illusions and the twisted logic of their misconceptions. But she also found rays of hope in places where others had reported only despair–surprising open-mindedness among the ultra-religious, common ground shared by those who had lost loved ones to the violence, a yearning for peace amid the rubble of refugee camps and the shards of bombed cities.
A deft writer, she interweaves her startlingly candid interviews with the vibrant realities of life in the streets. Just as Jennifer Miller was forced to confront her biases as an American, a Jew, a woman, and a journalist, in Inheriting the Holy Land, she similarly challenges readers to reexamine their own cherished prejudices and assumptions.
(Customer review)
…
DARK HORSES: Poets on Overlooked Poems by Joy Katz
Paperback $19.95
Too many amazing poems end up overlooked by the academy and excluded from the canon, remaining largely unknown to the poetry-reading public. Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer’s Dark Horses joyfully rediscovers dozens of these poems, recognizes their power, and illuminates their significance.
Seventy-five established American poets including Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Linda Bierds, Carl Phillips, C. K. Williams, Wanda Coleman, Miller Williams, and Dana Gioia have each selected one unjustly neglected poem, most never previously anthologized, and written a concise commentary to accompany it. Selections include forgotten gems by well known poets as well as poems by writers who have fallen into obscurity. Dark Horses also acts as a primer on how to creatively read a poem and a documentary of the bonds between a poem and its reader.
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Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas
Paperback $12.95
This book is an absolute pip! It’s easy, breezy, beautiful and wonderful, Wonderful, WONDERFUL! Damned if I can think of a better way to while away a few hours than by reading it.
12 year old Herbert Weinberg is at that lovely time in his life where he doesn’t have a care in the world. Well except for having to deal with his own telepathy, his eccentric genius father building a nuclear bomb and declaring the homestead an independent state and the general adult conspiracy against children to raise them up as vaguely unhappy as themselves.
I got more chortles, snickers and outright belly-laughs out of this book than the average P.G. Wodehouse opus. It’s like Mamatas has yanked Wodehouse’s type of absurdist family farce right out of the Edwardian age and plunked it down in the 21st century where we need it the most. Unfortunately I understand a distributing snafu has delayed wide release of this little gem, but it’s well worth the wait. Where else can you find peace treaties in hot dogs, nuclear bombs in garden gnomes and independent states in the back of Convenience Stores?
You owe it to yourself to pick this one up - Everyone wants to be happy, we’re just conditioned to think that being vaguely unhappy is what being adult is all about. (Customer review)
…
The Unbinding by Walter Kirn
Paperback $13.95
“Before AidSat I had no self, no soul. I was a billing address. A credit score. I had a TV, a computer, a phone, a car, an apartment, some furniture, and a health-club locker. Then AidSat hired me and gave me a life. And not just one life. Hundreds of them, thousands.”
Kent Selkirk is an operator at AidSat, an omni-present subscriber service ready to answer, solve, and assist with the client’s every problem. Through the AidSat network Kent has a wealth of information at his fingertips–information he can use to monitor subscribers’ vital signs, information he can use to track their locations, information he can use to insinuate himself into their very lives. Interesting. (Customer review)
Filed under e-Notes by admin.
Our neighbor Michael has published this fine book.
AUTOGRAPHED COPIES NOW AVAILABLE!
Man Gone Down is currently #1 in our Paperback Fiction category on BookCourt’s Bestseller list.
$14.00 - 20%
 Evoking the work of great American masters such as Ralph Ellison, but distinctly original, Michael Thomas’ first novel is a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating account of a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. With only four days before he’s due in to pick up his family, he must make some sense out of his life. Alternating between his past—as an inner city child bused to the suburbs in the 1970’s—and a present where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut about what it feels like to be pre-programmed to fail in life—and the urge to escape that sentence.
Praise
“Battered by bitter memories, and paralyzed by the poison of prejudice, which is tainting his relationships with his loving wife and sons, he works carpentry jobs, goes for long late-night runs, and seeks to exorcise his demons. By evoking the tension, longing, and beauty of the great and grinding city, summoning the mysterious power of the sea, and drawing on Melville and Ellison, Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post-9/11 lament over aggression, greed, and racism, and a ravishing blues for the soul’s unending loneliness.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Ambitious…. The book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator’s world.”—Kirkus Reviews
“In the great, dark churn of race and wealth, of poverty and prejudices, of judgments and forgivenesses that is the city, the hero of Man Gone Down charts a four-day, Homeric trek through what makes America and New York a social and racial nightmare as well as a dream that incredibly can still come true. In this fast-paced, idea-rich novel, Michael Thomas grabs you by the mental collar with the rare voice that is simultaneously classic and modern, with a style that compels the reader to cheer this unwavering husband and father onward, Ishmael-like, into the light, into the open waters of the next day. It would be a mistake to live in a city anywhere in America and not wade into Thomas’ rich and rewarding depths.” —Robert Sullivan, author of Rats and Cross Country: 15 Years and 90, 000 Miles on the Road . . .
“A big, brave, heart-wrenching first novel, Michael Thomas tackles head-on the subjects of race, work and family. A tremendous debut.” —Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls
“Once in a great while a voice comes along that staggers us with its vitality, strength and timeliness. Michael Thomas is one of those writers, and he’s been gifted with a dynamic voice as well as with a story worthy of our attention.” —David Haynes, Author of The Full Matilda
“Michael Thomas is a thoughtful, intelligent, ambitious writer and Man Gone Down is an impressive first effort. Literature—and the world—would be well served by more like him.” —Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl from the Left
“The narrator of this remarkable novel can name each star in the constellation of circumstances that describe the shape of his life as if observing them from a great distance, yet with a surprisingly intimate and passionate accuracy. Its unique achievement, that is, its particular beauty, is in how it engages us, right from the start, with the unannounced arrival of revelations, with humor, and with the growing realization that the life he speaks of has much in common with our own.” —Chuck Wachtel, author of The Gates
“What a novel, and what a writer. Michael Thomas is brilliant, and Man Gone Down is riveting. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope.” —Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis
Filed under e-Notes by admin.
BookCourt’s Top 100 Sellers in 2006
- Patchwork Planet (pb). Kate Milford & Jonathan Lethem. Soft Skull Press/BookCourt.
- History of Love (pb). Nicole Krauss. Norton.
- Snow (pb). Orhan Pamuk. Random House.
- Inheritance of Loss (pb). Kiran Desai. Grove Press.
- Never Let Me Go (pb). Kazuo Ishiguro. Random House.
- Gilead (pb). Marilynne Robinson. St. Martin’s Press.
- Duck & Goose. Tad Hills. Random House.
- Kafka on the Shore (pb). Haruki Murakami. Random House.
- Memory Keeper’s Daughter (pb). Kim Edwards. Penguin.
- I Live in Brooklyn. Mari Takabayashi. Houghton Mifflin.
- In Cold Blood (pb). Truman Capote.Random House.
- Places In Between (pb). Rory Stewart. Harcourt.
- Zagat New York City Restaurants 2007 (pb). Zagat Survey.
- Fortress of Solitude (pb). Jonathan Lethem. Random House.
- On Beauty (pb). Zadie Smith. Penguin.
- Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion. Random House.
- Motherless Brooklyn (pb). Jonathan Lethem. Random House.
- Prep (pb). Curtis Sittenfeld. Times Books.
- Brooklyn By Name (pb). Leonard Benardo & Jennifer Weiss. NYU Press.
- Emperor’s Children. Claire Messud. Random House.
- Saturday (pb). Ian McEwan. Random House.
- Garlic & Sapphires (pb). Ruth Reichl. Penguin.
- Suite Francaise. Irene Nemirovsky. Random House.
- My Life in France. Julia Child. Random House.
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (pb). John Perkins. Penguin.
- Case Histories (pb). Kate Atkinson. Little, Brown.
- NFT Brooklyn 2007 (pb). Not For Tourists.
- This is New York. M. Sasek. Universe.
- Indecision (pb). Benjamin Kunkel. Times Books.
- Heat. Bill Buford. Random House.
- Apartment Therapy (pb). Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan. Bantam.
32. Silver Spoon. Phaidon Press.
- The Road. Cormac McCarthy. Random House.
- Wind Up Bird Chronicle (pb). Haruki Murakami. Random House.
- I Like You. Amy Sedaris. Warner Books.
- Running With Scissors (pb). Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin’s Press.
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (pb). Jonathan Safran Foer. Houghton.
- Brooklyn Follies (pb). Paul Auster. St. Martin’s Press.
- Veronica (pb). Mary Gaitskill. Random House.
- Everyman. Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin.
- Runaway (pb). Alice Munro. Random House.
- Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael Pollan. Penguin.
- Absurdistan. Gary Shteyngart. Random House.
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Marisha Pessl. Penguin.
- I Love You More Than You Know (pb). Jonathan Ames. Grove Press.
- American Pastoral (pb). Philip Roth. Random House.
- Knuffle Bunny. Mo Willems. Hyperion.
- Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (pb). Matt Weiland. HarperCollins.
- The Sea (pb). John Banville. Random House.
- Ladies & Gentlemen the Bronx is Burning (pb). Jonathan Mahler. SMP.
- Forgotten New York (pb). Kevin Walsh. HarperCollins.
- Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Mo Willems. Hyperion.
- I Am Not Sleepy & I Will Not Go to Bed (pb). Lauren Child. Candlewick.
- Goodnight Moon (board book edition). Margaret Wise Brown. HarperCollins.
- Kite Runner (pb). Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead.
- Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (pb). Mark Haddon. Random.
- I Feel Bad About My Neck. Nora Ephron. Random House.
- Close Range (pb). Annie Proulx. Macmillan.
- Animals in Translation (pb). Temple Grandin. Harcourt.
- Middlesex (pb). Jeffrey Eugenides. St. Martin’s Press.
61. What is the What. Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s.
- Dreams From My Father (pb). Barack Obama. Random House.
- Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama. Random House.
- Long Way Down (pb). Nick Hornby. Riverhead.
- Plot Against America (pb). Philip Roth. Random House.
- Glass Castle (pb). Jeannette Walls. Simon & Schuster.
- Snail & the Whale (pb). Julia Donaldson. Penguin.
- Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late. Mo Willems. Hyperion.
- I Am Too Absolutely Small for School (pb). Lauren Child. Candlewick.
- Acts of Faith (pb). Philip Caputo. Random House.
- Tipping Point (pb). Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown.
- I Will Never Not Eat a Tomato (pb). Lauren Child. Candlewick.
- Disappointment Artist (pb). Jonathan Lethem. Random House.
- Eat Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin.
- Hug (board book edition). Jez Alborough. Candlewick.
- Rats (pb). Robert Sullivan. Bloomsbury.
- Works: Anatomy of a City. Kate Ascher. Penguin.
- Freakonomics. Steven Levitt. HarperCollins.
- Night (pb). Elie Wiesel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- March (pb). Geraldine Brooks. Penguin.
- Time Traveler’s Wife (pb). Audrey Niffenegger. Harcourt.
- State of Denial. Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster.
- City Baby Brooklyn (pb). Alison Lowenstein. Universe.
- Mayflower. Nathaniel Philbrick. Penguin.
- Blood Meridian (pb). Cormac McCarthy. Random House.
- Stumbling on Happiness. Daniel Gilbert. Random House.
- Istanbul (pb). Orhan Pamuk. Random House.
- View From Castle Rock. Alice Munro. Random House.
- Reading Like a Writer. Francine Prose. HarperCollins.
- Skin Between Us. Kym Ragusa. Norton.
- Da Vinci Code (mass market edition). Dan Brown. Random House.
- American Prometheus (pb). Kai Bird. Random House.
- Didi & Daddy on the Promenade. Marilyn Singer. Houghton Mifflin.
- Death & Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs. Random House.
- Pat the Bunny. Edith Kunhardt. Random House.
- Elementary Particles (pb). Michel Houellebecq. Random House.
- Confederacy of Dunces (pb). John Kennedy Toole. Grove Press.
- Everything is Illuminated (pb). Jonathan Safran Foer. HarperCollins.
- The End. Lemony Snicket. HarperCollins.
100. Brookland. Emily Barton. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
This listing is based on in-store sales of all book inventory during 2006. Paperback editions are indicated as (pb).
Filed under e-Notes by admin.
Patchwork Planet by Kate Milford & Jonathan Lethem ($25.00 / Available exclusively at BookCourt.)
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A COPY OF PATCHWORK PLANET
Brooklyn is in the middle of a broad and deep transformation on both the macro-scale of the demolition and rebuilding of entire neighborhoods and the micro-scale of incremental house-by-house gentrification, obscuring its past under the curtain walls of high-rises, and the sheetrock of brownstone renovation. So Kate Milford and Jonathan Lethem have together created Patchwork Planet, a portrait of the real Brooklyn—not the sepia-toned “old” Brooklyn of the Dodgers but rather the five-and-dime downtown Brooklyn of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties rendered in Milford’s acutely detailed large format photographs of office buildings and intersections, storefronts and shoppers, accompanied by Lethem’s whimsically personal anecdotes of chance encounters with Mad Brooklynites, of lost subway lines, and, yes of great views of the Manhattan skyline.
Patchwork Planet is two Brooklynites’ idiosyncratic composite portrait of an urban landscape—unlovable yet much loved—published by Brooklyn publisher Soft Skull Press and exclusively available from BookCourt — serving books to Brooklyn and beyond since 1981.
GONZO [LIMITED EDITION] ($325.00 -10%)
AMMO Books is pleased to announce its debut title: GONZO by famed American author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson. GONZO presents a rare look into the life of Thompson, whose groundbreaking style of “gonzo” journalism made him one of the greatest writers of his generation. Now, for the first time, his photographs and archives have been collected into a visual biography worthy of his literary legacy. With a heartfelt introduction by close friend Johnny Depp, GONZO captures a man whose life was as legendary as his writing.
AMMO Books presents this impressive limited edition title, featuring hundreds of personal photographs–many taken by Thompson himself and never before published. Accompanied by writing and memorabilia, this visual history gives insight into the literary icon’s life. GONZO chronicles Thompson’s numerous adventures, including his early days as a foreign correspondent in Puerto Rico, living in Big Sur in the sixties, time on the road with the Hell’s Angels, running for Sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970, and many personal moments with friends and family throughout the years.
This one-of-a-kind book is the ultimate tribute to the Good Doctor, and a must-have for any Thompson fan. Lovingly edited and designed, and lavishly printed, this extraordinary package includes a specially designed box that contains the book and a limited edition gallery-quality photograph by Thompson. This is an exclusive offering of only three thousand individually numbered copies available worldwide, destined to become a treasured part of your personal library.
  
  
ELLIS ISLAND: GHOSTS OF FREEDOM ($75.00 -10%)
Click HERE to order a copy of ELLIS ISLAND
Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! ($120.00 -10%)
Last batch of the 1st edition!
Winsor McCay’s masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, as it has never
been reproduced before. A magnificent hardbound volume of Nemo’s best
Sunday pages from 1905-1910, in FULL original size. Enhance your library
with a piece of American cultural history. It’s become an instant collector’s item.
Sunday Press Books
RON MUECK ($35.00 -10%)
    Now on view at THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM, the stunning and carefully crafted sculpture of Australian artist Ron Mueck have catapulted him into the first rank of the contemporary art world. This book is a record of his recent exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, for which he created an ensemble of new sculptures, two of which are of gargantuan scale.Check out this great slideshow of the folks at THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM gearing up for the exibit: CLICK HERE
THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, SECOND EDITION, 20 VOLUME SET ($1000.00)
The ultimate authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases, unparalleled in its accuracy and comprehensiveness, the Oxford English Dictionary is the supreme reference work for anyone who loves the language.
Key features:
* Integrates the material from the original OED and the Supplement into one alphabetical sequence
* Includes over 5,000 new words and meanings
* Completely redesigned and reset to enhance readability
* Replaces James Murray’s pronunciation system with the International Phonetic Alphabet
* Treats over a half-million words, illustrating definitions with over 2.4 million quotations
BOXED SETS = All -10%
El Bulli 2003-2004
$350.00 -10%
-The Complete Calvin and Hobbes-
$150.00 -10%
-The Complete Far Side 1980-1994-
$135.00 -10%
-The Complete Keller: The French Laundry Cookbook & Bouchon-
$100.00 -10%
-Hank Ketcham’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954-
$39.95 -10%
-Dante’s Divine Comedy-
$100.00 -10%
-The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett-
$100.00 -10%
-Absolute Dark Knight-
$100.00 -10%
-Absolute Sandman-
$100.00 -10%
-The Complete Wreck (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-13)-
$150.00 -10%
-Tales of Chekhov-
$150.00 -10%
Filed under e-Notes by admin.
Purchase a copy of Patchwork Planet: CLICK HERE
RELEASE PARTY - Thurs, Dec. 7th - 8PM
Signing / Q&A
Exclusively and eternally available from BookCourt -
Patchwork Planet is two Brooklynites’ idiosyncratic composite portrait of an urban landscape—unlovable yet much loved—published by Brooklyn publisher Soft Skull Press and exclusively available from BookCourt — serving books to Brooklyn and beyond since 1981.
Brooklyn is in the middle of a broad and deep transformation on both the macro-scale of the demolition and rebuilding of entire neighborhoods and the micro-scale of incremental house-by-house gentrification, obscuring its past under the curtain walls of high-rises, and the sheetrock of brownstone renovation. So Kate Milford and Jonathan Lethem have together created Patchwork Planet, a portrait of the real Brooklyn—not the sepia-toned “old” Brooklyn of the Dodgers but rather the five-and-dime downtown Brooklyn of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties rendered in Milford’s acutely detailed large format photographs of office buildings and intersections, storefronts and shoppers, accompanied by Lethem’s whimsically personal anecdotes of chance encounters with Mad Brooklynites, of lost subway lines, and, yes of great views of the Manhattan skyline.
$25.00 -
Exclusively and eternally available from BookCourt !
Filed under e-Notes by admin.
Now in Stock at $75.00 - 20% Disc.
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005, an exhibition of more than 200 photographs, debuts at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view from October 20, 2006 through January 21, 2007, prior to an international tour.
The material in the exhibition, and in the accompanying book, encompasses work Leibovitz made on assignment as a professional photographer as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends. “I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz says. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” The material documents the birth of her three daughters and many events involving her large and robust family, including the death of her father.
Portraits of public figures include the pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, Jack Nicholson on Mulholland Drive, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House, William S. Burroughs in Kansas, and Agnes Martin in Taos. The assignment work also includes searing reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and a series of landscapes taken in the American West and in the Jordanian desert.
Leibovitz is the recipient of many honors, including the rank of Commandeur in the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Barnard College Medal of Distinction. She was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000 and one of the thirty-five Innovators of Our Time by Smithsonian magazine in 2005.
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
We have just received several copies of a 50TH anniversary limited print run of FAHRENHEIT 451, signed by author RAY BRADBURY and RALPH STEADMAN, the illustrator. A true collectors item, this edition of Fahrenheit will blow you away. Stop by and have a look. The copies are selling for $350- minus a ten percent disc, as all of our hardcovers are 10% off list price.
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
Come check out the new issues!
The Paris Review 178
Open City 22
The Believer Vol. 4 No 7.
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
Visit the site: http://visitbrooklyn.org/about.html
No city in America boasts more character—or characters—than Brooklyn! Brooklyn and its people have been inspiring writers from Walt Whitman to Colson Whitehead and from Marianne Moore to Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Brooklyn Book Festival, held on September 16, 2006 from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., will celebrate Brooklyn’s thriving and diverse literary community and its rich history as a home and inspiration for authors. From Williamsburg to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope and Brighton Beach, Brooklyn is home to authors, literary magazines and publishers.
The festival, to be held in historic Brooklyn Borough Hall and outdoors on its beautiful plaza, will showcase retailers, publishers, authors and literary organizations. Multiple stages and indoor venues will feature adult and children’s programming, spirited panel discussions and spoken word performances. The festival will attract a broad and diverse audience from Brooklyn and the metropolitan region.
The Brooklyn Book Festival will celebrate Brooklyn’s international reputation as an enclave of hip, multi-ethnic writers who represent some of the greatest names in literature today.
Please join BookCourt at the festival! We hope to see you there!
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
A Public Space is the new independent magazine of literature and culture, founded by Brigid Hughes, the former Executive Editor of The Paris Review. In an era that has relegated literature to the margins, they plan to make fiction and poetry the stars of a new conversation. They believe that stories are how we make sense of our lives and how we learn about other lives. They believe that stories matter.
Four times a year, A Public Space will bring readers a collection of new authors and established talents. They encourage writers to get away from their desks and investigate what intrigues them, explore, snoop around. There are no boundaries, and they will support writers wherever they take us. Please come by the store and check out the new issue of A Public Space.
A Public Space Issue # 2 features:
David Mitchell, Ander Monson, Lauren Redniss, W.S. Di Piero, Laurie Sheck, Andrey Platonov, Olga Zondberg, Christopher Sorrentino, Nam Le, Mary Mattingly, Amy Leach, Maile Chapman, Bin Ramke, Corinna Vallianatos, Srikanth Reddy, Cesar Vallejo, and more. On: The Ziegfeld Follies, sicarios en Medellin, the dramatic life of the sea cucumber, motherhood, marriage, murder, Kurt Waldheim, Migraine Mike, a shipwreck, a Macedonian officer, a Russian home for a queen bee, and, finally, the death of death.
Learn more at : http://apublicspace.org
Filed under Events, e-Notes by Zack.
Just up: Brooklyn By Name Website.
New York Universiy Press has just now released a new book on Brooklyn. Here are some advance quoes:
“An excellent guide to Brooklyn. Explaining Brooklyn’s often mystifying names (like Force Tube Avenue and Dead Horse Bay) allows the streets to speak their stories. Walkers in the borough should not leave home without it.”
—Mike Wallace, co-author of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898″
“From Albemarle Road to Zion Triangle, the history of Brooklyn place names revealed in “Brooklyn By Name” is as fascinating as life in the County of Kings itself. By putting faces to the names of our streets, parks, and neighborhoods, Benardo and Weiss bring to vibrant life hundreds of places where Brooklynites live, work, and play every day. Whether we’re called Breukelen, Brookland, or Brooklyn, there’s no place like it in the world!”
—Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Borough President
“This beautifully researched, lucidly written and compulsively readable book will have readers bouncing from entry to entry. By focusing on the derivation of Brooklyn’s place-names, the authors have subtly traced the borough’s rich history of politics, power, greed and idealism.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of “Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan”
“Taking off from neighborhood names, this page-turner of a book tells of the successive waves of settlers and immigrant arrivals who have given Brooklyn its distinctive flavor. Here are the men and women whose fantasies, foibles, and otherwise-fleeting fame find permanency in the pavements, parks and place-names of the borough that almost wasn’t part of New York. Nicely illustrated with an exceptional folio of new photos and unusual old illustrations, and peppered with vivid stories and obscure facts, this book will fascinate even the most provincial of non-Brooklynites. You don’t have to live there to love this book.”
Filed under Events, e-Notes by Steve.
Within one week two great readings:
Robert Sullivan reads from Cross Country; stories from on the USA road; and my home town St.Paul: car repairs, Summit Ave and Garrison Keiler;
Gary Shteyngart reads about circumcision from Absuridistan, first in the voice of Russian-American accent and then in the voice of a Brooklyn Hassidic Mohel.
Just now I heard Robert Sullivan on Fresh Air
You can read a review of the book on the cover of the Sunday July 2, 2006 New York Times Book Review Are We There Yet?
[ needs on-line free log-on]
Filed under Events, e-Notes by Steve.
Celebrations of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, are held world-wide every year on this date because all the events in the novel take place in the course of a single day in Dublin – June 16, 1904. Joyce records this day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an ordinary Dubliner, as he wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses. Streets, shops, pubs, churches, bridges – something of Dublin pops up on nearly every page. The city is always in our peripheral vision no matter how notoriously impenetrable Joyce’s prose becomes.
Today, many cities in some sixty countries hold annual Bloomsday festivities. They range from Dublin’s costumed reenactment of Leopold Bloom’s itinerary, to New York City’s “Bloomsday on Broadway” when actors read from Ulysses at Symphony Space. In Philadelphia, where the original handwritten manuscript is housed in the Rosenbach Museum & Library, enthusiasts gather for a street festival complete with readings & traditional Irish music & food. Farther-flung locales celebrating Bloomsday include Toronto; Santa Maria, Brazil; Melbourne, Australia; Germany; & Holland.
Joyce once said “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” On Bloomsday, Joyce’s (& Leopold Bloom’s) Dublin is not only remembered but recreated the whole world over.
 
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
Currently a BookCourt BestSeller (20% off list price,) The Thinking Fan’s Guide To The World Cup is totally cool, informative, and what every obsessive soccer fan needs. Stop by the store and have a look.
The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup features original pieces by thirty-two leading writers and journalists about the thirty-two nations that have qualified for the world’s greatest sporting event. In addition to all the essential information any fan needs — the complete 2006 match schedule, results from past tournaments, facts and figures about the nations, players, teams, and referees — here are essays that shine a whole new light on soccer and the world.
- Former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castaeda invites George W. Bush to watch a game.
- Novelist Robert Coover remembers soccer in Spain after the death of General Francisco Franco.
- Dave Eggers on America, and the gym teachers who kept it free from communism.
- Time magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief Jim Frederick shows how soccer is displacing baseball in Japan.
- Novelist Aleksandar Hemon proves, once and for all, that sex and soccer do not mix.
- Novelist John Lanchester describes the indescribable: the beauty of Brazilian soccer.
- The New Yorker’s Cressida Leyshon on Trinidad and Tobago, 750Å|1 underdogs.
- Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby on the conflicting call of club and country.
Plus an afterword by Franklin Foer on the form of government most likely to win the World Cup.
Filed under e-Notes by Zack.
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