Banner Message
Did you have trouble finding what you were looking for?
Click here for our special store for hard-to-find and used items.
Staff Pick
From the writer and director of Knocked Up and the producer of Freaks and Geeks comes a collection of intimate, hilarious conversations with the biggest names in comedy from the past thirty years--including Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman, Harold Ramis, Seth Rogen, Chris Rock, and Lena Dunham. Before becoming one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood, Judd Apatow was the original comedy nerd. At fifteen, he took a job washing dishes in a local comedy club--just so he could watch endless stand-up for free. At sixteen, he was hosting a show for his local high school radio station in Syosset, Long Island--a show that consisted of Q&As with his comedy heroes, from Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld. They talked about their careers, the science of a good joke, and their dreams of future glory (turns out, Shandling was interested in having his own TV show one day and Steve Allen had already invented everything). Thirty years later, Apatow is still that same comedy nerd--and he's still interviewing funny people about why they do what they do.
Sick in the Head gathers Apatow's most memorable and revealing conversations into one hilarious, wide-ranging, and incredibly candid collection that spans not only his career but his entire adult life. Here are the comedy legends who inspired and shaped him, from Mel Brooks to Steve Martin. Here are the contemporaries he grew up with in Hollywood, from Spike Jonze to Sarah Silverman. And here, finally, are the brightest stars in comedy today, many of whom Apatow has been fortunate to work with, from Seth Rogen to Amy Schumer. And along the way, something kind of magical happens: What started as a lifetime's worth of conversations about comedy becomes something else entirely. It becomes an exploration of creativity, ambition, neediness, generosity, spirituality, and the joy that comes from making people laugh. Loaded with the kind of back-of-the-club stories that comics tell one another when no one else is watching, this fascinating, personal (and borderline-obsessive) book is Judd Apatow's gift to comedy nerds everywhere. Praise for Sick in the Head "I can't stop reading it. . . . I don't want this book to end."--Jimmy Fallon "An essential for any comedy geek."--Entertainment Weekly "Fascinating . . . a collection of interviews with many of the great figures of comedy in the latter half of the twentieth century."--The Washington Post "Open this book anywhere, and you're bound to find some interesting nugget from someone who has had you in stitches many, many times."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times "An amazing read, full of insights and connections both creative and interpersonal."--The New Yorker "Fascinating and revelatory."--Chicago Tribune "Anyone even remotely interested in comedy or humanity should own this book."--Will Ferrell
Roxanne says: A must read for any comedy aficionado or anyone brave enough to try stand-up! Apatow interviews all the greats: Seinfeld, Shandling, etc.
Andrea says: A quiet ode to friendship, solitude and kindness. The characters are very human and humane and the animals chime in. For anyone who has loved a pet.
Melanie says: MI5 agent and later turned BBC producer finds enemies she’d made have reappeared. For Anglophiles, fans of espionage, and comical witty language.
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * New Yorker * Sunday Times (UK)
From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity--and how it saved her life.
In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Jami Attenberg--described as a "master of modern fiction" (Entertainment Weekly) and the "poet laureate of difficult families" (Kirkus Reviews)--reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one's ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?
As the daughter of a traveling salesman in the Midwest, Attenberg was drawn to a life on the road. Frustrated by quotidian jobs and hungry for inspiration and fresh experiences, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually on travels around the globe. Through it all she grapples with questions of mortality, otherworldliness, and what we leave behind.
It is during these adventures that she begins to reflect on the experiences of her youth--the trauma, the challenges, the risks she has taken. Driving across America on self-funded book tours, sometimes crashing on couches when she was broke, she keeps writing: in researching articles for magazines, jotting down ideas for novels, and refining her craft, she grows as an artist and increasingly learns to trust her gut and, ultimately, herself.
Exploring themes of friendship, independence, class, and drive, I Came All This Way to Meet You is an inspiring story of finding one's way home--emotionally, artistically, and physically--and an examination of art and individuality that will resonate with anyone determined to listen to their own creative calling.
Roxanne says: Attenberg, approaching fifty, takes us through a good portion of her life via travels to Italy, Hong Kong, and New York. Akin to Rachel Cusk, Attenberg uses her travel fore guideposts to reflect on her wounds and victories. What results is a poignant, no nonsense assessment of freedom and her own evolutionary value system.
AN ECONOMIST AND BLOOMBERG BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Wouldn't you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting. This is not "biohacking," it's science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia's aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover: - Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn't tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack.
- That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging.
- Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug"--and how to begin training for the "Centenarian Decathlon."
- Why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.
- Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all. Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.
Melanie says: An important and readable book by longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia. He explains Medicine 3.0, the Four Horsemen, and how we can think about long-term health in a different way in order to create our best health path. This book could change your life.
Exhilarating, funny, and unexpectedly devastating, Grown Ups is for anyone who has ever felt the fear of being overtaken by a sibling, who feels almost--but not quite--grown up, and who's struggled to navigate a new future for themselves. Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic. She's navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs, terrified that time has passed her by, silently, without her ever realizing it, which feels even more poignant and common in our COVID era. All she sees are other people's children, everywhere. Now stuck in the idyllic Norwegian countryside for a gathering to mark her mother's sixty-fifth birthday, Ida is regressing. She's fighting with her younger sister, Marthe, and flirting with her sister's husband. But when some supposedly wonderful news from Marthe heightens tensions further, Ida is forced to mark out new milestones of her own.
Roxanne says: For fans of Elena Ferrante, Aubert is a Norwegian author who crafts a realistic story of two sisters; one married and pregnant, one attempting single parenthood with secret IVF testing. A great sibling rivalry story.
In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers--among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell--whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.
Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.
In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers--among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell--whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.
Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.
Doug says: The way the interwoven lives of the authors connect with the Melvillean true tale and all the writers between. It is truly a "love letter to literature." The blurbs on the dust jacket are all you need. My choice for great book of the year. This is our top staff pick of 2023. Doug, Andrea, Roxanne, Bryn and Ben all loved it.