Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

Welcome to the post-December calm. Although it never gets truly sleepy at the bookshop these days, weekday mornings in January and February are about the quietest we get – quite a change from the hectic holidays. (Browsers, take note!) It was another very busy December on the corner, full of book consultations, giftwrapping, treats, and general good cheer. Thank you as always for braving the cold and crowds to shop at Three Lives.

We don’t have much news for this edition – we’re just trundling along, slinging books! – but there is one big thing to mention. Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway, has a new collection, Table for Two (which includes an expanded version of the Rules side story “Eve in Hollywood”). As he has done in the past, Amor has kindly offered to sign and inscribe copies of Table for Two for customers who preorder before the book’s on-sale date in early April. If you are interested, please get in touch – sooner is always better – and remember, we can also ship copies to fans who are not in the New York area.

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

I had a grand and thoroughly joyful, inspiring, and oddly moving wander around the British Isles reading Roger Deakin’s invigorating Waterlog (Tin House), an account of a year he spent seeking out wild swimming spots across the land, from Cornwall to the Hebrides, from the Yorkshire Dale to East Anglia beaches. Deakin is the perfect guide – thoughtful, humble, funny, charmingly eccentric and erudite. His oddball adventures, a few seemingly of some peril, are infused with history, local characters, flora and fauna, and odd bits of whimsy that celebrate the natural world and the joy of slowing down to take it all in. Considered a classic of nature writing in the United Kingdom immediately upon publication in 1999, Waterlog was only just published stateside a couple of years ago. This book is a glorious treat.

In a completely different direction, there is much to ponder in Julie Myerson’s novel Nonfiction (Tin House) – the creative life of the writer, the singular focus and self-absorption often needed to create (and justify?) art, the meandering border that shifts across the fictional and the autobiographical, the family dynamic. Not in the least in this story of parents contending with their teenage daughter’s heroin addiction is the harrowing, staggering view from within that particular maelstrom: Myerson depicts the crushing chaos with spot-on authority, intensity, and precision. – Toby

I began last year by reading A.R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, a “long poem” typed onto adding-machine tape between 1964 and 1965. So I began this year with 1997’s Glare (W.W. Norton), in which Ammons returns to the long, thin form he’d pioneered three decades earlier. Glare is the work of an older poet – the voice is more bitter, the horizons circumscribed. Outside the window America is nearing the end of the millennium, and everything is getting faster and meaner. Surveying a country that seems eager to leave him behind, Ammons is charming even in defeat. “I’m / sorry,” he writes, “I don’t care about information: // I can make up all I need.”

In Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion (Particular Books), Charlie Porter explores what it really means to “make up” all one needs. Bloomsbury appears, in Porter’s telling, as a hard-won oasis: a haven for queer people within a culture that denied and defamed their love. To actually make all they needed – including the wardrobes filled with handmade clothes – was, for Woolf, Bell, Forster, et al., a way of “living through making.” Porter’s book is both a radical history and a charge of purpose for the present. (Thank you, Troy, for the recommendation!)

Soetsu Yanagi also championed things made by hand, objects that are so familiar we hardly see them. The Beauty of Everyday Things (Penguin, translated by Michael Brase) is a celebration of all that is comforting and surprising in a frayed piece of cloth, a heavy teapot, a simple pattern of flowers. Yanagi’s work can give us a deeper appreciation for the pain and ingenuity involved in creating the tools and textiles we live with every day. 

And don’t let me forget fiction! The very short stories collected in Diane Williams’s Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine (McSweeney’s) have been a constant source of delight for me this month. They are flinty, devious, and mysterious – shimmering windows onto damaged souls. Every page is a gas, and a wonder. – Lucas

Unwittingly, I started my 2024 with three tried and true novelists. I guess I wanted a sure thing! I will read anything Hisham Matar writes, and once again, I was not disappointed. His latest, My Friends (Random House), excavates many of his signature themes – father-son relationships, life under an authoritarian regime, the heartbreak and compromises of exile – with an especial turn toward friendship and the ways in which it evolves and sustains over decades. His prose, his language and style choices work for me every time, and his use of short chapters lends a propulsive pace to this narrative.

Speaking of propulsion, I was delighted to turn to Christoffer Carlsson’s companion to Blaze Me a Sun, a Swedish mystery I loved last year. Under the Storm (Hogarth, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles, on sale February 27) delivers with Carlsson’s literary chops, skillful sense of plotting, and complex portrayal of a small community in crisis where everyone has their own agenda and secrets.

And to round it all out – the queen, the goddess, the writer to whom we should all doff our caps: Iris Murdoch. Whenever I’m scratching my head over what to read next, I pick up one of her books. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Penguin Classics) is wicked good fun and yet another exploration of her compelling philosophy of love and virtue. Character and plot machinations galore, some late-in-the-game surprises, and the foregrounding of a queer romance – Iris, you did it again! – Miriam

My Work by Olga Ravn (New Directions, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) is autofiction following a young woman who, after giving birth, feels untethered from the person she once was. When Anna has her child, she splits in two, and Ravn charges herself with putting the selves back together using all the scraps of Anna’s life – diary entries, poetry, hospital leaflets. Anna knows that the only way back to wholeness is through writing, but she also knows this means confronting the shame, guilt, and fear often felt in early stages of motherhood. “This is why no one wants to read the books of mothers. No one wants to know her. No one wants to see her become real.” What Ravn does is surgical, making Anna real and stitching her all together. And it is often ugly and painful. This book walks the reader through all stages of childbirth – the blooming of a life, yes, but also death, rage, and transformation. 

In Lonely City (Picador), Olivia Laing embarks on a deep examination of loneliness. She explores by way of art, becoming a student of loneliness and of the great artists who often inhabited this state – Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Klaus Nomi, Henry Darger. Laing makes a case for yearning, for hungry need, for the desperation one is saddled with after being left alone. By the end, loneliness feels both habitable and escapable. It feels useful, and it feels hopeful. Laing makes clear that even though making art can be a solitary experience, its aim is intimacy. Its aim is contact. Art-making was how these artists not only processed isolation but also pulled themselves out of it. As Laing brilliantly puts it: “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is a collective; it is a city.” – Sarah

You can skip the parts of H.V. Morton’s A Traveller in Rome (Da Capo) concerned with minor British aristocrats exercising their privilege in the title city – it’s dull minutiae. Everything else, though, is great. Morton’s 1950s travelogue is still vibrant and relevant (it gave me ideas for my own Rome trip this month: Vatican necropolis, here I come!). The author’s midcentury gentility shines even when he’s almost brought to tears by Italy’s cryptic postal service or deafened by the motorbikes whizzing past his pensione. And you will learn a lot about fountains. Who built them, why they were built, their attractiveness relative to other fountains, where their water comes from. And if that sounds dull, well, it’s not: even the waterworks are fascinating in Morton’s gaze.

From Rome to the Philippines, and la dolce vita to drug war: my other excellent read in recent months was Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing (Random House), a brutal account of extrajudicial killings and political corruption. Thousands of drug dealers and users, along with countless bystanders, were murdered by sanctioned vigilantes and the official police force during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, which concluded only two years ago. Evangelista doesn’t flinch from the atrocities, and there’s certainly no happy ending here, but the story of zealots run amok is one that always needs to be told. – Ryan

My first memory of Keith Haring is seeing a photo of him in Vanity Fair, nude except for a covering of his own body paint, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. An unforgettable image for a young not-yet-out college kid like myself. Back then you didn’t necessarily have to go to a museum or a gallery to see Haring’s work – it was all around, in the air, just like Madonna. But all these years later I still didn’t know much about his life, so I was psyched to get an early copy of Brad Gooch’s biography Radiant (Harper, on sale March 5). I loved Gooch’s memoir Smash Cut, in which he writes beautifully about his life with boyfriend Howard Brookner in New York City in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Radiant is just as good and is as much a portrait of the city and culture of the time as it is of Keith Haring. “By late August 1978, when Keith Haring arrived in town, New York City was just recovering from a long, hot summer.” Haring’s father drops Keith off at the 23rd Street McBurney YMCA, one of the residence halls for the School of Visual Arts, where he would soon begin the fall semester. It took Haring a day to find Christopher Street, a “gay Disneyland,” and thus it all began. – Troy

My first book of 2024 was Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas (Harry N. Abrams). There is so much packed into this novel: the epic highs and lows of being a theater kid; AOL chat rooms and LiveJournal; the meticulous re-creation of writing and reading fanfiction; and more! But the thing that made it impossible for me to put the book down was the desire to know how two people, Fay and Nell, who were once so close that they thought of themselves as a single entity, had such a devastating falling-out that it haunts them over a decade later. Thomas deftly handles themes of queerness and gender: the loneliness Nell experiences as the only open lesbian at her school, confident in her identity yet insecure about her lack of experience, and Fay’s struggle as a closeted trans man, desperately trying to signal her gender and also conceal it from everyone, including herself. If you find the idea of reflecting on your teenage years deeply mortifying, this book is worth picking up for the way it inspires one to be more generous with one’s younger self.

Wanting to maintain a theme of obsessive friendship, I read The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Picador). This book tells the story of two friends who, like Nell and Fay, remake the world and themselves via stories they craft together. This eventually leads to a long con in which Agnus, at Fabienne’s insistence, plays the role of child prodigy and sole author of their book of stories. Li’s prose is kaleidoscopic, her tone shifting between grotesque and depressing, from fairy tale to bildungsroman. It is a subtle trick to place the narrative firmly in Agnus’s point of view but leave enough space between the lines for readers to see what Agnus cannot. – Marlowe

I really loved reading two of Gwendoline Riley’s books, My Phantoms and First Love (New York Review Books), in quick succession – each so startling, vivid, and brief. They are both hyper-focused on the mechanisms of a relationship, perfectly honed into the idiosyncratic details of their characters. The novels do not flinch from the permeating toxicity and elements of emotional brutality in each relationship – there is lots of reminiscing about old patterns of interaction and wondering if one can ever really change. Some exchanges still haunt me, in the best way. 

I also read Ling Ma’s collection of short stories, Bliss Montage (Picador). Each tale is shot through with an infusion of the fantastical, so perfectly integrated into the modern setting and characters that it barely registers as surreal. I’m almost mad at how good the writing is – concise but meandering when it wants to be, reserved in one sentence and then the next sends you reeling. Ma is a natural storyteller to reach such depth in such a short amount of time, and I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next. – Elaine

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Vintage)

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Vintage)

Blaze Me a Sun by Christoffer Carlsson (Hogarth, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles)

The New Life by Tom Crewe (Scribner)

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (W.W. Norton)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions, translated by Susan Bernofsky)

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions, translated by Susan Bernofsky)

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions, translated by Susan Bernofsky)

That Time of Year by Marie NDaiye (Two Lines, translated by Jordan Stump)

Come & Get It by Kiley Reid (Putnam)

The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

Family Meal by Bryan Washington (Riverhead)

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Inverno by Cynthia Zarin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction

Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière (Spiegel & Grau)

Talking to My Angels by Melissa Etheridge (Harper)

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista (Random House)

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Walk With Me: New York by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

Glossy by Marisa Meltzer (One Signal)

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

Sweet Enough by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter)

The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Devotion by Patti Smith (Yale University)

Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)

M Train by Patti Smith (Vintage)

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith (Vintage)

A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín (Picador)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (Harper, translated by Eric Ozawa)

2. The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)

3. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton (Harper)

4. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead)

5. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)

6. The Girls by John Bowen (McNally)

7. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

8. Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman (Berkley)

9. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (William Morrow)

10. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Atlantic Monthly)

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SPECIAL ORDERS:

A reminder that we specialize in special orders. In our small shop it’s always a challenge to find room for all the new, notable, and exciting books; if you’d like a book that we don’t have on hand, we are always happy to order it for you. We place orders almost daily and the usual turnaround time for a special order is two business days. For some books it may take longer, but we’ll be sure to discuss the particulars with you before we place an order. Additionally, we can ship books to you anywhere within the United States. Give us a call, send us an email, or stop in any time.

PREORDERS:

We are happy to take preorders for forthcoming titles, and we will let you know as soon as the book arrives. We are all too familiar with the fervid desire to possess a new book at the first possible moment, and we will do everything in our power to make sure the book lands in your hands hot off the presses.

GIFT CERTIFICATES:

We offer gift certificates, which you may purchase in any amount.  

Three Lives & Company, Booksellers

154 W. 10th St.

New York  NY 10014

212.741.2069

threelives.com

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