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Staff Pick

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray
$17.00
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

My Sister, the Serial Killer

My Sister, the Serial Killer

Braithwaite, Oyinkan
$16.00
WINNER OF THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR MYSTERY/THRILLER - "A taut and darkly funny contemporary noir that moves at lightning speed, it's the wittiest and most fun murder party you've ever been invited to." --MARIE CLAIRE

Korede's sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola's knife.

Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.

Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her.

Katia says: A darkly comic, kind of creepy read. Written sharply and beautifully. At its center it is an exploration of sisterhood, family bonds and the effects of trauma.

Trout Fishing in America

Trout Fishing in America

Brautigan, Richard
$16.99
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. A book "that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . an instant cult classic" (Financial Times).

Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and '70s who came of age during the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imaginations of young people everywhere.

Called "the last of the Beats," his early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise.

This edition features an introduction by poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan's work as a student in California.





Ben says: The ultimate hippy novel. Tender, personal, elegantly written, and above all, absolutely wild!

Jellyfish Age Backwards

Jellyfish Age Backwards

Brendborg, Nicklas
$29.00

This eye-opening book offers a "clear and captivating" (Dr. Kris Verburgh​)scientific deep dive into how plants and animals have already unlocked the secrets to immortality-and the lessons they hold for us all.

Recent advances in medicine and technology have expanded our understanding of aging across the animal kingdom, and our own timeless quest for the fountain of youth. Yet, despite modern humans living longer today than ever before, the public's understanding of what is possible is limited to our species--until now. In this spunky, effervescent debut, the key to immortality is revealed to be a superpower within reach. With mind-bending stories from the natural world and our own, Jellyfish Age Backwards reveals lifespans we cannot imagine and physiological gifts that feel closer to magic than reality:

  • There is a Greenland shark that was 286 years old when the Titanic sank, and is currently 390, making it older than the United States. Scientists predict it will live for another 100 years.
  • Trees and lobsters don't "age" in the way we know it. They simply get bigger and bigger.
  • There are forms of radiation that have been known to actually increase the lifespans of certain species, from tortoises to naked mole-rats.
  • There's a species of jellyfish, the size of a fingernail, that can age forwards, then, when threatened, age backwards and begin the process all over again.
  • Mixing cutting-edge research and stories from habitats all around the world, molecular biologist Nicklas Brendborg explores extended life cycles in all its varieties. Along the way, we meet a man who fasted for over a year; a woman who edited her own DNA; redwoods that survive thousands of years; and in the soil of Easter Island, the key to eternal youth. Jellyfish Age Backwards is a love letter to the immense power of nature, and what the immortal lives of many of earth's animals and plants can teach us about the secrets to longevity.

    Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize

    A New York Times Editor's Choice Pick

    A Sunday Times (UK) Best Book of the Year

    Nora says: What is aging? Is it one or many biological processes? Why do certain organisms age quickly and others slowly? Can aging be prevented? What does each aging process tell us about disease and disease prevention?  Jellyfish Age Backwards is an enlightening and entertaining look at what happens to all living beings over time. Brendborg writes clearly for the layman without condescension. Great for the armchair biologist!

    Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

    Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

    Bridle, James
    $20.00

    Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle's Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence--plant, animal, human, artificial--and how they transform our understanding of humans' place in the cosmos.

    What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings--beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial" intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

    At the same time, we're only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we've failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others--the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us--are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world?

    The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival.

    Includes illustrations

    Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

    Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

    Bridle, James
    $30.00

    Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle's Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence--plant, animal, human, artificial--and how they transform our understanding of humans' place in the cosmos.

    What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings-- beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial" intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

    At the same time, we're only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we've failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others--the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us--are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world?

    The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival.

    Includes illustrations

    James says: An artistic benevolent vision of how being aware of all the forms of intelligence on Earth can be optimistically engineered into our psyche, and how A.I. can serve as a beneficial tool for all.


    Wilderness Warrior : Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

    Brinkley, Douglas
    $22.99
    Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir

    Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir

    Brodak, Molly
    $16.00

    "Raw, poetic and compulsively readable. In Molly Brodak's dazzling memoir, Bandit, her eye is so honest, I found myself nodding like I was agreeing with her, sometimes cringing at what she sustained, and laughing-often. I can't wait to buy a copy for everyone I know."--Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help

     

    In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the "Mario Brothers Bandit" by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.

     

    In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Bandit, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too--another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. Growing up with this larger-than-life, mercurial man, Brodak's strategy was to "get small" and stay out of the way. In Bandit, she unearths and reckons with her childhood memories and the fracturing impact her father had on their family--and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.

     

    Written in precise, spellbinding prose, Bandit is a stunning, gut-punching story of family and memory, of the tragic fallibility of the stories we tell ourselves, and of the contours of a father's responsibility for his children.

    Ben says: A brutally honest look into the way a gambling addiction interferes with a family's existence as well as a stark meditation on the complexity of life.

    Death Valley

    Death Valley

    Broder, Melissa
    $17.99
    Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times ("incandescent...hilarious...a triumph"), Oprah Daily ("surreal, absurd, lucid, and wise"), Vanity Fair ("Broder [is] a genius and a sorceress"), and more!

    From the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief and a "magical tale of survival" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

    In Melissa Broder's astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow--for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike.

    Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.

    Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is "a journey unlike any you've read before" (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black).

    How to Know a Person

    How to Know a Person

    Brooks, David
    $30.00
    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives--from the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain

    "More than a guide to better conversations, it's a blueprint for a more connected and humane way of living. It's a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their relationships and broaden their perspectives."--Bill Gates, GatesNotes (Summer Reading Pick)

    As David Brooks observes, "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen--to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood."

    And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?

    Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

    The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.

    Roxanne says: Brooks went from zero to hero in my mind.  His deep research and obvious self-reflection glows in this book.  I not only have new terminology to grapple with people who don't listen, but also used his story telling inquiry for richer conversations with my family.