Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

Spring has finally arrived in New York City. The signs appeared slowly, over months – first the snowdrops peeking through still-frosty soil in Jefferson Market Garden, then the familiar birdsong returning to trees in the park, and pale green peas in the greengrocers’ baskets. On the corner of Waverly Place and West 10th, we know the season is changing when our shelves and tables start bursting with new books, bright and beautiful as tulips: Katie Kitamura, Han Kang, Ali Smith, Charlie Porter, Lynn Steger Strong, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nell Zink, Laurent Binet, and many more shop favorites have new work out this spring. 

Amid the churning tide of the new, traditions like Independent Bookstore Day feel especially meaningful. Each year, on the last Saturday of April – that’s April 26 this year! – the booksellers at Three Lives bake cookies, brownies, bars, and other sweet treats to share with our customers. We hope you can visit us this year for a snack, a chat, and a special bookmark, as we express our thanks for your continued support of independent bookstores.

April is also National Poetry Month, an annual reminder of the unique pleasures that great poetry can offer us all (even those of us who rarely read it). To honor the occasion, we have packed our step-table with new and notable collections. Sarah has written up a few of these titles in a section we’re debuting below: look for the “Poetry Nook” after our usual staff favorites.

Ocean Vuong, a writer as beloved for his prose as for his poetry, has a new novel coming in May. The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press) is his first work of fiction since 2019’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and we are excited to be hosting him for a signing on Wednesday, May 14. This is a morning event: we will open our doors at 9 a.m., for an hour or so, to all those who would like to meet Ocean and purchase a signed book. (As with previous morning events, we will have coffee and scones.) There are no tickets or RSVPs necessary, but it might be prudent to come on the earlier side. And if you can’t make it to the event, you can still call or email us ahead of time to request an inscribed copy for pickup or shipping.

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

Every time a book is sold at Three Lives, we write the title on our inventory pad so that we can do a count for reordering. I’d like to know how many times I’ve written the words On Tyranny on that pad since 2017. For eight years, Timothy Snyder’s manual of sorts has been on our reorder list, though it ebbs and flows depending on the state of the world. For months now there has been a steady stream of sales. The other day I said to a young man who was buying the book, “Better late than never, I’m taking one home tonight too.” On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Crown) is exactly that: lessons to alert, educate, and activate action. Lesson number 8 is “Stand out”: “Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”

Charlie Porter, the U.K. author of What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes, has written his first novel, Nova Scotia House, just out last month from Particular Books. (It’s not yet published in the U.S., but we are carrying it at Three Lives.) Nova Scotia House is a novel that sweeps you away, and inward too – to another place and time. That time is early 90s London, where we meet a group of friends and strangers living through the AIDS crisis. Porter reminds us of that revolutionary way of thinking that was necessary for survival. “It was queer magic that reached back in time, reached far into the future, it broke time, it broke the physical realm, it broke the constraints of what is considered normal, that awful world of conformity where really you just become a cog in the machine, where you are milked for profit, where your primary role is to consume and therefore be consumed. AIDS put queer magic in total jeopardy. So much magic wiped out. We have to reconnect with queer magic today or else all is lost.” The lives and pursuits of Jerry, Johnny, and Gareth are the ingredients of that magic, that queer magic. This is a book about living, and loving, both then and now. – Troy

Pico Iyer’s Aflame (Riverhead) makes the case for silence and contemplation in a noisy world, reflecting on the author’s decades of visits to a Benedictine hermitage perched above the Pacific in Big Sur. Perhaps it’s easy to find peace in one of the most beautiful natural places on Earth – but when I leave the crowded subway and see the prayer wheels turning at the temples in my Queens neighborhood, I also feel that same slowing-down, which Iyer writes about so appealingly, like a paragraph break for my day. Decades ago, Iyer wrote a travel book called Falling Off the Map, a favorite of mine about parts of the world isolated by geography or culture. Aflame aims for the inverse: self-isolating, at least temporarily, from a too-connected society.

André Aciman’s memoir Roman Year (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is almost the opposite of Iyer’s: the author, still a young man on the page, is looking for excitement and love in mid-century Rome. (It’s a direct sequel to Out of Egypt, which chronicled his family’s years in, and exile from, Alexandria.) Young André hates Rome until he borrows a bike and begins to explore beyond his lodgings, a onetime brothel on Via Clelia – then the drab, damp city springs to life, and the author sees a world beyond his complicated family and tarnished heritage. These sections are the best parts of the book, and the most relatable – self-discovery in the discovery of a place. – Ryan

Love Me Tender, a memoir by Constance Debré (Semiotext(e), translated by Holly James), has been recommended to me so many times, and it completely lived up to expectations. After coming out as gay in her 40s, Debré files for a divorce; but her husband, accusing her of being “insane” – because of her homosexuality – convinces the French courts to bar her from custody of their young son. Reeling from the sudden hole in her life, she recounts her days in exacting detail, anchoring herself to a routine while losing herself in emotionally distant sex with multiple women. Her voice is laden with rage and brimming with a furious spirit. 

Another book that brings a similar fierceness of spirit is Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends (MCD), which barrels headfirst through a wild kaleidoscope of modern gay relationships. It’s my ideal short story collection, which is to say it barely feels like one; the unifier is a throughline of dry humor, a streak of self-sabotage and self-awareness in each of the unnamed narrators. This collection feels singular, unafraid, and intimate. – Elaine

“But neither of us would ever, under any circumstance, be honest about yesterday. This is how we are taught to love in America . . . In this way and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation. We do not have to be this way. I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read that lie. I wrote this to you instead.”

Kiese Laymon opens his memoir, Heavy (Scribner), explaining to his mother and the reader all the lies he could write in this book – the lies we would much rather hear. Lies that tell us everyone is free and no one is guilty, that the choices we make always end up being the right ones. But Laymon did not set out to soothe. He wanted a reckoning, and this book delivers one. As Laymon struggles with disordered eating and racial violence, he finds truth in the books he reads and the lines he writes over and over, revisiting and revising the story of his life as a young Black boy in Mississippi. It is this constant interrogation – of his country, his body, and his past – that carves a complicated path toward forgiveness and resistance.

After reading Heavy, I knew I needed a novel. Since December I have almost exclusively read nonfiction. I needed a sure thing to get me back into fiction. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Vintage) is, without a doubt, a sure thing. I read Giovanni's Room over the course of three days, struck down by the doomed romance between Giovanni and David and, of course, by Baldwin’s magnetic writing. This book addresses many things – suffocation of queer love, disillusionment with one’s country, and gut-wrenching betrayal. But at the heart of it, I think, is the refrain Wherever you go, there you are. Nothing can be outrun – not queerness, heartache, or the complicated burdens of where you are from. In Giovanni’s Room, David fails at what Kiese Laymon ultimately achieves: staring truth down and deciding to run toward it, not away from it.  – Sarah

In mid-February I finished Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead), the last of the half-dozen shortlisted Booker Prize finalists to be released in the U.S., and as I turned the last page I thought: I might well have just read my book of the year. In this quiet story, with its surprising narrative pull and weight, Wood writes beautifully of the middle-aged protagonist’s decision to leave her life and cloister at an abbey despite being a non-believer.  Details of her life are scattered sparingly, but it’s her reflections on life in her new community in the Australian plains that make this a revelatory reading experience.

Some years ago, after his life on the high seas ended and he became a maritime consultant, my father visited the Baltic states to study and review their port facilities. His glowing recollections of the amazing cities and citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania stuck with me. When Baltic Souls (Scribe, translated by David Doherty) landed at the shop some twenty years later, I thought I had found the ideal travel narrative to introduce me to the region. What the Dutch journalist Jan Brokken has fashioned, however, is a history and journey through these countries by way of 15 or so mini-biographies, from the notable (Arvo Pärt, Hannah Arendt) to the relatively unknown. The result is a fascinating portrait of the Baltic people as well as a window into their art, culture, and politics: a thoroughly engaging, erudite take on the traveler’s tale. (And, a personal note: fair winds and a following sea, Capt. Jack 1930-2024.) – Toby

The title of Celia Paul’s 2019 memoir, Self-Portrait (New York Review Books), suggests not only its subject – a picture of the artist, drawn from decades of her own journals, poems, memories, sketches – but also its tone. There is no wink of irony in Paul’s choice to name her book as if it were a painting. She writes just as she paints, from a dream-deep well of honesty that cannot help but capture the world as she sees it. Truth is Paul’s true medium, evident from the first fumbling life-studies done at the Slade – through the desperate reds and anhedonic grays of her yearslong love affair with Lucian Freud – and on through the putrefying warmth of her late paintings, where landscapes and bodies molt and transform, their matter dissolving into light.

Ismail Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge (out of print from Arcade, occasionally available in its Vintage Classics edition from the U.K.; translated in both cases by John Hodgson) has the near-mythic force of a great historical allegory. In the last years before the Ottoman conquest of Albania (also called “Arberia” by Gjon, the monk and amateur philologist who narrates the novel), a shadowy foreign interest purchases the rights to build a bridge over a river whose name means “Wicked Waters.” The old ferry company is outraged; the townsfolk are bewildered. When a series of vandalisms threatens to derail the project, the bards in the tavern start to sing an “old” song: the ballad of a bridge that demands a human sacrifice. And then a body appears. Is it conspiracy or coincidence, murder or martyrdom? Kadare’s skill is to suggest many things at once. Like Gjon, we are seduced by the subtlety of the clues – the thrill of detection – though we can never be entirely sure what it all means. When the climax arrives it comes shrouded in mist, a stage play of bloodshed made all the more frightening by its air of unreality. – Lucas

~ Sarah’s Poetry Nook ~

Essex Hemphill’s Love Is a Dangerous Word (New Directions) is a truly astonishing collection. In these poems Hemphill examines his identity as a Black gay man in the 1980s. There is loss – of friends, dreams, lovers. But there is never a loss of self: Hemphill holds on to that with gritted teeth. “They don’t know / we are becoming powerful,” he writes in “American Wedding.” “Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming.”

In Smother (W. W. Norton), Rachel Richardson searches for even ground on which to raise her children, knowing that the world she has brought them into is filled with uncertainty. While California burns around her, she crafts a childhood for her daughters despite the smoke hanging above their heads. In the title poem, Richardson turns the omnipresent smoke into the character it demands to be: “The smoke doesn’t sit with her feelings. / Air or no air, she grows.” This collection reflects on what it means to be a parent today – the future may look terrifying, but Richardson cannot afford hopelessness. She takes stock not just of the burning but of what remains, and what can be built with those remains.  

Muriel Rukeyser wrote the poems in Elegies (New Directions) against a backdrop of near-constant disaster – the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviet Union. The collection reads as a grieving process for a society that has gone off the deep end. Rukeyser’s dizzying, desperate scream for a better world reminds me of Rachel Richardson’s voice in “The I Want Song” from Smother. Both poets are clawing to save what they can, both are desperate to get the world they want, a world free from senseless pain. Rukeyser is never able to make sense of the destruction, lingering instead in the stage of grief, of shock. But she does understand what is needed for rebuilding.   

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.

Not all things are blest, but the

seeds of all things are blest.

The blessing is in the seed.”

— “Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (Picador)

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Penguin)

Flux by Jinwoo Chong (Melville House)

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Holt)

Nonfiction

There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr (Picador)

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista (Random House)

The Wager by David Grann (Vintage)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Crush by Ada Calhoun (Viking)

The Californians by Brian Castleberry (Mariner)

A Third Term by Paul Greenberg (Ground Zero)

Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (Little, Brown)

You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett (Anchor)

The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley (Atlantic Monthly)

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

A Separation by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (New York Review Books, translated by Sophie Hughes)

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar (Random House)

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Random House)

My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House)

Twist by Colum McCann (Random House)

Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot (Knopf)

The Maid’s Secret by Nita Prose (Ballantine)

The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)

North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford (Strange Object)

To Have and Have More by Sanibel (Zando)

The Float Test by Lynn Steger Strong (Mariner)

Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf)

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Viking)

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (Viking)

Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson (Ballantine)

Nonfiction

I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots by Henry Alford (Gallery)

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)

The Believer by David Coggins (Scribner)

The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin Press)

From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey edited by Tom Fitzharris (New York Review Books)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

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

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar (Random House)

The Return by Hisham Matar (Random House)

The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto (Vintage)

Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto (W. W. Norton)

Family Style by Peter Som (Harvest)

Art Hiding in New York by Lori Zimmer and Maria Krasinski (Running Press)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)

2. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage)

3. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House)

4. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

5. Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)

6. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown)

7. When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter (Penguin Press)

8. Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

9. Lion by Sonya Walger (New York Review Books)

10. Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Particular Books)

11. My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

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.