Winter 2020
Greetings from
Three Lives & Company!
It has been a
fun start to 2020 here at the little shop on the corner, and it is about to get
even more fun. Some news:
Beginning March
1, in accordance with city and state laws, we will not be offering plastic bags
and will be charging a five-cent tax on every paper bag. Remember to carry
around that tote or reusable bag you have sitting at home! And fear not, we
still have our Three Lives canvas totes for sale (in red, black, and cream) as
well as a new cheaper option: a reusable, compact bag that we are selling for
five dollars. We are happy to answer any questions you have and look forward to
seeing you walk through our red doors with your bag of choice over your
shoulder.
And while we
have not been hosting events at the shop since the temporary shoring posts were
installed in June, we are making ONE exception for ONE hour: Melissa Clark will
be joining us on Sunday, March 15th at noon to sign and chat about
her new cookbook Dinner in French (Clarkson Potter, March 10). Please stop in to
meet Melissa and pick up a copy. It's a beauty! We look forward to seeing you
then.
~ Recent Staff Favorites ~
A
woman is confronted with a changing world and warming planet, grappling with
what she – and everyone else – will lose. Jenny Offill's
highly anticipated new novel, Weather, is a beautifully written
fragmented novel, powerful and impressively subtle. Offill's
masterful ability to balance the many strands of a story – family,
addiction, existential dread, and living in a time of crisis – makes for
an unforgettable read that captures our current political moment. Meditative
and raw, it is my stand-out read this winter. (Knopf)
– Nora
Heathcliff Redux
Lily Tuck
The
great Lily Tuck. I would follow her anywhere she writes. In her latest fiction,
the title novella masterfully depicts the inner life, and tension, and passions
of her protagonist, a young mother in 1963. The headlong dive into one person's
overwhelming desires and the subsequent destruction of the life she had studiously
if impassively created is always an exhilarating subject in the hands of Tuck. Streamlined
and tight, a Tuck sentence contains so much in so little. An
absolute delight. (Atlantic Monthly Press) – Toby
Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener
In
her mid-twenties Anna Weiner left her low-paying job in book publishing and
headed west toward the promise of Silicon Valley. She was young and broke,
privileged but "downwardly mobile," when she arrived in the strange and extravagant
world of startups. In Uncanny Valley,
Weiner recounts her time in the tech industry. She is a witty and deft observer
of startup culture, where offices operate more like frat houses and CEOs are
twenty-four-year-old college dropouts. Part coming-of-age story, part expose, Uncanny
Valley is a gold rush story for the twenty-first century. (MCD) – Ruby
Topics of
Conversation
Miranda Popkey
Popkey's rich and intelligent debut novel is made up of ten conversations
that take place over the course of seventeen years. An unnamed narrator speaks
with other women about love, motherhood, and addiction, among other subjects.
Her biography is revealed slowly, in bits and pieces for the reader to
decipher, but Topics of Conversation is
a novel of ideas, not plot. It wrestles with gender, power, narrative, and the
stories we tell ourselves and others. (Knopf) – Ruby
Long Bright
River
Liz Moore
Liz
Moore's recent novel, Long Bright River,
is an emotional study of family set within a thriller about one policewoman's search
for her missing sister and for a killer who is targeting sex workers. With
intelligence and sensitivity, Moore gives us the opiod
crisis in the harsh urban landscape of a once thriving but now decaying
neighborhood and the reality of a childhood spent in such a place. One of the
loveliest things about Long Bright River
is the delicately constructed, complex women who
emerge to quietly love, and support, and protect one another. This is the book
that had me missing subway stops this winter. Deeply moving. (Riverhead)
– Joyce
The Anarchy
William Dalrymple
Dalrymple's riveting history of the British East India Company follows
the institution from its founding in 1599 through its dissolution in the 1800s,
but the meat of the book is the chaos the company quickened in the kingdoms of
India from the mid-1700s until the British government nationalized it a century
later as the Raj. Dalrymple's reliance on Indian
sources means he does not shy away from the violence and privation forced on
millions of people by rapacious corporate traders bent on fame and riches at
any cost. (Bloomsbury) – Ryan
The Bells of
Old Tokyo
Anna Sherman
Sherman's
book ostensibly charts a search for a set of fabled historical bells in Japan's
capital, but the bells themselves are a MacGuffin—they
are really just the framework around which the author wraps a gorgeous memoir and
travelogue. Sherman is more interested in the ancient bones of Tokyo than its
pop culture, more invested in the coffee shokunin who preserves the old
ways than the capsule hotels, high-tech bidets and Harajuku
fashion that fill a thousand other books on Japan. Though a fast read, The Bells of Old Tokyo has impressive
weight and dignity. (Picador) – Ryan
The Memory
Police
Yōko
Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
If
you are in the mood for an atmospheric, slightly dark, slightly fable-esque novel, look no further than The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. On an unnamed island, residents
occasionally wake up and feel that something is "missing," and suddenly,
apples, or cats, or photographs no longer mean anything to them. Except that a
few residents do remember those things, including the narrator's mother
and her editor, and the Memory Police are after anyone whose memories remain
intact. A beautifully unfolding meditation on what memories mean to us, with
just enough plot to pull you forward, The
Memory Police is a stirring book about both friendship and resistance in
the midst of totalitarianism. (Pantheon) – Emily
Our Women on
the Ground
edited
by Zahra Hankir
This collection of essays by Arab women reporting from the
Middle East brings essential voices to the forefront. Each essay is wildly
different, ranging from straight war reportage to memoir to cultural history.
The result is a nuanced look into war, sexual harassment, displacement, and
mass migration. Many of the included reporters are sharing their personal
stories for the first time. Through unsentimental and factual accounts, Our Women on the Ground spotlights
courage, kindness, and truth. (Penguin) – Nora
~
Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~
Fiction
Normal
People by Sally Rooney
(Hogarth)
We
Cast a Shadow by Carlos
Maurice Ruffin (One World)
Daisy
Jones & the Six by
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine)
Lost
Children Archive by Valeria
Luiselli (Vintage)
Cheer
Up, Mr. Widdicombe by Evan James (Washington Square Press)
Ghost
Wall by Sarah Moss
(Picador)
Sing
to It by Amy Hempel (Scribner)
Nonfiction
Say
Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (Anchor)
How to
Disappear by Akiko Busch
(Penguin)
I.M. by Isaac Mizrahi (Flatiron)
Inheritance
by Dani
Shapiro (Anchor)
Figuring by Maria Popova
(Vintage)
Bad
Blood by John Carreyrou (Vintage)
All
the Lives We Ever Lived by
Katharine Smyth (Broadway)
The
Source of Self-Regard by
Toni Morrison (Vintage)
The British
in India by David Gilmour
(Picador)
~ The Three
Lives & Company Bestseller List ~
1. Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2. Weather
by Jenny Offill (Knopf)
3. Year
of the Monkey by Patti Smith (Knopf)
4. Uncanny
Valley by Anna Wiener (MCD)
5. Such
A Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Putnam)
6.
French Exit by Patrick DeWitt
(Ecco)
7. Nothing
Fancy by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter)
8. On
Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
(Penguin Press)
9. American
Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (Flatiron)
10. Abigail
by Magda Szabo, translated by Len Rix
(New York Review Books)