Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

The Labor Day holiday marks a shift in the bookseller’s calendar: the end of a (relatively) sleepy summer and the beginning of fall, when thrilling new titles pour in every week and all our favorite authors seem to have something new on offer. We won’t inundate you with names here, in part because our last newsletter rounded up many of our most anticipated books of the coming season, and also because summer is not over quite yet! There are still lingering pink evenings and bright, dry afternoons with nothing to do but read and think; our list of recent favorites, below, features plenty of books to cherish as the season wanes.

We don’t have much in the way of shop news, but there are two important bulletins. First, we are glad to report that Miriam, our intrepid book buyer, is back from parental leave! Her latest installment of our children’s book roundup, “Small & Mighty with Miriam,” can be found after our staff recommendations. (And, if you haven’t seen her at the shop yet, we hear she may have a photograph or two of a very cute baby to show you...)

Before we get to the second piece of news, we hope you’ll indulge a small digression. If you have been a customer for long enough, you have probably heard us explain the story behind our shop’s name at least once. Though our answer hasn’t changed – not much, at least – at present it feels worth repeating. “Three Lives” may well be a nod to the Gertrude Stein novel of the same name, but that is not really what it means to us. Instead, our three lives are the three women who founded the shop. 

In 1978, Jill Dunbar, Jenny Feder, and Helene Webb established a bookshop on simple principles that have stood the test of time: the very best books currently published, arranged in artful and enticing displays, inviting and rewarding the pleasures of curiosity and conversation. It is Jenny whom we credit with that most crucial element, the design of the shop itself. It is no exaggeration to say that Jenny – a true artist and craftsperson – actually created the space that is Three Lives. After she and Jill sold the shop in 2001, they moved to the North Fork of Long Island, where, for the next twenty-four years, Jenny continued her life’s work as an artist. Two weeks ago, with her partner Jill by her side, Jenny Feder died at the age of 73. 

We send you this sad news from inside the shop she built, a cozy room that has been our home for more than forty years. As the memorial in our Tenth Street window now affirms, Jenny lives on in these walls, in the shop she called her “biggest, living art project.” We feel grateful to spend our days in the little world she helped create, and we join you all – our “& Company” – in mourning and remembrance. (1952 – 2025)

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

To say I haven’t had the time or brainpower for reading this year would be a gross understatement. And I offer this explanation so as to impress upon you how truly remarkable and engrossing I found the following two novels: Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven (Penguin Press) and Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin Press). I picked up these books at a time when reading seemed a struggle, when no novel was quite clicking, and my oh my, they were balm and bliss for this tired mind. I won’t pretend I can offer cogent recaps of their plots (Bug Hollow is the best kind of family drama and offers true immersion in the lives of three generations of a California clan; Fonseca imagines real-life writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1952 sojourn in Mexico with her six-year-old son), but I can share how they rekindled my love of fiction, how I couldn’t put them down – baby be damned! – until I had reached their last pages, how they sent me hunting for the next book that would be as witty and warm and wise. The feeling of being absorbed in Huneven’s and Kane’s creations will stick with me for some time, and once again, I have something to hand to the reader who approaches me with that age-old request, “I just want a good novel.” Look no further. – Miriam

As summer winds down, I am happy to share some books I enjoyed over the season. What Is Queer Food? (W.W. Norton) spoke to me in so many ways: as an interesting history of food and queerness, as thoughtful memoir, as fascinating and fun mini-biographies (hello Richard Olney!). I love a mixed-bag nonfiction read, and John Birdsall has fashioned an exquisite example of the type of book I just rejoice in while reading. Following a friend’s recommendation, I picked up Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (Penguin Classics), at once a captivating account of the habitat and behaviors of Eastern Seaboard fish and birds and an elegy to a place wildly affected by the state of the climate since it was written eighty-plus years ago. Across the world and in the present day, Omar El Akkad writes with compassion and forthrightness about the death and destruction in Gaza and the West’s silence in his tormented cry, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf). Lastly, Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane, a novel just published in mid-August but which I read in galley back in early spring, is still with me these many months later: the characters, the setting, the mood. A great novel for that last-gasp summer vacation or to start one’s fall reading season. – Toby

This summer I’ve been on a science fiction and fantasy kick. Credit for starting it off belongs to The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Orbit). It’s a fantasy novel set in the Empire of Orrun, where the Emperor’s reign is coming to an end and a competition is underway to select his successor. When one of the competitors is murdered, the Emperor’s High Scholar is tasked with investigating the crime and also finds herself unexpectedly competing for the throne. What I love most about this book is its unpredictability. Hodgson has a keen understanding of the genre tropes she employs, deftly alternating between pushing them to their limits – exploring each device’s full potential – and subverting them. I think this could be a fun read for anyone but especially rewarding for those familiar with the lineage of epic fantasy. 

The same can be said for the Teixcalaan Series, an anthropological science fiction duology by Arkady Martine. In the first book, A Memory Called Empire (Tor), a new Ambassador arrives in the center of the ever-expanding, politically unstable Teixcalaanli Empire only to realize that her predecessor’s death was no accident. Themes of identity, technology, colonialism, and cultural imperialism against the backdrop of space might sound like well-trodden ground, but Martine uses her unique perspective as both a city planner and historian of the Byzantine Empire to create a rich, detailed world and an intriguing mystery without being heavy-handed. The follow-up, A Desolation Called Peace, is a rare, perfect sequel about diplomacy, conspiracy, and first contact. I would recommend them both for anyone who, as Martine’s dedication succinctly puts it, “has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.” – Marlowe

Not long ago a young woman approached me in the shop and asked, “Would you be able to give me a recommendation? I’d like something that makes me think.” We all have those books: ones that get our attention in a different way, almost provoking us, with writing that we connect with intimately and that leads us into novel ways of thinking. When we emerge from these books we feel new, at least in some respects. From the small stack I offered, this young woman chose The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I thought about this exchange recently, while reading We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters (Penguin). It is a book that made me slow down and think – putting words to what I’ve been seeing and feeling, giving me time to assess my own values regarding food and life. This book is Alice’s very personal call to action against fast food culture. “Speed in fast food culture devalues the entire work of cooking,” Waters explains. “This is the opposite of cooking.… With speed, all other qualities drop out. The pleasure doesn’t matter, the beauty doesn’t matter, the taste doesn’t matter, the resulting waste doesn’t matter.… But when we force ourselves to slow down, the world comes into focus. Our awareness shifts. And we begin to understand that we have the power to change it.” Thank you, Alice! 

A new cookbook, The Cook’s Garden: A Gardener’s Guide to Selecting, Growing, and Savoring the Tastiest Vegetables of Each Season by Kevin West (Knopf), is very much in line with the values found in We Are What We Eat. It’s a guide to becoming a better cook by stepping into the garden, a farmers market, or your local farm stand. Just a few pages in I knew I was reading something special. West’s writing is deeply personal, wise, entertaining, practical, and inspired, and his Tennessee roots shine through. Is it a cookbook for gardeners or a gardening book for cooks? It is both, and an absolute must for anyone interested in growing and cooking. West describes the garden as “a self-portrait that draws from the world,” the starting point for a personal cuisine that is constantly evolving. 

I couldn’t help but jump ahead, past the gardening tips, to see West’s recipes, and I am happy I did, because there I found green beans with pesto (a dish that is on the menu at Via Carota right now and utterly delicious), a green bean gratin, and – are you ready for this? – a green bean risotto! – Troy

I can tell when I am inside a good novel within the first two pages; after that it cannot fool me, one way or the other, I will have made up my mind. Pan (Penguin Press), Michael Clune’s fiction debut, begins auspiciously: surveying the Chicago suburbs at dusk, our narrator, fifteen-year-old Nick, slides between mumbled, sketchy fragments – “Very cheap construction.” “No sidewalks.” – and descriptions full of mysterious, unsettling energy. A subdivision’s townhouses stand “exposed,” not merely to the elements, but to the “raw death of the endless future, which at night in the Midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roof.” Here I knew I was in for something compelling, and yet I remained wholly unprepared for the strength and accomplishment of this book. Pan offers us a year inside Nick’s head, a previously calm territory lately roiled by the first signs of a panic disorder. Looking for some meaning behind his spell of madness, Nick explores literature and sleep deprivation, chamber music and clandestine drug ceremonies, young love and menial labor. Clune’s accuracy is astonishing – his commitment to reproducing the textures of the teenage mindworld is nothing short of heroic – but Pan is about much more than its fine language. It is heavy, funny, honest, melancholy, familiar and alien at once; it made me feel less alone.

Lighter in tone, though no less an accomplishment: I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal (New Directions, translated by Paul Wilson). I cannot recommend this comedic gem more urgently. It’s high tea and hijinks at the finest hotels in Eastern Europe – by turns elegant and ribald, delightfully delusional on every page. Next time you are in the shop, pick up a copy and read the first paragraph. You will know you’re in a good one. – Lucas

Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt (Granta, translated by Peter Kuras) is a Rooney-reminiscent love story following Tanja and Jerome, two characters in their early thirties trying out a long-distance relationship, questioning what it means to enter a phase of adulthood where conviction and commitment feel harder to skirt. As they work to become who they think they should be, and to wear off who they were in their twenties, they spiral closer to and farther away from each other. This is a romance set in the very recent past of 2016: Tanja writes futuristic fiction that has gained her an internet fanbase, while Jerome builds websites for artists, including for Tanja. They text each other from the bathrooms of raves and dark corners of sex parties, enjoying these moments more than the hedonistic yet predictable scenes playing out around them. Tanja and Jerome self-destruct and overthink – they argue about the movie Call Me by Your Name – and they overcommunicate. (Even given the physical distance, they still live in an era of constant contact and therapy-like analysis.) Randt does not caricature or condemn the millennial experience but instead sharply observes just how humorous and frustrating it can be to know and define oneself in the digital age. 

I would also like to point out Nightboat’s recent reissue of David Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline. The memories collected in this book cut in the same way much of Wojnarowicz’s work does. As Ocean Vuong brilliantly puts in his introduction, “[David’s] voice, while inflected with pain and frustration, never forsakes the central desire to celebrate the act of living.” The book holds paintings by Wojnarowicz, shadowy figures in various states of lust. Some images seem to be from fantasies, others from nightmares. Each memory comes with a new form of self that he openly embraces. Through his stories and paintings he recollects a queer experience of suffering, longing, and ecstasy, completely free of shame and deflection. – Sarah

Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, published eight years ago in English and still one of my favorite hand-sells, is as tightly wound as novels get – a perfectly brief and focused story of family disintegration. Shanbhag’s new novel, Sakina’s Kiss (McNally Editions, translated by Srinath Perur), tackles some of the same themes, but with a completely different approach. After two strange men appear at Venkat and Viji’s home, insinuating that their daughter is in some sort of obscure trouble, the plot spins off in many directions. Does she owe money? Has she fallen in with dangerous muckrakers? At the center of it, Venkat, as narrator, faces a personal reckoning with his place as a “modern” man in modernizing India.

A pure delight: The Way of the World (New York Review Books, translated by Robyn Marsack), a travelogue about a 1950s journey through parts of the world whose very names summon legends – Persepolis, Shiraz, the Khyber Pass. Swiss peripatetic Nicolas Bouvier wrote the words and his friend Thierry Vernet supplied drawings (reproduced in the NYRB edition). The two friends rattled across the Balkans, through storied mountain ranges and deserts, into the Middle East and India. They paid their way piecemeal, Thierry’s artworks garnering enough for a tank of gas or the pair’s daily bread. Bouvier has the broadminded curiosity of the itinerant, patiently navigating unfamiliar cultures and saving his ire for the incessant flies and mechanical mishaps. (I bought the book in the most serendipitous of circumstances: at a bookshop abroad, on the advice of a fellow bookseller – many thanks to Paul at St. George’s in Berlin.) – Ryan

The Women by Hilton Als (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is astounding. Not to be subjected to formal definition, the book plumbs the lives of four distinct and fascinating characters, bookended by remarkable investigations into Als’s own mother and a writer to whom he was close in his adolescence. Als combines the shrewd analytic curiosity of a historian with the oftentimes painful vulnerability and empathy of a son. It is effortless.

I spent a recent beach vacation reading a novel of teenage British girls stranded on a deserted island off Burma in 1919. In Marianne Wiggins’s disturbing John Dollar (Simon & Schuster), there are murdered sea turtles, a widow who swims with dolphins, tsunamis, and the rituals of girlhood. Death looms, and the veil between worlds feels thinner as those left behind fall deeper into varying degrees of madness.

Be prepared for Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead), out in late October. I let myself be led into the fray here, not asking too many questions and really enjoying the flow of memories, which are punctuated by scenes from a long love affair with a much older and wealthier man. While that last bit might sound dreary, the novel stays surprisingly light on its feet the whole way through. – Elaine

~ Small & Mighty with Miriam ~

In an effort to curate this column (and our children’s book section at the shop) even further, I’ve made the savvy decision to start conducting my own market research at home. It’s one thing to be a children’s book buyer – and then it’s leveling up to be able to run my favorites by a quite discriminating eight-month-old book critic. So consider the following two reads to be vetted (and approved) by old(ish) and young alike.

Parks by Marc Majewski (Abrams)

What first caught my eye about this nonfiction picture book were the illustrations. Heavy brushstrokes; lush, colorful details filling the page; a sense of pull and envelopment such that the reader could almost walk right into the scene before her... I was sold. On closer inspection, this fun, introductory survey of parks around the world utterly delivers. Parks can be messy and tidy, loud and quiet; they enchant, honor, invent... My daughter reaches for this book every chance we give her and then gives a screech of absolute joy when we open to the first page, and honestly, I can’t blame her.

Everyday Bean by Stephanie Graegin (Tundra Books)

This early reader collection of very short stories about a young hedgehog and her grandmother is a showstopper. Each story, told with minimal text over a handful of pages, details a moment in the life of Bean, from picking out a plant with her grandmother (a cactus, of course!) to using her imagination to transform a cardboard box into a home, a spaceship, an ice cream truck. The illustrations are undeniably charming and perfectly complement the whimsical, heartwarming nature of the tales. The mini-narratives feel complete, and their sense of humor and delight withstands many rereadings. Bean dressing as a ghost to scare her grandmother? My daughter laughs and laughs.

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (Atlantic Crime)

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler (Random House)

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead)

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (Picador)

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Trust Her by Flynn Berry (Penguin)

Sing to Me by Jesse Browner (Little, Brown)

Here Is a Book by Elisha Cooper (Abrams)

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

Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead)

Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin Press)

Weepers by Peter Mendelsund (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley (Knopf)

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar (Viking)

A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead)

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine)

Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn (Knopf)

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

So Far Gone by Jess Walter (Harper)

Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland (MCD)

Nonfiction

The Last Supper by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

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

It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach (Haymarket)

Dining Out by Erik Piepenburg (Grand Central)

Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press, signed by Thompson)

Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise (Spiegel & Grau)

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (Gallery)

2. Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

3. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage)

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

5. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine)

6. If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura (Flatiron, translated by Eric Selland)

7. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit, translated by Ros Schwartz)

8. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

9. Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

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

11. Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland (MCD)

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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.