Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

The pear blooms are out on Waverly Place, and on our flower-decked theme table, a collection of verse awaits you for Poetry Month. Folks who have been reading this newsletter for years (or decades!) know that we at Three Lives like our traditions, and one of our favorite spring occasions is fast approaching: Independent Bookstore Day, when we show our appreciation for your support by plying you with baked goods. On the last Saturday in April – that’s April 27 this year – our booksellers don aprons and bake cookies, brownies, and bars, and wheelbarrow them to the shop for your enjoyment. (We will also, as usual, have our special IBD bookmark.) Please join us for a celebration of independent bookshops – and independent readers.

There’s something old, and here’s something new: we’re debuting a fresh section in this newsletter, borne from the popularity of our children’s literature bookcase. Miriam has written up a selection of new picture books for our young readers (and our young readers’ desperate-for-a-birthday-gift parents), carefully pruned from the forests of kids’ books published every season. You’ll find her picks below, following our usual reading roundups.

And speaking of children’s books, we have an event on the horizon for a local writer and illustrator. Elisha Cooper, author of River, Yes & No, and Big Cat, Little Cat, will be at Three Lives on the morning of Sunday, April 28 (that’s the day after IBD), for his latest picture book, Emma Full of Wonders. Come by between 10 a.m. and noon to meet Elisha and get a signed copy!

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

Recently I stumbled upon Diana Athill’s only novel, Don’t Look at Me Like That (New York Review Books), and was surprised and delighted by the prickly narrator stubbornly making her journey into adulthood against the backdrop of 1950s London. More relatable and modern than I expected, full of wonderfully wry observations about British society, first loves, and heartbreaks, this novel is a gem.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking) was another surprise: the book’s poetic language and unusual structure lend themselves perfectly to depicting the matches in a women’s youth boxing tournament. The novel flows from one girl’s mind to the next as they fight, from their future to past to present – you would never think a tumbledown boxing gym in Reno could become such a transcendent stage, but it does. 

Finally, Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People (MCD) is a beautiful meditation on unexpectedly losing a close friend. It’s not very often that I laugh as much as I cry while reading, and this was one of those times. – Elaine

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday) is that it remains, in many ways, an adventure tale. A retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, Everett’s book obviously takes a different view of mid-1800s ethical dilemmas, and the author twists a few of the events of Twain’s classic to make a point to modern readers. But the satire has a light touch, and the relationship between Jim and Huck remains the heart of the story. What’s new is the depth of Jim’s private life and mind: in Everett’s telling he’s a reader and aspiring writer, a devoted family man, and a profound thinker who debates moral matters in his head with John Locke and Voltaire’s Cunégonde.

This season I once again turned to two of my favorite globetrotting writers. Jan Morris’s World of Venice (Mariner) serves up the author’s usual scholarship and verve, echoing from the cobbles and canals of Italy’s floating city. Morris updated the book multiple times over several decades, reflecting the city’s history – slow change, layers of dignified decay, a place sinking under the weight of its stones and millions of visitors. But there are still ten thousand delights in Venice, and Morris seems to have found them all.

Paul Theroux, George Orwell and Burma make an irresistible Venn diagram for me. Theroux’s new novel Burma Sahib (Mariner) tackles the experiences of young Eric Blair before pen name and fame. Fresh out of Eton in the Raj police force, Blair observed firsthand the cruelty of Britain’s colonial regime, and Theroux shapes those years into the author’s moral awakening – despite his own failings and insecurities. (His Burmese days found a home in Orwell’s great first novel, a brutal rejoinder to empire-builders.) – Ryan

Widow Basquiat (Crown), an assemblage of Jennifer Clement’s stellar prose and her close friend Suzanne Mallouk’s direct memories and diary entries, is a cutting and poetic expression of Mallouk’s tumultuous relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is not a portrait of Basquiat but of Mallouk and the pain she endured, often at his hand. She stayed when he viewed her as the perfect object of his affection and when he broke her down to a literal object – silent, compliant, something only to be moved at his will. Clement (whose new memoir, The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat & Me, will be published by Canongate on May 28) gives us insight into one of the greatest artists of our time through the woman who saw him at his ugliest. But she also lets us see Mallouk, an artist herself, who fought for a voice and found inspiration in a love that was cataclysmic from its beginning.

In Miranda July’s novel All Fours (Riverhead, on sale May 14) the narrator, approaching menopause and facing an impasse in her marriage, sets out on a cross-country road trip. Her plans derail only a few miles outside of Los Angeles when she checks into a motel room and decides to renovate it. Here, for the first time, she finds a space all her own – a space where she can undergo the evolution she’s been waiting for. Like the narrator in her rented room, I found it difficult to leave July’s beautifully sculpted world. There are so few authors (actually, I can’t think of any – we need more!) who venture to write about menopause and midlife with such curiosity and joy. – Sarah

Here’s a book recommendation that came from the other side of the counter: after several customers, near-breathless with admiration, gave their raves for Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo (Knopf), I had to see what it was all about. I wholeheartedly agree: exceptional. Eichler has written a singular history and cultural critique of four composers – Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Britten – and the music they created following the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. An astonishing work of scholarship, storytelling and personal reflection about these men, their music, and their responses to the carnage, Time’s Echo is, as Edmund de Waal said, a “profoundly moving” reading experience.

I’m not sure where I came upon my copy of Josephine Johnson’s The Inland Island (Scribner) – though am thinking it is from one in a cluster of excellent secondhand bookshops in Asheville, North Carolina, from a few years ago – but I do remember being taken by the simple, stately jacket from the original 1969 edition and the promise of nature detailed over a year on an Ohio farm. What I found within was indeed wonderfully observed nature writing, but Johnson (still the youngest winner of the Pulitzer literature prize for her 1934 novel Now in November, published when she was twenty-four) rounds her simple narrative of slowing down and witnessing the world around her with an irreverent, bittersweet, and fierce plea for an environment at the mercy of a brazen, consumerist, war-fighting nation. One feels her anguish and disgust amidst the joy she finds in the creaking of the trees in a high wind, the beauty of the resolute ladybug, the grand awakening in spring. – Toby

This year I’ve been in a mood. I’ve not been in the mood to sit. Maybe it’s partly a result of sitting for forty-nine-plus captivating hours listening to Barbra Streisand read her memoir My Name Is Barbra, or maybe it’s because my attention is on spring and what’s to come and what’s to be done. Reading in doses has been the way – a story, an essay, a chapter. 

Recently Miriam put a new book in my hand that caused me to gasp: My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love (Picador), edited and introduced by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid has chosen a wonderfully diverse mix of contributors from the present and past (Colette, Christopher Lloyd, Wayne Winterrowd, Mary Keen, and Hilton Als, to name but a few) to write on such subjects as hellebores, poppies, irises, and marigolds. No need to gobble it up all at once – it’s a book to be enjoyed throughout the gardening year.

Oh, and speaking of books to be rationed and savored, here’s a book I’ve mentioned before, one of the best cookery books I’ve come across in a long time: The Secrets of Cooking by Bee Wilson (W.W. Norton). Wise, practical, encouraging, sparking enthusiasm to dash to the market and get in the kitchen. So I leave you with Bee’s recipe for asparagus, whose arrival is right around the corner.

“The recipe that changed how I think about asparagus was River Café penne with asparagus carbonara… with spears of asparagus cut on the diagonal in the place of the pancetta. The thing that startled me was the wonderous economy of the method. While the pasta boiled until al dente for nine minutes, you cooked the asparagus in a separate pan. The stalks were added first, then, after two minutes, the tips, which cooked for four minutes. The blanched asparagus was tossed with pasta, yolks, parmesan, butter and thyme to make a richly springlike dish: green and golden.” – Troy

The lion’s share of my reading time since late January has gone to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Vintage, in two volumes, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike), a massive, masterful novel set in the dying days of the Austrian Empire. The plot (such as it is) follows Ulrich, our “man without qualities,” as he’s drawn into a plan to commemorate Franz Joseph’s seventieth jubilee year with a mighty civic event, a great symbol that will unite the fracturing nation. (We all know how that turned out.) The book itself is many things: a sociologist’s vivisection of Viennese culture; a historian’s analysis of a world about to collapse; a philosopher’s search for truth in a language that resists it and a society that rejects it. But it’s all held together by Musil’s narration, an impossibly subtle balance of force and precision, humor and heart, flesh and spirit. The Man Without Qualities is a stunning picture of a vanished past that is also, somehow, a reflection of our present, warped and distended as an image in a funhouse mirror. Not merely a novel of ideas, Musil’s may be the novel of ideas: an encyclopedia of Western thought brought to shimmering, maddening life. 

But we all need vacations, and for that I turned to Alan Ross’s Reflections on Blue Water: Journeys in the Gulf of Naples and the Aeolian Islands (Faber & Faber). Ross was an unusually sensitive travel writer – sensitive to light, to color, to fragrance – a keen observer with a poet’s ear and a knack for distilling landscape to its essence. Recording several decades’ worth of journeys among Ischia, Capri, and their surrounding islands, Ross gives us each place as a kind of palimpsest, written over by the generations of writers, artists, and emperors who have called these islands home. Here we find Neruda and Malaparte, D.H. Lawrence and Ingrid Bergman, Augustus and Rilke; in these waters, too, Ross is the perfect guide. – Lucas

~ Small & Mighty with Miriam ~

Welcome to my first picture book column! It is a happy day at Three Lives when a standout kids’ book gets unpacked: we crowd around – or pass it from hand to hand – and admire the art, the message, the clever story. And that seems to be happening more frequently lately. It’s long past time to fill you in on the latest and greatest in illustrated books.

The House with 100 Stories by Toshio Iwai (Holiday House)

Exactly the kind of book I adored (and read a hundred times) as a young person. The House with 100 Stories is meant to be turned on its side and read vertically. Tochi is summoned to a tall tower and goes inside to find... a ten-floor (cheerfully illustrated) mouse house. When you turn the page and reach floor eleven, Tochi has landed in a squirrel house. You get the idea – every page is ten stories and the residence of a different animal. Each floor is labelled with its number (a great way to master digits and counting) and features a charming level of detail. Tochi might just meet a new friend on the 100th floor...

Exactly as Planned by Tao Nyeu (Rocky Pond)

This book also has a fun conceit: you read half the story as you would expect (from the point of view of Moose) and when you reach the midpoint, you turn the book over and upside down, and start the story again from Fox’s perspective. Moose is headed to Fox’s house for tea and brings along a scarf as a thank-you gift. En route, the scarf goes missing, and Moose has to think on his feet (sorry, hooves) to make sure he doesn’t show up empty-handed. Meanwhile the brownies that Fox baked for Moose also have disappeared and that just won’t do... Featuring illustrations in shades of orange, blue, and purple – with a colored pencil-like look – Exactly as Planned is fairly text-heavy and story-focused so would be best for a more adept reader. Its message of consideration and kindness, its focus on the way we treat others and how we can help each other out only adds to its appeal!

The Prickletrims Go Wild by Marie Dorléans (Floris, translated by Polly Lawson)

The art in this book immediately caught my eye. It’s sharp; it doesn’t mimic the style found in so many children’s books right now; it expertly plays with the contrast between black-and-white and riotous color (especially green!). The Prickletrim family loves their orderly, impeccably manicured garden – and then their gardener quits, and the grass and flowers grow absolutely wild, invading their home and exposing the Prickletrims to a different way of life. I love this book’s personality: it’s exploding with imagination and originality, just like the garden at its center.

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan (Catapult)

Emma Full of Wonders by Elisha Cooper (Roaring Brook)

James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury (W.W. Norton)

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut (Penguin Press)

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (New York Review Books)

Ellipses by Vanessa Lawrence (Dutton)

The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House)

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

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan (Little, Brown)

The Morningside by Téa Obreht (Random House)

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Knopf)

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid (Putnam)

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Viking)

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking)

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (Viking)

Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking)

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco)

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

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

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (MCD)

Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt (Europa)

Cocktails with George and Martha by Philip Gefter (Bloomsbury)

The Language of Trees by Katie Holten (Tin House)

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson (Pushkin)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan (Penguin Press)

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

Somehow by Anne Lamott (Riverhead)

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

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Doubleday)

The Secret of Cooking by Bee Wilson (W.W. Norton)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking)

2. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

3. Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Knopf)

4. Dune by Frank Herbert (Ace)

5. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (MCD)

6. The Hunter by Tana French (Viking)

7. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Scribner, translated by C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks)

8. Happy Place by Emily Henry (Berkley)

9. The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s)

10. Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin (Harper)

11. Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (Bloomsbury)

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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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