Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

We have lots of news to share with you all, including a couple of events we will be hosting at the shop in the coming months: one with children’s book author and illustrator Elisha Cooper and one with the nonfiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe. More information about both events is below (just above our usual Staff Favorites section).

Our biggest piece of news, however, is one that some of you already know. After fourteen years at Three Lives, our Troy is leaving to start his own bookshop. Wild Sorrel Cookbooks will open on East 13th Street this spring, selling new and used books and artisan crafts for the home cook.

This announcement is bittersweet, though certainly more sweet than bitter: we are thrilled for Troy and his new adventure, and confident of his good fortune. But we must acknowledge what a loss this will be for Three Lives. Our little shop had never had a manager before Troy took on the role around ten years ago. It was a position that became him, in more ways than one, and for that decade it has felt impossible to think of Three Lives without thinking of Troy. He has elevated bookselling into a high art, with a skill and spirit that are sure to make his own shop a great success. And we will miss him terribly. But the blow will certainly be softened by our frequent trips to the east side to visit Troy and his dog, Olive, at their new home! We trust we will see you there as well.

Troy will remain with us through the end of the month, during which time he’ll be getting Ryan up to speed on his new manager duties, so please stop by before then to wish Troy luck, to reminisce, and to chat about cookbooks.

Now, on to the show.

~ Upcoming Events ~

Caldecott Honoree Elisha Cooper, author of Here Is a Book, Yes & No, and Big Cat, Little Cat, will be at Three Lives on the morning of Sunday, March 1 to sign his new book The Rare Bird (Roaring Brook). Stop by the shop between noon and 1 p.m. to chat with Elisha and pick up a signed copy! 

The following month we will welcome Patrick Radden Keefe, author of The Snakehead, Say Nothing, and Empire of Pain, for a breakfast signing of his new book London Falling (Doubleday). Please join us on the morning of Wednesday, April 8 between 9 and 10 a.m. to meet Patrick and purchase a signed book. (As always, we will provide scones and coffee!) If you know you cannot attend and would still like a signed or personalized copy of either book, just call or email the shop to place your order.

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

Before December I think the last time I read a series was in high school. But after all the buzz surrounding On the Calculation of Volume (New Directions), Solvej Balle’s seven volumes of time-loop dread, I caved and found myself committing to its hypnotic adventure. Book I (translated by Barbara Haveland) opens with Tara Selter reliving November 18 for the 121st time. She is quietly moving through her house; her husband is home too, but she cannot interact with him. She has fallen out of time, and he is unaware that, for Tara, this single day keeps repeating. What proceeds is an isolated quest to fold back into time’s rhythm. In this life of repeated days, nothing can be surprising: Tara knows the exact moment the rain will begin, when a piece of bread will fall from the table, when her husband will leave to gather wood. Book II (same translator) introduces a palpable longing to watch things move forward, to see them end and not merely repeat. Tara tries to communicate with her friends and family, but it all falls apart overnight: their memories are wiped clean, and hers is not. “I think of my family as a solid core with friable edges,” Tara narrates. “Something seems always to be crumbling away….I think of my mother’s cigarette….The ash, which reached like a long gray finger into the ashtray until it was blown over and disintegrated.” By Book III (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell), a lot has changed even if the day on the calendar hasn’t. Tara is sifting for clues, inspecting patterns, searching for seasons, and finding the holes in time’s fabric. I won’t say anything more, except that I am already itching to read Book IV (same translators), which comes out April 14! – Sarah

Listening to Ryan and my godson, Noah, chatter excitedly in the shop about Mason & Dixon (Picador), Thomas Pynchon’s tale of the two surveyors and their epic mission in the American colonies, I decided it was time to pick up the novel that has circulated in my reading pile for years. I will say it was one of the most confounding books I think I have ever read – just when I thought I was getting some footing, an amorous mechanical duck would appear, or Popeye the Sailor Man would make a cameo, and I would be left wondering where I was, what had just happened, and how the story got here. Despite the effort, I found the novel a remarkable accounting of an early American ethos already marked by our rapacious appetite for more, more, more (money, freedom, land, entitlement), making it an especially timely, troubling read considering the present state of this nation. By the end I was near-despondent that it was over, and now, some weeks later, I regret not following my immediate impulse to return to page one and read it all again. – Toby

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives (Knopf) feels like a classic novel in contemporary garb – a multigenerational story of class and manners, ranging from a market tea stall in 1950s Rawalpindi to a modern Lahore of skyscrapers and luxury cars. Mueenuddin’s characters also have classic motivations – jealousy, ambition, greed – and the author has an iron grip on their machinations: nothing feels forced or extreme, and every small story within the larger plot is drawn in fine strokes, from the intricacies of cucumber farming to the intrusion of social media on an insular, status-driven world. (There’s even a Chekhov’s iPhone.)

In recognition of our upcoming event with Patrick Radden Keefe, I need to recommend his first book, The Snakehead (Vintage), a gripping nonfiction account of human smuggling in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Many readers know Radden Keefe primarily from the bestselling Say Nothing – which is also excellent, and a favorite of many on the Three Lives staff – but in its mapping of the byways of New York City’s immigrant communities, and its explication of the historic failures and biases of American border policies, The Snakehead makes perhaps the better claim for me. – Ryan

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Del Rey) is a fresh, occasionally devastating take on the space opera genre. The novel masterfully handles a vast array of moving pieces: characters’ disparate storylines eventually interconnect in an impressive show of world-building that never loses sight of the little people who make up that world. 

Immersive epics for long, cold nights are all well and good, but finding a slim collection of zippy, hilarious stories like Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help (Vintage) was also very welcome. These stories are as packed with wit and levity as they are with sorrow, often combining all three in the span of one sentence. I am late to being a Moore fan, but I’ve realized that her writing is in fact made for me, and I can’t wait to read more. – Elaine

Two books I’ve loved recently are The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace) and The Dispossessed (Harper) by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human envoy to the frozen world of Gethen, sent on a mission to recruit the planet’s androgynous inhabitants into an interstellar alliance. The Dispossessed follows a brilliant physicist who leaves his anarchic home world for a capitalist neighboring planet in an attempt to reunite these two societies and break the isolation of his people. 

I admire Le Guin’s prose for its lyricism and its economy, and for the vivid descriptions of her worlds – the arduous journey across a freezing, barren wasteland in Left Hand completely reshaped my thoughts about January’s winter storm. In both novels, Le Guin’s characters struggle to overcome enormous communication barriers; in order to see things clearly – and to be seen, even to be loved – they must set aside cultural prejudices and learn to accept each other as they are. If you’re a science fiction fan and haven’t read her yet, you absolutely should. 

Some books I’m excited to read later this year: The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan (Tor), a dark historical fantasy riffing on the legends of the Beast of Gévaudan; Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (Soft Skull), a literary mystery about an ex-academic turned private investigator who attempts to track down Alice B. Toklas’s reputed horn; and China Miéville’s The Rouse (out from Picador in the U.K. this September), about a woman who stumbles upon dark conspiracies and draws the attention of uncanny forces. – Marlowe

I remember finding a galley of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (Penguin Press, translated by Martin Aitken) in the basement of Three Lives in 2021. I was new to bookselling and hadn’t seen many advance reader copies, so that book was a real enigma, a cheap-looking paperback with an ominous page count (666 exactly) and a Nicholas Sparks–ish cover (sunset, murmuration of blackbirds). As a work of supernatural horror yoked to Knausgaard’s leave-nothing-out realism, it worked, but it left a lot unfinished, and at the height of Covid I was skeptical of long-term projects that made big promises but threatened to go nowhere. Now, four novels into the cycle – The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm, and The School of Night (same publisher, same translator) followed in close order – I have become a believer. The School of Night in particular feels new for Knausgaard, new and shocking. In this seedy tale of a young photographer, Kristian, living in obsessive isolation in 1980s London, Knausgaard dissects the damaged, narcissistic psychology that underwrites so much male “genius,” including his own. As a book about the dangerous instability of mediocre artists, The School of Night draws queasy, unspoken parallels between Kristian and the teenage Karl Ove of the My Struggle series, as well as the man from whom Knausgaard borrowed that infamous title, another frustrated aspiring artist who left his family in search of personal greatness and ended up bringing hell to earth.

I am convinced that the film critic A.S. Hamrah will eventually be considered an essential thinker of our time. When future historians read his hilarious, erudite, politically serious essays – first collected in The Earth Dies Streaming, from 2018, and now in Algorithm of the Night, from last year (both n+1 Books) – they will wonder how a movie critic got it all so right, and why. I started reading Hamrah when I was still in college in suburban North Carolina, a place that felt worlds away from New York City as it appeared in magazines like n+1. Hamrah’s essays opened that door for me, hinting at a cultural life I hadn’t even thought to aspire to. His reviews can be a couple sentences long or run to several thousand words; each one is hyperliterate and historically grounded, bracingly scornful while never hitting below the belt. His books stand as pillars of intellectual integrity and humor in our deeply anti-intellectual and unfunny century. – Lucas

Well, as predicted, 2026 is turning it around! Not in the world at large, golly no, but in the world of books – where I’d much rather live at the moment – things are coming up aces. I feel like I have every genre to recommend – a novel, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories. I’m here for your reading needs!

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives totally delivers on the promise of his story collection from 17 years prior. Also set on a farm in Pakistan, also with a sprawling cast of characters, Mueenuddin’s new novel is immersive and detailed, sweeping and deeply concerned with the human. It is the yarn I needed to kick off my year and boost my optimism about the state of contemporary literature.

Anne Fadiman’s Frog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the literate essay collection of my dreams. Spanning topics as various as the dead pet frog her family kept in their freezer for far too long to the underappreciated and forgotten son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the magazine written by Antarctic explorers while they weathered long stretches at the South Pole, Frog kept my interest on every page and was over far too soon.

Lauren Groff may be best known for her novels, but I will throw down the gauntlet and say she’s an even better short story writer. Read Brawler (Riverhead, February 24) for proof. Some stories (the first one alone) will remain seared in my brain and leave a pit of dread in my stomach for a long time to come. In fact, I’m eager for others to read this collection because I want to talk about which stories stood out as favorites – I bet readers will have many different responses to that query. I particularly like how Brawler hung together as a whole: houses of all kinds run through these tales, as well as moral dilemmas that have no easy resolutions.

And a nice added touch? We have or will have signed copies of all three of these books in the shop. Thanks to Daniyal, Anne, and Lauren! – Miriam

I had wanted to write about a book one last time for our newsletter before leaving Three Lives. (It’s no wonder that typing the words “leaving Three Lives” has made my eyes well with tears.) Lately, I haven’t had the luxury to read for pleasure. As you now know, I’ve been planning and working on my cookbook shop, Wild Sorrel Cookbooks, which will open in the spring. So instead of writing about a book in this space, I’d like to write about you. You all have helped make life at Three Lives so satisfying, so much fun, and the most wonderful way to spend a work day. Helping you find a book for vacation, a special gift for a friend, a conversation, a story – it just never gets old. Anyone who has spent time at Three Lives knows it is a place that gives back to you, and then some! Sure, it’s about all the many wonderful books, but it’s the life inside, too, that makes the place so magical. And I’ve had the great good fortune to spend fourteen years inside this special shop with all of you. I will miss my colleagues deeply, and I will miss being on this corner, but I do hope you’ll come visit me at my new space in the East Village. Help give it the magic it’ll need. I want to thank each and every one of you for helping make my fourteen years here so unforgettable, and filled with so much joy. These have been the greatest years of my life. Truly. – Troy

~ Minneapolis, USA ~

Like many of you, our eyes have lately been fixed on Minneapolis. Images from January’s protests in that city have proved indelible: a phalanx of men in tactical gear brandishing military-grade assault weapons at a woman dressed in scrubs and Crocs; a five-year-old child in a blue winter cap taken from his parents in broad daylight; a mother shot in the face in her car; a nurse shot in the back while pinned to the ground. 

As citizens – a word that grows more fraught by the day – we are as outraged by the government’s conduct as we are proud of our compatriots who have taken to the streets to protest ICE’s brutal mission. As a bookstore, we feel compelled to note that the state’s violence against protesters is not merely immoral, but is also a dangerous assault on the rights guaranteed by our First Amendment. Murdering dissidents is never a first step: rather, it is the fruit borne of years of escalation – from banning books across the South, to arresting and deporting college students for views expressed in school newspapers, to bringing ruinous lawsuits against news organizations who dare to speak out. And while we are far from experts on these or any other matters, we affirm the simple truth that neither bookstores nor democracies can long exist without the rights of free expression and assembly. We stand in solidarity with all those who are fighting to defend these rights, and to defend their friends, families, and neighbors from the masked men this government has sent to terrorize them.

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)

Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin Press)

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin Press, translated by Martin Aitken)

The Hitch by Sara Levine (Roxane Gay Books)

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy (Ballantine)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W.W. Norton)

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf)

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat)

Vigil by George Saunders (Random House)

Crux by Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead)

The Pelican Child by Joy Williams (Knopf)

A Little Life Box Set by Hanya Yanagihara (Vintage)

Nonfiction

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

At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Frog by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

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

Football by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press)

Something from Nothing by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter)

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

Dear New York by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s)

A School Lunch Revolution by Alice Waters (Penguin Press)

The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West (Knopf)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Strangers by Belle Burden (Dial)

2. Heart the Lover by Lily King (Grove)

3. The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin Press, translated by Martin Aitken)

4. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown)

5. Vigil by George Saunders (Random House)

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

7. An Almanac of New York City for the Year 2026 (Abbeville, edited by Susan Gail Johnson)

8. This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf)

9. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (New Directions, translated by Barbara Haveland)

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

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

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.