Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

We write to you from the depths of summer, when the flow of visitors to the Village – and the flow of big new books – slows as the city simmers. It won’t last long: the Labor Day holiday kicks off the next seasonal phase for us, and new releases will crowd our shelves again. The fall is typically a feast for readers, and the list of shop-favorite authors who have new titles in the next three months is too long to recite in its entirety, but here are a few names to whet your appetite. Garth Greenwell, Rachel Kushner, Olga Tokarczuk, Vigdis Hjorth, Richard Powers, Elizabeth Strout, and Sally Rooney all have new books in September. Titles from Sarah Moss, Louise Erdrich, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ina Garten, Yotam Ottolenghi (whose new cookbook, Comfort, will have American and British covers to choose from!), and Maira Kalman will land in October. And on November 19, Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited new novel, his first since 2018, will hit shelves.

We are hosting events for three of these new books. Two of them are morning, scones-and-coffee, meet-the-author occasions – our favored setting in recent years for events. First, we’ll be hosting Garth Greenwell, author of the new novel Small Rain, on Friday, September 6. Garth has been a friend of the shop since his debut novel, What Belongs to You, became an instant favorite almost a decade ago.

Next, the singular artist Maira Kalman will be signing books – and maybe sketching in them, too – on the morning of Tuesday, October 15, for the publication of her illustrated memoir Still Life with Remorse. Anyone who has had a chat with Maira, however brief, knows well the pleasure of her company – and if you’ve never had that pleasure, this is your chance.

Our last occasion is not an author event – unless he shows up unannounced, which would be a very big surprise indeed – but it is the continuation of a cherished Three Lives tradition: Murakami Midnight Madness. We have had midnight release parties for Haruki Murakami’s last three major novels, and we’re gathering again on the night of Monday, November 18 for his latest, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. (Lucas has read an early copy and did not want it to end.) Expect jazz.

We’ll reach out with more details for each of these events as they approach. For now, block off those two mornings and one evening (we tried to sell the concept of a Murakami Morning Madness, but it didn’t quite have the same cachet), and if you would like to preorder any of the titles involved, please get in touch.

One more bit about preorders, then we’ll let you get to our staff reading roundups. Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, will be published on September 24, and we are fortunate to be receiving a limited quantity of signed copies. If you would like a signed book, please contact us to pay in advance, and we’ll have a copy reserved for you on the publication date. (And remember, we can ship anywhere in the country if you’re not available to pick up at the bookshop.)

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

It’s been months since I’ve felt excited about a new release, and I feel a debt of gratitude to Fiona McFarlane for pulling me back into contemporary literature. Her new collection of linked short stories (and if you’re not a short story reader, don’t be scared off, I’m not either) is utterly engrossing and clever. Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) contains twelve tales of individuals who have been affected by a serial killer’s random murders along this Australian highway in the 1990s. A young woman who suspects her boyfriend might be the man appearing on the nightly news. A former school principal who lived across the street from the man arrested for the crimes. A politician who shares the same last name as the accused and whose political ambitions are stymied by this coincidence. An actor who plays the serial killer in a movie many years later. A pair of true crime podcast hosts who pore over the murders as a new development in the case surfaces. McFarlane has devised a startlingly original – and skillful – dissection of our fascination with gruesome acts and the ways in which they reverberate outward, affecting communities and human beings many years and countries apart. And she does it all by resolutely not focusing on the murderer himself. Highway Thirteen is one of those rare collections in which each story totally stands on its own and, at the same time, manages to work in concert with the others to create a brilliant whole. Time for me to turn to McFarlane’s previous books that I so unwisely neglected... – Miriam

The stories in Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros (Vintage) are told from the perspectives of young girls and women living on both sides of the US/Mexico border. There is an undeniable, spirited power to these female characters in the face of violence, regret, and longing. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” a woman reflects on a relationship she had as a young girl with an older married man: “I paint and repaint you the way I see fit, even now. Making the world see you through my eyes. And if that’s not power, what is?” Cisneros allows her characters to feel their anger and sensuality, and does so in dreamlike prose reminiscent of her first novel, The House on Mango Street – a novel I read well over a decade ago that has left a lasting impression on me. I have a feeling that this collection will stay with me for many years as well. 

I would also like to recommend a poetry collection, The Butterfly’s Burden, by the late Palestinian poet and activist Mahmoud Darwish (Copper Canyon, translated by Fady Joudah). This collection combines three complete volumes by Darwish (The Stranger’s Bed, A State of Siege, and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done). I have made an effort to read a little bit from this collection each morning. Starting the day with Darwish’s impassioned hope, beautiful lyricism, and meditations on profound loss has become a powerful part of my morning – one I wish to continue in the future with his many other collections. – Sarah

Old and new, fiction and non-, my recent reading has followed no real pattern other than what looks good on my shelf. I plowed through Denis Johnson’s brash Vietnam War epic Tree of Smoke (Picador), one of the many Big Books for the Right Moment that I’ve put aside over the years. Far-ranging, grotesque, morally ambiguous, it’s a book that carves an original story from a familiar block.

Having read almost every word of Paul Theroux’s travel writing, I’m now filling in his fiction backlist. I picked up the original red and gilt hardcover edition of Kowloon Tong (Mariner now publishes the paperback) for – what else? – an international trip and was instantly transported to Hong Kong circa 1997, just before the handover to China. Theroux’s mode seems almost extinct these days: small, personal stories in a big, lush world. You’re immersed in detail, but the writing is not a bit purple – the characters (businessman Bunt, his British-chauvinist mother, an employee-turned-lover, and the mysterious mainland man who wants Bunt’s factory and much more besides) play their parts, and the author doesn’t lead or lecture. Theroux has no interest in giving his readers a pat or righteous ending – refreshing.

Peter Hessler’s River Town, published in the early 2000s, was passed around Peace Corps circles like a sacred text. (I know because I was one of the volunteers who devoured it during my service.) Other Rivers (Penguin Press) is his return to China two and a half decades after he taught school on the banks of the Yangtze. Now he’s older, married, and towing twins, teaching the next generation of young Chinese in Chengdu. A lot has changed since the Deng Xiaoping era, and Hessler’s easy flow of history and memoir is a great primer for China in the age of surveillance, Covid and Xi Jinping. – Ryan

I’ve loved two short story collections recently, an older one by Annie Proulx called Close Range (Scribner) and a recent release, Ben Shattuck’s History of Sound (Viking). Both are steeped in the natural world, with such strong senses of place that you almost taste your environs. The characters in Close Range are live wires in the Wyoming landscape, withstanding crushing loneliness and wielding the best cowboy vernacular I’ve ever read. Proulx’s writing absolutely knocked me backwards in this one.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I thought Halle Butler’s new novel Banal Nightmare (Random House) was really fresh and bizarre. A dysfunctional friend group of 30-year-olds reunites in their hometown for house parties and gallery openings, everyone on the verge of some sort of personal breakdown – it had me laughing, and at times it’s unsettling and completely wacky but still so smart. By the end I was truly quite moved. – Elaine

I picked my first mid-year highlight because I wanted to understand what it was like to care deeply about a sport, and no one is better at discussing the messy beauty of a subject than Hanif Abdurraqib.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) is, as the subtitle suggests, a love letter to basketball, but more specifically about growing up in that subculture in Columbus, Ohio in the ‘90s, as Lebron James appeared on the scene. The book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four quarters with the section headers counting down. One of the joys of this is how Abdurraqib deftly handles tangential topics about art or the minutiae of daily life, asking readers to trust him as he seemingly leads us astray, only for everything to perfectly coalesce by the time the clock reaches 0:00. I love the symmetry of this book, a reminder that the pain of leaving the places we love means the opportunity for the joy of a homecoming.

My second pick, Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood (Dial), is also about home and the complications that arise when the places you love become unfamiliar to you, razed by gentrification and replaced with something sterile and hostile. Gatwood paints a beautiful but at times sad portrait of a waterfront in Santa Cruz as the protagonist attempts to hold her ground on the last property untouched by the vision her tech-elite neighbors have for the community. I loved the relationships in this novel: Mitty and Bethel’s unconventional friendship as roommates with a fifty-year age gap who develop a voyeuristic obsession with their neighbor Lena, and the dynamics among the three women when they are forced to contend with how deeply their perceptions of each other misalign with their understanding of themselves. – Marlowe

Of all the characters in all the books I’ve read since our last staff newsletter, I still find myself thinking of Mattis, the middle-aged dreamer at the center of Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds (Penguin Classics, translated by Torbjorn Stoverud and Michael Barnes). Mattis’s world is small: just a country road, a sweets shop, a lake, and the farm where he lives with his sister, on whom he depends completely. (Mattis is intellectually disabled.) But everything of consequence lies hidden in this stripped-down scenery, rising from the land and from the page in Mattis’s singular voice. For nature speaks to Mattis. The flight of an unexpected bird, the fury of summer lightning: these are warnings that the world he has known is coming to an end. 

In Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person (David R. Godine, translated by Daniel Weissbort), Guy Roland faces the opposite problem – his world ended years ago. Guy is an amnesiac, a private detective with no memory of who he was before the German occupation of Paris. When his boss at the agency retires to Nice, leaving behind his keys to the office and a few tantalizing clues, Guy sets out to solve the mystery of his former life. It’s classic Modiano, a perfect place to start if you’ve ever wanted to read him.

At this point, regular readers of this newsletter may be remembering that I’m just a sucker for rural Norwegian psychodramas and chilly Continental “anti-mysteries.” And they’re not wrong! Which is why I was thrilled to find a new favorite in Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth, translated by Megan McDowell). I could feign ignorance about what drew me to this queer, supernatural horror novel from Argentina, but I know it was the Joy Williams blurb on the back. (I’m still me, after all.) Our Share of Night is, indeed, sublime entertainment: fast-paced and gruesomely violent, genre fiction that nods to the tropes while twisting them into something original. It’s my ideal “vacation book” for these final days of summer. – Lucas

In Villa E (Liveright), Jane Alison turns the lives of two architects, the Irish designer Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, into a fascinating fictional portrait of two complicated, strong-willed artists and the Mediterranean villa that comes between them. Designed and built by Gray in the late 1920s, the house becomes an obsession of the mercurial and misogynist Le Corbusier, driving him to a rash act of vandalism. The thrill of Villa E is as much the character study of these two artists as it is the evocative setting, the famed villa prominently overlooking the Côte d’Azur and the grand, blue expanse. 

It’s winter, 1891 in Butte, Montana, and two renegade lovers, degenerate Irishman Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, the latter married mere days before to the local mine boss, flee to the frontier, on the run from a ruthless posse in a wild, rollicking, and surprisingly moving tale from the mighty Irish novelist Kevin Barry. If you’ve read any of Barry’s earlier novels, including the Three Lives staff favorite Night Boat to Tangier, you know his trademark vibrant style and memorable characters; if you have not read him before, you are in for a treat with The Heart in Winter (Doubleday).

For fans of The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas or Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, along comes a reissue of an early twentieth-century novel full of mystery, tension, and unsettling events. Great Fear on the Mountain by the Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (Archipelago, translated by Bill Johnston) is a tight, edgy tale of men against nature, and against their own fears and superstitions, as a group of farmers seek new pastureland for the village herd. – Toby

In The Garden Against Time (W.W. Norton), Olivia Laing uses the restoration of her own garden, gardens real and imagined, gardens past and present, and the lives of gardeners to explore the search for paradise – and it’s brilliant. Laing sums up that longing beautifully when writing about the English textile designer William Morris: “It’s this deep, infectious wistfulness for something better that animates his political and aesthetic visions. Both are saturated with longing for plentitude, for pleasure, for something that is glimpsed around the corner, that once existed and might come again. Is it love? Is it sex? Is it a new social order?” Laing thinks she has the term for this paradise: “Call it a garden state: a cross-species ecology of astounding beauty and completeness, never static, always in motion, progressive and prolific. I want to live there, and the world won’t survive much longer if we don’t. It hasn’t come to pass, this fertile revolution, and yet every time you look into a garden, the invitation is still there.”

I’ve been a huge fan of Ruth Reichl’s writing since reading her restaurant reviews in The New York Times, her work at Gourmet, and all her memoirs, starting with Tender at the Bone. Reichl discusses her new book The Paris Novel (Random House) with Evan Kleiman on Good Food and says “This book is really an ode to pleasure, to the power of pleasure.” It’s about a young woman arriving in Paris in the ‘80s, uncertain but curious, willing to allow a dress and a chance meeting to open up her world. Guided by her senses, she finds joie de vivre. I loved it. 

Fall books I’m excited about: Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House, October 8); Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper, October 15); and a new cookbook by Anna Jones, Easy Wins (Fourth Estate, September 17). – Troy

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

Day by Michael Cunningham (Random House)

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (Astra House, translated by Ann Goldstein)

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll (Marysue Rucci Books)

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz)

Shy by Max Porter (Graywolf)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage)

Nonfiction

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

Thunderclap by Laura Cumming (Scribner)

Horizontal Vertigo by Juan Villoro (Vintage, translated by Alfred MacAdam)

National Dish by Anya von Bremzen (Penguin)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

The World After Alice by Lauren Aliza Green (Viking)

The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf)

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Doubleday)

Exhibit by R.O. Kwon (Riverhead)

The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House)

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo (Doubleday)

The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao (Flatiron)

Middle of the Night by Riley Sager (Dutton)

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Knopf)

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)

Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Tin House)

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco)

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker (Viking)

The Believer by David Coggins (Scribner)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Walk With Me: Hamptons by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

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

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue by Julie Satow (Doubleday)

Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise (Spiegel & Grau)

The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby (Pantheon)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)

2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead)

3. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking)

4. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage)

5. The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House)

6. Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida (Europa, translated by Haydn Trowell)

7. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

8. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (Verso, translated by John Howe and Andy Bliss)

9. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)

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

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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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