Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

Last summer you had a peek behind the Three Lives curtain with our first alumni newsletter, wherein booksellers from years past reminisced about their careers on the corner and talked about their lives since leaving the shop. Of course, there are far too many members of the Three Lives family to cover in only one edition of the newsletter, so we are back this month with our second installment, spanning over forty years of history at your bookshop. We hope you enjoy the memories!

The rest of us are taking our usual early-summer break from writing up reviews, but of course we need to at least mention our recent favorites. Sarah has devoured David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives and Eric Schnall’s novel I Make Envy on Your Disco. Ryan thought that Joseph Andras’s curious novella Faraway the Southern Sky (translated by Simon Leser), about Ho Chi Minh’s pre-revolutionary life in Paris, was an intriguing snapshot of a singular man, and Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet a keen history of Chinese cuisine and food culture. Two novels, one classic and one contemporary, have risen to the top of Elaine’s recent reads: Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. Toby’s pick for the season is another older book, Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters.

June brings the heat, Pride celebrations – keep an eye out for our Pride table! – and summer recipes. To keep you in good food this season, Troy has done a writeup of his top recent cookbooks – his Cookbook Corner below traverses the world from Nice to Korea to Berkeley.

~ Alumni Updates ~

I cannot look at the passage of time since my days working at Three Lives with quite the same insouciance as others have; for sure, the great majority of my life has passed. It’s been 38 years since I last worked with Jill Dunbar, Jenny Feder and Helene Webb. I started in 1979 or ‘80. For a long time, I was the sole employee, but as the store flourished, the staff grew. I left in 1984 to move to Santa Monica, came back soon after, and worked one more year. I began at the original location on Seventh Avenue and West 10th, and when I came back, worked at the “new” store. There would be no Three Lives without Jill, Jenny, and Helene: intelligent, creative, innovative, cultured, hard-driving, engaging, strong, opinionated women. The store they created has never faded. It has retained and deepened its essence, both the same and different.

After I left the second time, I taught elementary school for over three decades, retiring a couple of years ago. I have kept a list of books I have read since 1989. (I have one from the summer of 1966 as well.) I could list dozens of books I’ve loved, but that is too much. What follow are the books which immediately sprang to mind when I was asked to contribute to this alumni newsletter.

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (Vintage)

If I were as fine a writer as Jefferson, a longtime customer whom I remember well and see often walking around the Village, I would be able to weave books and their authors into meaningful, revealing, astute paragraphs about how the art of these authors has illuminated my understanding of the world and of myself, but I can’t. I shall just recommend both Constructing a Nervous System and Negroland, her previous memoir.

Anthony Trollope

When I first started at the store, I read the six novels of the Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope, the wonderful Victorian novelist – in my opinion, far superior to Dickens. I can see myself lying on my stomach on the big bed at my small Barrow Street apartment. I was so young, I could lay face down on the bed reading for hours without my back throbbing in pain. Years later, in 2001, when I took a sabbatical and spent a year in Virginia, I lost myself in the six Palliser novels, Trollope’s political series. But sitting up.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (Vintage)

I was astonished, thrilled, and impressed by the bizarre world of elevators and people who boss them around in Whitehead’s first novel. It is a detective story, a racial story, and a quest story. Politically astute, smart, wacky.

Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

I was utterly captivated by this book. Well-written, well-constructed, and oh so vivid, with lots of astonishing diary entries. I cannot describe it, so I’ll just quote the publisher: “In 1903 Leonidas Hubbard was commissioned by an outdoors magazine to explore Labrador by canoe. Joined by his best friend, Dillon Wallace, and a Scots-Cree guide, George Elson, Hubbard hoped to make a name for himself as an adventurer. But plagued by poor judgment and bad luck, his party turned back and Hubbard died of starvation just thirty miles from camp. Two years later, Hubbard’s widow, Mina, and Wallace returned to Labrador, leading rival expeditions to complete the original trek and fix blame for the earlier failure.”

This House of Grief by Helen Garner (Pantheon)

The true story and trial of a man who deliberately drowned his three children – exactly the sort of book I never read. Garner, famous in Australia, is sharp-eyed and compassionate; unlike most true crime writers, she reports the story but is also openly, keenly present, though not in a finger-pointing, tabloid manner. Unusual, generously accomplished, and riveting.

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (New Directions)

After reading the jaw-droppingly surprising (and witty) novella The English Understand Wool, which Miriam put in my hands, I rushed to read more DeWitt. This is one weirdo novel, perfectly constructed and executed. Satirical, political (office politics, sexual politics), hilarious: who in god’s name could think of this?! Nutty! – Penny House (1979-86)

It’s been more than thirty years since I worked in the bookshop with Jill and Jenny, and I count it as one of my favorite jobs ever. Since that time I’ve stayed around books and publishing, mostly as an editor, and I do a lot of writing as well. Forthcoming projects that make me happy: my little “foreword” to Chris Stein’s memoir Under a Rock (on sale June 11 from St. Martin’s), and a book that I co-wrote with my friend Indra Tamang called My Curious Years with Charles Henri Ford: The Autobiography of Indra B. Tamang (on sale August 27 from Turtle Point Press). I might be a little biased, but I highly recommend both of them! My favorite long-running project is my blog, Walkers in the City, which is just me wandering around New York and letting my mind do the same. 

When I was at the bookshop, we staffers read the New York Times Book Review cover to cover every week as part of the job. Jill and Jenny also encouraged us to read as many books as we could in order to talk about them with “friends of the store” who loved coming in to do just that. Eavesdropping on Jill and Jenny chatting with some of those regulars was nothing less than dazzling – the standout being Fran Lebowitz. I remember Grace Paley coming in, Larry Kramer with his fluffy doggie, John Lahr, Stanley Crouch, David Wojnarovicz, and sometimes Marguerite Young, who lived on Bleecker Street with a big collection of dolls.  

Some books I remember reading at that time are A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage), Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare, and You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips (Random House), all of which I remember liking very much. Some I’ve enjoyed recently: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Penguin), which I remember selling in the store but had never read, absolutely everything by Lucia Berlin, A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi (Ecco, translated by Paul Bowles), and the collected stories of Cookie Mueller (Semiotext(e)). I also loved The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America) and the essays of Lydia Davis (Picador in two volumes). 

Right now I’m rereading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards (New York Review Books), which I’m liking as much this time as the first, when Jenny put it in my hands thirty-odd years ago and said, “You have to read this.” She said she’d just finished it and cried when it was over, but she couldn’t say exactly why. I have a feeling that’s going to happen to me too, and I don’t know why either.

My favorite part of the workday back then was always rolling out the awning with a long iron pole that was kept in a tiny little “closet” that is still in the store. Jill and Jenny would say that the pole “lived in that closet,” and from what I understand it still does. – Romy Ashby (1989-91)

I very frequently refer to Three Lives as my beloved ancestral homeland. It’s an emotional place for me, my years there having been such a formative time in my bookselling career. And who knew it would become a career? I credit Jenny, Jill, Hilary, and the infinitely quotable Tracy O’Dwyer for my enthusiasm or, perhaps, my seeming inability to choose anything but talking about books as a life path. I was at Three Lives from about 1992 to 1999, returning for a couple of memorable events in 2000-01, just as Toby assumed ownership. Living for a few years at 177 Waverly (before I could absolutely no longer afford it), my commute was pretty lovely. Today, I live just behind my little Narberth Bookshop, 68 steps away from the front door. I opened the shop in 2016, just five days before the election, the results of which led to quite a different and heightened community experience than I had been anticipating! It has now been 7.5 years in this sweetly evolving small space, and twenty-five years since I returned to my Philly-area hometown from the West Village. 

My two adult-ish sons, Julian and Sam, are making their way into the world. Sam is at Sarah Lawrence College and is a crazy-quick reader, a lifelong theater participant. Julian takes classes in history and economics and gives me essential pieces of wisdom every day. I live with my partner in bookselling, Kevin, and we travel as often as we can in our small RV. 

There are certain books that I strongly identify with my time at 154 West 10th. I consider these my “Three Lives books.” (There’s also an accompanying soundtrack, thanks to Jenny’s meticulously crafted mixtapes.) These include anything and everything by Alice Munro and Toni Morrison, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (St. Martin’s Griffin), The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Penguin Classics), and, of course, The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Picador). There was also more Woolf and Stein than I was able to properly digest at the time. Since then, a few favorites include How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Mariner), The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton), A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Penguin), Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (New York Review Books), The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Knopf), and The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). I’m currently reading and re-reading a few titles in preparation for upcoming in-store book groups, including The North Woods by Daniel Mason, Monsters by Claire Dederer, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, and The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. 

Wishing everyone health and happiness. Wouldn’t a reunion be cool? – Ellen Tea, (1992-99)

Working at Three Lives for the summer of 2012 was a dream – what better way to spend a July afternoon than in the store with Troy, Toby, Joyce, and the team? It was the summer after my junior year of college, and I hadn’t moved to the city yet (I would the following year), so working at the shop was really my introduction to the Village and life downtown. When I left to go back to school, Troy gave me a photo of the staff and a beautiful red lipstick as a parting gift. I treasured those and still have them.

Since that summer, Three Lives has been a place to find books, of course, but also to chat and be back in that delightful world. I’ve now lived in Brooklyn for eleven years, worked in publishing at New York Review Books, and currently am a senior editor at New York Magazine’s The Strategist. I’ve written pieces for NY Magazine as well as the New York Times on topics that have been a delight to dive into: maximalist cakes, Murano glass, and porcelain plates, to name a few. 

I’ll recommend two books that satisfy what is maybe the hardest category to find: something to read at the beach that still feels smart and provocative. First, The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Vintage) – if you haven’t read this one already, it’s brilliant and a page turner. Perfect for anyone who’s wondered what could go wrong when a group of liberal arts kids form a pseudo-cult around a classics professor. Second, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (Picador). It’s a story of two intertwined artist-and-academic families living downtown in the ‘80s. The novel is filled with vivid descriptions of artworks that only exist in the realm of the book, dinner parties, and intense love and friendship. – Hilary Reid (2012)

Hello, TL&Co newsletter readers! I can’t recall the day or even month I worked my last shift at the shop, but it’s pretty close to exactly ten years ago. That fall I moved to Chicago for grad school in cinema studies. I finished in 2021, the same year that Cubby and I got married. We live on the northwest side of the city, have two cats, and garden a lot. I’ve been teaching full time for three years, first as a postdoc at the University of Chicago and am now in the middle of a two year experiment at the University of Nevada in Reno. I get back to Chicago as much as I can but also have been exploring the mountainous West for the first time in my life. The Sierras are like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I’m getting better at hiking like a local, but for now I mostly drive around, marveling.

Finishing grad school meant a return to pleasure reading after a long ebb, and summer is when I soak in it. I’ve just arrived back in Chicago, and as a transitional object I’m in the middle of Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius (Penguin), a blast of a read for anyone like me ambling somewhere in the Venn diagram of Anglophile-in-denial, 20th-century intellectual history freak, and language pedant. Up next is a cruise through what’s left unread in Percival Everett’s back catalog, working my way up to his latest, James. I’d loved Everett’s hit books, Erasure and The Trees (Graywolf), but I was spurred to completionism by a New Yorker profile of him in March by Maya Binyam, whose book Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is one of my favorites of the past couple of years. Hangman gets off the ground in charming and hilarious pseudo-picaresque but gradually shows its cards to be much more wise than clever.

If I think back to books that have stood out in the past decade, there are things like Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (New Directions); Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them (New York Review Books); J.G. Farrell’s Troubles (New York Review Books); everything by Charles Portis… And then there’s Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (W.W. Norton). It feels like a confession: I’ve read the twenty completed volumes twice in the past four years, sailing the whole cycle again just in the last nine months in Reno. “The Aubriad” does what it says on the tin: they’re obsessively detailed books about the battles of the Napoleonic Wars and life aboard the sloops and frigates of the British Navy, circa 1800-1816. The adventures are fun and pulpy, and the prose is excellent – dry, bouncy, carrying me right through thickets of description. But it doesn’t take many volumes to realize that O’Brian is as interested in the mysteries of other people as in celestial navigation. The central task of the series is to show how love and friendship can overcome solipsism and that we understand ourselves best through knowing those we care for. Again and again, over thousands of pages and multiple circumnavigations of the globe, O’Brian nails it.

Miss you all! – Dave Burnham (2013-14)

There is no greater rite of passage for a bright-eyed twentysomething than working in a bookstore, and I reflect back on my time at Three Lives with all of the same romanticism as when I was actually working there. Now I’m a jaded thirtysomething, and after a stint out west in California have made my way back to New York with a few more letters behind my name and long hours spent working in community mental health as a psychotherapist. Three Lives was my family’s local bookshop growing up, and there is no greater pleasure than being able to return to it again as an adult; I truly think of it as a home away from home. 

Last year I read The Bell by Iris Murdoch (Penguin Classics), and it instantly soared onto my all-time favorites list. Sex, nuns, and Baroque music? Why not. Speaking of nuns, Lying Awake by Mark Salzman (Vintage) is a portrait of a nun living in a monastery in contemporary Los Angeles. A trip outside the walls of the monastery to the neurologist leads her to question whether her ecstatic visions are truly divine or the result of a medical condition. It’s a tiny pearl of a novel, humble yet beautiful. Another novel that I would categorize as small but mighty is Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto (Europa, translated by Alex Ladd). It was recommended to me years ago by our very own Troy and I am happy to now pass it on to all of you. In the same vein of powerfully spare writing, it feels almost redundant at this point to mention Claire Keegan. If you are late to the Keegan phenomenon, don’t feel guilty, just make your way over to Three Lives immediately and start with Foster (Grove). Then thank me.

If you’re planning a trip to Italy soon and, like me, enjoy immersing yourself in the writing of the country you are in, there is no greater book than Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (New York Review Books, translated by Jenny McPhee). I read it about five years ago while in Rome and was charmed beyond belief by Ginzburg’s writing. Lastly, I recently picked up Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House, translated by Christina MacSweeney), which is full of folly, absurdity, and deeply inventive writing. I can’t remember the last time a novel made me laugh out loud, but this one did just that. – Sophie Browner (2014)

“The Three Lives Years,” as I hope to call them in a tell-all memoir one day, still feel like yesterday to me. In fact, many are the moments I’ve been walking or biking around New York in the last six to eight years (I can’t remember exactly when I left, and the last four years have felt like fifteen years, so “what is time, anyway,” as they say) and find I’ve been lost in a former bookseller’s reverie, reliving some moment from behind the red doors: hand-selling old favorites like Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (Counterpoint), Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (New York Review Books, translated by Thomas Teal), or A Heart So White by Javier Marías (Vintage, translated by Margaret Jull Costa); shelving and ringing up and gift-wrapping at high speeds after drinking the seventh or eighth Three Lives-mandated cortado of the day; or spinning in the chair behind the counter and giggling like a maniac while composing dubiously-themed late-night closing emails with the crew on weekends.  

In any event, though I was but a dewy-eyed babe back then, I’m forty-one now, and it shows. If you knew me then, you’d be amazed by how much more white hair I have now. Some of it came about from working with children (I spent four years teaching creative writing to youths aged 11-18 in Connecticut, though refused to move there, which meant spending a significant portion of those years half-asleep on Metro-North), some from writing books (In 2019 Three Lives hosted the launch event and reading for my first novel, Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe, a dream come true for which I am forever grateful), and some while reading Peter Sloterdijk’s mind-boggling You Must Change Your Life, published by Polity Press (I’ve been reading more philosophy over the last couple of years – research for a novel I’m writing that, unfortunately, has a philosophy student in it). 

Reading-wise, I’m happy as a pig in mud riffling through whatever catches my fancy these days. I was on a Muriel Spark tear recently and read a dozen of her short novels; my favorites include Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means, and The Ballad of Peckingham Rye (all from New Directions). While traveling in Norway last summer I read a bunch of Vigdis Hjorth, whose novel Is Mother Dead (Verso, translated by Charlotte Barslund) is already a favorite at the shop. I also found her Long Live the Post Horn! (same publisher and translator) moving in a way that took me completely by surprise. I finally read Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (New York Review Books, translated by Adrian Nathan West) this year and it has been haunting me in the best of ways. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet (W.W. Norton) was a wonderfully enriching and mouthwatering education in China’s culinary history and traditions (I love her cookbooks, too – The Food of Sichuan, also from Norton, is a favorite). Right now I’m in the middle of a fascinating 1976 travelogue/memoir, Stories of the Sahara (Bloomsbury, translated by Mike Fu), by the fiercely adventurous (and often funny) Sanmao.

I’m just over in Brooklyn, by the way – I still stop by to shoot the breeze now and then, so hopefully I’ll catch some of you in the shop soon! – Evan James (2015-17)

Three Lives will always be a second home to me. It was my first job after moving to New York, and also the job I started two weeks before a worldwide pandemic took over. How blessed was I to be in a community full of care, love, support, and literature! I miss it every single day –holding down the fort with Ryan on Saturdays (and trying to sneak Taylor Swift onto the shop playlist), Sundays with Troy and Miriam, chocolate-covered pretzels abounding… every day full of laughter, recommendations, mental lists of books I wanted to read, and connections with strangers, regulars, and friends in the neighborhood. I will forever be grateful for my tenure at the shop, for the pleasure and honor of working under Toby’s hospitality and kindness, and for the friends I made. There’s a coming-home feeling every time I step through those double red doors, peruse the Staff Picks, ask Troy for the latest cookbooks, get a new photo of Ryan’s son, and see what titles are faced out on the shelves – and maybe catch Toby shuffling books around!

I left at the end of summer 2021 to take a job in fashion, and while I spent two years in that chic little world, I am so happy to say I am back where I belong – in the world of books, working as a publicist at Blackstone Publishing! I’ve been chipping away at my TBR pile like never before. One recent standout: One Day by David Nicholls (Vintage). My copy is now full of my scribbles, thoughts, and shocks. Nicholls creates a world of mirth, love, pain, confusion, anger, yearning, loss, intimacy, and so much more. I felt like I knew Dex and Em as well as they knew each other, and maybe even understood myself a bit more by the end. Truly a treasure of a novel.

Other standouts include Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Knopf), Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (Bloomsbury), and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (Harper, translated by Eric Ozawa). I’ve always favored books centered on people’s stories – their relationships and the consequences of them. These books made me cry, laugh, grieve, and sometimes settle into a comfortable bubble of warmth. The humanity of each character’s journey – their flaws, strengths, and growth – kept me rapt.

When I started at Three Lives, I had also begun a publishing internship with Europa Editions. This internship – and the shop’s immaculate stock of translated works – made me fall hard for Japanese literature. Coming off Morisaki Bookshop, I returned to the works of a favorite author of mine, Hiromi Kawakami. If you’re a Three Lives regular, you already know how much love Strange Weather in Tokyo (Counterpoint, translated by Allison Markin Powell) gets in the shop. And for good reason! I also re-read The Nakano Thrift Shop and The Ten Loves of Nishino (both from Europa and translated by Powell) and snuck in some works that I hadn’t yet read, like People from My Neighborhood (Soft Skull, translated by Ted Goossen). Kawakami’s perspective on the world – the experiences one must go through to shape who they are, and the impact that even the strangest of strangers can have on our lives – will always inspire and comfort me.

These summer days especially have me missing the shop and its energy. I can’t wait to stop by soon to say hi and see the whole crew before I embark on a European journey. Happy summer to you all, and happy reading! – Tatiana Radujkovic (2020-21)

~ Troy’s Cookbook Corner ~

What kind of cookbook are you looking for? 

Recently I was listening to an episode of KCRW’s Good Food hosted by Evan Kleiman and she was interviewing Priya Krishna about her new cookbook, Priya’s Kitchen Adventures (Harvest). Priya talked about how much her parents loved to travel, and because her mom worked for an airline, the family was able to visit many parts of the world, experience different cultures, and eat, eat, eat. When they returned from their trips to Greece, France, Mexico, Egypt, India, Peru, Japan, and others, Priya and her mom would learn more about the dishes they had eaten and recreate them in their kitchen. As she puts it in Kitchen Adventures: “I realized that traveling doesn’t actually require boarding a plane. I could travel in my own kitchen. Cooking a dish from another country was a way of transporting me there – no passport required!”

Priya’s cookbook is not just for kids (although it is wonderfully illustrated, photographed, and instructional) – it is for anyone interested in tapping into the true adventure that cooking allows us, each and every time we step into our kitchens. I too have returned from trips to Northern California or Oaxaca and been inspired to keep those memories alive by incorporating newly discovered dishes and ingredients into our daily repertoire of meals. I suppose I’m always looking for a cookbook that transports me and teaches me how to be a better, more knowledgeable, and intuitive cook – and the cookbook authors who do that for me are Alice Waters, Nigel Slater, Melissa Clark, and Bee Wilson. (For abandon and joy in the kitchen, I go to Jeremy Lee.) I may not be able to make it to Berkeley in the spring to have a slice of Alice’s rhubarb galette, but I can open Chez Panisse Fruit to page 280 and know exactly how to make it.

I brought a new cookbook home, Niçoise: Market-Inspired Cooking from France’s Sunniest City (W.W. Norton), and immediately I was intrigued. I’ve never been to Nice and I don’t really know what makes the food from Nice truly Niçoise, but Rosa Jackson explains exactly that in her new book by setting the stage, giving the feel for the place, its history, traditions, and the ingredients of its cuisine. Rosa has a cooking school in Nice, and oh, how I would love to make the journey to take her classes. This book is a way of transporting us into her world – get it in your hands and you’ll see! Sure, I look forward to walking the promenade of Nice (think Matisse), but for this summer I’ll settle for making Rosa’s Fleurs de Courgette Farcies with Salsa Niçoise, and in the height of summer when tomatoes are at their peak and eggplants are plentiful, you can be sure I’ll be making her Ratatouille Niçoise!

Rosa includes a quote from the writer Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, about the nineteenth-century Promenade des Anglais: “[T]he wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes worn; and, on a sunny day, the spectacle is as gay and brilliant as a carnival.” 

I encourage you to come down to the shop and look through the shelves yourself to see what excites and inspires you. Your idea of adventure is unique to you. 

These are new cookbooks that have caught my eye and will help transport you on your culinary adventures this summer. Many more await. 

The Farm Table by Julius Roberts (Ten Speed)

Bohème Cooking: French Vegetarian Recipes by Carrie Solomon (Countryman)

The California Farm Table Cookbook by Lori Rice (Countryman, on sale June 18)

Italian Coastal by Amber Guinness (Thames & Hudson)

Koreaworld by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard (Clarkson Potter)

A Seat at My Table: Philoxenia: Vegetarian and Vegan Greek Kitchen Recipes by Kon & Sia Karapanagiotidis (Hardie Grant)

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

Death Valley by Melissa Broder (Scribner)

Penance by Eliza Clark (Harper)

The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House)

Nonfiction

The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan (Vintage)

The Leaving Season by Kelly McMasters (W.W. Norton)

Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson (Random House)

The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin)

A Book of Days by Patti Smith (Random House)

Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (Harper)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

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

Emma Full of Wonders by Elisha Cooper (Roaring Brook)

The Hunter by Tana French (Viking)

The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf)

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

All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead)

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Doubleday)

Exhibit by R.O. Kwon (Riverhead)

The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House)

The Morningside by Téa Obreht (Random House)

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Knopf)

My Work by Olga Ravn (New Directions, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House)

The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley (Putnam)

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)

Nonfiction

The Women by Hilton Als (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker (Viking)

The Believer by David Coggins (Scribner)

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (MCD)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Walk With Me: Hamptons by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

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

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (Crown)

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith (Vintage)

The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby (Pantheon)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking)

2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead)

3. Funny Story by Emily Henry (Berkley)

4. Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

5. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House)

6. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)

7. The Guest by Emma Cline (Vintage)

8. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Scribner, translated by Hicks and Hicks)

9. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions, translated by Michael Hofmann)

10.In Memoriam by Alice Winn (Vintage)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

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

###