The Average American Male

Author: Chad Kultgen

Category: Literary

Regular price: $12.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 26, 2024

Deal ends: August 26, 2024

Description:

“I can’t figure out if this book is a heart-felt dispatch from the front line in the battle of the sexes or a brilliant send-up of the way in which the male point of view has been misrepresented by militant feminists. I suspect it may be both.” --Toby Young, New York Times bestselling author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

An offensive, in-your-face, brutally honest and completely hilarious look at male inner life and sexual fantasy. In the course of this hilariously honest book, our narrator suffers through a relationship with his wannabe-actress girlfriend until he finds the perfect girl. But when he moves into the new relationship, he slowly realizes he thinks that all women are pretty much the same, that his true desires will never be fulfilled, and the decision between living life alone or biting the marriage bullet must be made.

Newspaper Blackout

Author: Austin Kleon

Category: Literary

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 26, 2024

Deal ends: August 26, 2024

Description:

Poet and cartoonist Austin Kleon has discovered a new way to read between the lines. Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction—eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry.

Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," Newspaper Blackout will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane.

Newspaper Blackout contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.

A Permanent Member of the Family

Author: Russell Banks

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.49

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

A collection of short stories from the contemporary American master whom the New York Times declared "the most compassionate fiction writer working today."

Suffused with Russell Banks’s trademark lyricism and reckless humor, the twelve stories in A Permanent Member of the Family examine the myriad ways we try—and sometimes fail—to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world.

In the title story, a father looks back on the legend of the cherished family dog whose divided loyalties mirrored the fragmenting of his marriage. “A Former Marine” asks, to chilling effect, if one can ever stop being a parent. And in the haunting, evocative “Veronica,” a mysterious woman searching for her daughter may not be who she claims she is.

Moving between the stark beauty of winter in upstate New York and the seductive heat of Florida, Banks’s acute and penetrating collection demonstrates the range and virtuosity of both his narrative prowess and his startlingly panoramic vision of modern American life.

The Year She Left Us

Author: Kathryn Ma

Category: Literary

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

Three generations of Chinese-American women in a San Francisco family must confront their past and carve out a future in this extraordinary novel, a “haunting” debut full of “shimmering and unforgettable” characters. (New York Times Book Review)

The Kong women are in crisis. A disastrous trip to visit her "home" orphanage in China has plunged eighteen-year-old Ari into a self-destructive spiral. Her adoptive mother, Charlie, a lawyer with a great heart, is desperate to keep her daughter safe. Meanwhile, Charlie must endure the prickly scrutiny of her beautiful, Bryn Mawr educated mother, Gran—who, as the daughter of a cultured Chinese doctor, came to America to survive Mao's Revolution—and her sister, Les, a brilliant judge with a penchant to rule over everyone's lives.

As they cope with Ari's journey of discovery and its aftermath, the Kong women will come face to face with the truths of their lives—four powerful intertwining stories of accomplishment, tenacity, secrets, loneliness, and love. Beautifully illuminating the bonds of family and blood, The Year She Left Us explores the promise and pain of adoption, the price of assimilation and achievement, the debt we owe to others, and what we owe ourselves.

Kieron Smith, Boy

Author: James Kelman

Category: Literary

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price:

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

An award-winning novel of urban boyhood: “No other . . . comes as close as this to

Catcher in the Rye

.” —

The Literary Review

A Man Booker Prize–winning author brings us inside the head of a young boy in a novel that offers a “splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow” (

The Washington Post

).   Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five to early adolescence amid the general trauma of everyday life—the death of a beloved grandparent, the move to a new home. A whole world is brilliantly realized: sectarian football matches; ferryboats on the river; the unfairness of being a younger brother; climbing drainpipes, trees, and roofs; dogs, cats, sex, and ghosts—all rendered in the unmistakable perspective of youth, offering “a vivid reminder that childhood is a foreign country” (

Kirkus Reviews

).   “A book full of the wonder of growing up . . . A magnificent and important novel.” —

Financial Times

  “Recalls the modernist experiments of Joyce and Woolf . . . Kelman is a writer of singular will and sincerity.” —

The New York Times Book Review

  “As an urban coming-of-age, the novel also reminded me of

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

 . . . This funny, sad and deeply entrancing novel works as dreams do: by seduction, by raising strange spirits, and by delivering a world entire. It represents a triumph for Kelman, as hard and uproarious as a Glasgow Saturday night.” —

The Washington Post

  “Kelman’s raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron’s loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous.” —

Publishers Weekly

Family Trust

Author: Kathy Wang

Category: Literary

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

“A globe-trotting, whirlwind, tragi-comic family saga that wrings tears from absurdity and laughter from loss.  A joy to read from start to finish.”   — Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize

The Nest meets Crazy Rich Asians in this sharp comedic novel about a Chinese-American family's attempts (or not) to fulfill its dying patriarch's final bequest.

Some of us are more equal than others....

Meet Stanley Huang: father, husband, ex-husband, man of unpredictable tastes and temper, aficionado of all-inclusive vacations and bargain luxury goods, newly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For years, Stanley has claimed that he’s worth a small fortune. But the time is now coming when the details of his estate will finally be revealed, and Stanley’s family is nervous.

For his son Fred, the inheritance Stanley has long alluded to would soothe the pain caused by years of professional disappointment. By now, the Harvard Business School graduate had expected to be a financial tech god – not a minor investor at a middling corporate firm, where he isn’t even allowed to fly business class.

Stanley’s daughter, Kate, is a middle manager with one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious tech companies. She manages the capricious demands of her world-famous boss and the needs of her two young children all while supporting her would-be entrepreneur husband (just until his startup gets off the ground, which will surely be soon). But lately, Kate has been sensing something amiss; just because you say you have it all, it doesn’t mean that you actually do.   

Stanley’s second wife, Mary Zhu, twenty-eight years his junior, has devoted herself to making her husband comfortable in every way—rubbing his feet, cooking his favorite dishes, massaging his ego.  But lately, her commitment has waned; caring for a dying old man is far more difficult than she expected.

Linda Liang, Stanley’s first wife, knows her ex better than anyone. She worked hard for decades to ensure their financial security, and is determined to see her children get their due. Single for nearly a decade, she might finally be ready for some romantic companionship. But where does a seventy-two year old Chinese woman in California go to find an appropriate boyfriend?

As Stanley’s death approaches, the Huangs are faced with unexpected challenges that upend them and eventually lead them to discover what they most value. A compelling tale of cultural expectations, career ambitions and our relationships with the people who know us best, Family Trust skewers the ambition and desires that drive Silicon Valley and draws a sharply loving portrait of modern American family life.