Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

Every year the fall season seems to come closer on the heels of summer. Part of the reason is that so much happens in the book world from September through December: publishers release many of their major titles; awards are awarded (including the Nobel, which this year went to the South Korean writer Han Kang – see below for Ryan’s impressions of her novel The Vegetarian – and the Booker, announced in mid-November); and people find their perfect cozy reading spots for the autumn colors and the winter chill. And for us, of course, the weeks become busier and busier with shop tasks: not just selling books, but finding places in our little space to store them up for the holiday rush, getting our giftwrapping muscles in shape, and buckling down to the seemingly endless small details to get Three Lives ready for the rush.

One not-so-small job: keeping up to date with current releases. There are a lot, and a number of them have instantly become staff favorites. (One title to call out specifically: Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Although it’s not in the write-ups below – perhaps because most of the reads came before the book even went on sale – half the staff has now read Intermezzo, with excellent reviews across the board.) It’s a season of riches, and our little crew couldn’t possibly read every new book that crosses our threshold, so please: if you’ve read something fantastic recently, we want to know! Come in, and give us your impressions.

Still to come: our November 18 Murakami Midnight Madness event for The City and Its Uncertain Walls, in which we will count down to Haruki Murakami’s latest novel with refreshments (including local sake), giveaways, and games. See our website for more details. You can also receive an exclusive set of art overlays (as long as our sets last) if you preorder and pre-pay for the book – get in touch if you are interested!

Next up is the holiday edition of our newsletter, in which we’ll revisit our favorite books from across the whole year. (And yes, Troy will be writing the latest iteration of his Cookbook Corner.) The rest of 2024 will surely pass in an instant, so just a reminder: while we’ll be open for browsing until 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, if you need us to order specific books for you or if you have a large gift order to assemble, it’s always best not to leave it for the last minute. Shipping times can get unreliable late in the year, publishers can run out of stock, that obscure book you need for the uncle with eclectic taste might take a little extra time. We are already working with customers on their holiday lists, so if you feel any need to do your shopping early, we’re here for you.

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

After categorizing several Richard Powers books in the “Would Like to Get to This, But I Know I Never Will” pile, I finally cracked one: Playground (W.W. Norton), a new novel about ecology, the oceans and humanity’s reckless transition to a digital world. The plot roams from Chicago to French Polynesia, visiting earth’s deep places. Powers’s prose is thoughtful and smart, weighing the benefits of the computer age against the things we’ve lost or forgotten along the way, but the book is also an ode to water and sand, to sharks and seabirds – to the unfathomable world beyond the margin of our thin crust. Most nature writing does not capture me, but there is perhaps nothing I feel more nostalgia for than the ocean, and reading Playground I could almost hear the creaking of pontoons on a bright tropical day and see the sun setting into the expanse.

I’ve also sped through The Vegetarian (Hogarth) by our new Nobel laureate, Han Kang. Several people in Yeong-hye’s circle – her husband, brother-in-law, and sister offer their perspectives on the protagonist’s unraveling, initially catalyzed by grotesque nightmares about eating meat. Those around her fear Yeong-hye’s shunning of societal norms more than her loosening grip on reality and move quickly to force her back in line with their expectations for compliant wives, deferential younger sisters and demure women. The translation by Deborah Smith (also the translator for my four-year-old son’s favorite picture book about the Seoul transit system, I Am the Subway!) is smooth and fluent, accentuating the ease with which Yeong-hye’s acquaintances violate her autonomy. – Ryan

I recently loved 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner), a fast-paced multigenre novel about an English teacher who travels back in time, from 2011 to 1958, on a mission to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s a well-researched work of historical fiction, tying together a nostalgia for a bygone era when everything tastes better and costs less with the reality of daily life and political tensions in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The questions this novel reckons with are not unique to time-travel fiction – is it possible to change the past, and at what cost? – but what I both loved and found so devastating is that it lays all its cards out on the table in the first chapter, yet had me on the edge of my seat until the last page.

I had never read any of King’s work, so I feel a little late to the party, but in case you have yet to hear the news, this man is an excellent storyteller and there is nothing else like this book! – Marlowe

Anyone who has picked up a Maira Kalman book knows how utterly unique they are. Kalman builds her books with images, words, color, and stories, and there is always humor along with sadness. Still Life with Remorse (Harper) is no exception. Kalman begins by defining remorse as “DEEP REGRET, implying shame, implying guilt, implying sorrow.” Through snippets of stories from her own life, the lives of artists, and objects, we begin to see the places that remorse lurks in our own lives. Monet’s vase with flowers at Giverny, a woman who loves to wash and dry bedsheets, stuffed peppers made with love, dinner with Maira and her father. For me it was the painted sheet music of Handel’s “Ombra mai fu”:

Never was a shade

of any plant

dearer and more lovely

or more sweet.

Tender and beautiful fronds

of my beloved plane tree

Let fate smile upon you.

May thunder, lightning and storms

never disturb your dear peace,

nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.

(Google it and have a listen!)  How does one shake off the heavy weight of remorse, Kalman asks? You’ll see. 

Suggesting that you read Ina Garten’s memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens (Crown) is like suggesting a slice of her chocolate cake. Hearing Ina on WNYC years and years ago did it for me: the way she talked about food and told stories with such warmth and wit – I became an instant fan. Since then I’ve cooked many of her recipes and have always said that what sets her apart is that she knows that one thing that will make a dish go from good to delicious. But going into the memoir I didn’t know that much about Ina’s life. Oh, what a fascinating, surprising, and inspiring life story she has. I didn’t want to put it down, and I basically didn’t! (Note: a great read for a budding – or any! – entrepreneur.)

The heart of Ina’s story and the heart of Maira’s book reflect a line from Still Life with Remorse: “In the strangeness of life, LIVE.” (Ina would most certainly add, work hard and have fun!) – Troy

S.J. Naudé’s Fathers and Fugitives (Europa, translated by Michiel Heyns) is a difficult book to describe. I read it this summer in a single day, swept away in the force of its cold, devastating narration. Set in Belgrade, Cape Town, Tokyo and elsewhere, Fathers is about many things – grief, inheritance, queerness, reparations. Above all it is a treatise on the meaning and experience of aloneness. It’s a bleak and beautiful book and made an excellent pairing with Border Districts (St. Martin’s), my first foray into the work of Gerald Murnane. The narrator of Border Districts is a man living alone, a self-described “student of mental imagery” who spends his days cataloging his life’s most indelible pictures. I felt hypnotized by this meandering, Sebaldian collection of beauties mundane and profound: light through stained glass in a long-forgotten foyer; a tarp on a veranda, flapping in the wind from the sea. 

In her latest story collection, Concerning the Future of Souls (Tin House), Joy Williams finds new ways to imagine life after death. These ninety-nine (very) short stories find the angel Azrael coping with a rising tide of the dead. Humanity has metastasized to the whole planet: what’s an angel of death to do with all this senseless dying? Another short and potent book is Overstaying by Ariane Koch (Dorothy, translated by Damion Searls) – a series of surreal vignettes from a mountain town in Europe, where a solitary woman has received a mysterious visitor. As this visitor becomes more entrenched and less tolerable, Overstaying transforms into something hilarious, and oddly affecting. I loved this little book for its diabolical humor and its delirious (mis)use of language. 

Language is the subject of Salvage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a new essay collection by Dionne Brand. This is an intellectual memoir told through brilliant and blistering close-readings: of Austen, Defoe, Thackeray, Twain. Brand dives into the “wreck” of these foundational texts, searching for Blackness as both absence and presence in the narrative of empire. This is not an “easy” book, and nor should it be. It reads like a spiritual sibling to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, another generation’s groundbreaking work of critical re-reading. – Lucas

In September I read two books by Carolyn Forché: her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin), and the poetry collection The Country Between Us (Harper). Both recount her time in El Salvador during the late ‘70s as the country tipped towards civil war. 

At the age of 27, Forché was asked by Leonel Gómez Vides, a Salvadoran political activist, to leave California and write poetry about the horrors happening in El Salvador. During her time there she spoke with colonels who collected the sliced ears of their victims, walked the halls of prisons in which the innocent were tortured in unspeakable ways, and was pursued more than once by “death squads” that abducted and killed people at random. Through Leonel, she learned of America’s involvement in the atrocities taking place and how she could truly be of use in a revolution. Forché wrote poetry on the floors of cars, in collapsing huts, and in hotel rooms where she could hear the rain of bullets on roofs. She did her best to “remove her blindfold,” to see what was actually happening, so she could deliver the truth of the Salvadoran people back to the States. The two books I read are a result of that witnessing. In staunch and unflinching prose, Forché maps her own radicalization and her part in the building of a resistance movement. It is impossible to recommend one book over the other – they are both urgent and necessary, and best read together. I felt that my own blindfold had been removed after reading Forché’s work – a validation of her mission.

From “Return”:

Your problem is not your life as it is

in America, not that your hands, as you

tell me, are tied to do something. It is

that you were born to an island of greed

and grace where you have this sense

of yourself as apart from others. It is

not your right to feel powerless. Better

people than you were powerless.

– Sarah

It has been a fallow reading period, on my shelf a pile of books started and discarded after ten, thirty, seventy pages. Frustrating, partly because I am never sure what exactly I am looking for in this reading state. And then a galley comes along. (Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice, coming from Catapult in February 2025.) It looks interesting. I take it home and sit right down to it, finishing it in two sittings. Ah, that wonderful feeling again, lost in a book.

Reading now There’s Always This Year (Random House) and you can wholeheartedly add me to the growing legion of Hanif Abdurraqib fans. Structured around his beloved Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team and the supremely talented LeBron James, Abdurraqib explores so much more than fandom: race, class, family, grief. Written in a singular style, with such love and grace, it feels like Abdurraqib has exploded the essay model to find new ways of expression and structure. His earlier work, A Little Devil in America (Random House), is of a kind, centering on Black performance in the United States. – Toby

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Vintage)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin, translated by Martin Aitken)

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut (Penguin)

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Grove)

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee (Astra)

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Picador)

Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas (Overlook)

Blackouts by Justin Torres (Picador)

Nonfiction

Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler (Knopf)

This House of Grief by Helen Garner (Vintage)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Doubleday)

Exhibit by R.O. Kwon (Riverhead)

Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)

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

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Vintage)

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)

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Tin House)

Nonfiction

The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis (Scribner)

Got Your Answers by Mike Greenberg (Hyperion Avenue)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Walk With Me: Hamptons by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

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

New York Nico’s Guide to NYC by New York Nico (Harper)

Ottolenghi Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi et al. (Ten Speed)

Intimations by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2. Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

3. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World)

4. Playground by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)

5. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

6. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

7. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

8. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

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

10.Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Ballantine)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

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

###