Greetings from Three
Lives & Company!
The last Saturday in
April is Independent Bookstore Day, a favorite shop tradition (and, in recent
years, one of our busiest days outside the holidays). As in years past, Three
Lives booksellers will bake cookies and other sweets to give to customers throughout
the day, a sincere expression of our gratitude for all your support of our
little shop. Please join us on April 25 for this celebration of independent
bookstores (and the people who keep them in business!).
A quick perusal of the
Signed Editions section of this newsletter should give a sense of the sheer
volume of signed books currently in the shop. As many of you know, we host very
few actual events, so this list is a testament to the authors who take the time
to visit us – some from around the corner, some from across the globe – and
sign whatever books we have on hand. Mostly these visits are unpredictable, but
we have two opportunities to make you aware of in the coming months.
First, Douglas Stuart, Booker
Prize–winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, will be
signing and personalizing copies of his new novel John of John (Grove
Atlantic) for customers who preorder from Three Lives. Please note that this is
not an event but rather a chance to preorder a signed or inscribed copy of the
novel. The book comes out on May 5; to place your order, please call or email
the shop before April 22.
Next, we are thrilled to
announce a breakfast book signing with Ann Patchett on the morning of Thursday,
June 4, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m., for her forthcoming novel Whistler
(Harper, to be published June 2). Ann is a writer who hardly needs an
introduction. She has written at least a dozen genuine classics, both fiction
and nonfiction, and her turn as a bookseller – in 2011 she cofounded Parnassus
Books, which she still owns – has only increased her stature in the world of
American letters. We will share more information as the event draws near, but
as always, if you would like to order a signed or personalized copy and cannot
attend that morning, please reach out to the shop early so we can arrange it
for you.
Lastly, we would be
remiss not to mention that April is National Poetry Month. Though the month is
already half gone, Sarah has rounded up a beautiful assortment of new and
notable poetry to enjoy this season. You will find her Poetry Nook after our
usual staff round-ups. And speaking of staff: we have a new bookseller! If you
haven’t already, stop by soon to meet Kathryn, whose recent favorites you can
read about below.
~ Recent Staff Favorites
~
Sometimes when you read
an old book – a really old book – one of the
takeaways is that people have always been basically the same: same needs, same
desires, same ideas of morality, same sense of spectacle. And sometimes you
read a book like Felix Platter’s Beloved Son Felix (McNally
Editions, translated by Seán Jennett) and you think that there actually can be
a pretty big gulf between them and us. The memoir
chronicles Platter’s journey from Basel to Montpellier and his life studying
medicine in the latter city in the mid-1500s. Platter seems to have watched
every public execution on offer in Montpellier, and he often interrupts a
mundane recitation of events with a paragraph of municipal violence: “The
severed head rolled across the floor. Afterwards the executioner cut off both
legs and both arms, and arranged them on the scaffold with the head in the
middle… In the morning he hung them on an olive-tree outside the town and there
they were left to rot.” (The next sentence is about collecting plants.) Felix
and his fellows rob graves. They dodge brigands. The Black Death, still raging
in parts of Europe, is never far from their door. This book is an absolute
delight. (Maybe we’re not so different.)
Like All the Lovers in the Night, another favorite of mine,
Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow (Knopf, translated by Laurel
Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) is deceptively simple: a group of young women on the
margins of society open a bar in ’90s Tokyo, hustling to stay afloat in Japan’s
post-tech slump. What follows is half buddy story and half Heavenly
Creatures – a joyous and sinister trip through modern Japan’s floating
world of hostess joints and karaoke rooms. – Ryan
Ben Lerner’s new novel Transcription
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a series of conversations, a subtle and
sophisticated drama of the human voice and technologies that try (and fail) to
capture it, to reproduce it. Many of the themes that have haunted his previous
novels are here as well: over three long chapters, our narrators struggle
through fraught encounters with great art, the complexities of fatherhood (both
literal and literary), the confusing poetics of the internet age. But in this
slim, seductive novel, Lerner has achieved something more than the sum of his
subjects, something that is hard to put a finger on
but which makes the book utterly engrossing. Maybe it is a unity of form and
function, the way the book mirrors and repeats itself, echoing and rhyming like
speech. Maybe it is the tender, frustrating figure of Thomas, the aging
professor and erstwhile father figure whose absence structures the novel’s
three major dialogues. Or maybe it is simply the quality of Lerner’s writing:
the daring precision of this real, human voice.
A recent flux of Toni
Morrison material (see: Namwali Serpell’s On
Morrison; Knopf’s recent collection of her lectures, Language as
Liberation; and Vintage’s repackaging of the paperback novels) compelled me
finally to read Song of Solomon, Morrison’s masterful third
novel. This is a powerhouse of a book, the kind that rewires your brain as you
read it, making everything else feel anemic by comparison. Here Morrison seems
set on rewriting American history itself, fusing the Bible, Faulkner, blues
music, the Emmett Till murder, Tom Sawyer, the Odyssey, and a thousand
and one other sources into a new language, as cruel and compassionate as
family, as death.
Pip Adam’s The New
Animals (Dorothy Project) is another novel in search of novelty, set
over the course of one long day and night in the Auckland fashion world in
2016. What begins as a deft experiment in shifting perspective (think Virginia
Woolf or Hanne Ørstavik) crescendos into an astonishing conclusion, about which
I will say nothing except that it is some of my favorite writing of the last
five years. – Lucas
I never enjoy flying,
but the flights Beryl Markham took across Africa in the 1920s – piloting a tiny
turquoise two-seater – sound exhilarating. Markham’s memoir, West with
the Night (North Point Press), explores her unconventional life
in Kenya as a British expat: in absorbing vignettes, she recounts hunting
warthogs before dawn, training racehorses, and becoming a pilot, among other
exploits. Markham is most known for her pioneering solo nonstop flight from
Europe to North America, but the book focuses more on the trips no one would
have heard about, like following tribes of elephants for hours from the sky or
rescuing stranded men on a short runway they’d carved by hand out of the bush.
It’s interesting how little Markham dwells on the fact that she is the only
woman around doing these things, but she seems not to be concerned about that
at all: she is just following her next call for adventure.
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (Pushkin Press) was my next read,
a startling portrait of a small Irish town set during the post-2008 financial
crisis. Each character takes the stage for one chapter only, their accounts
simmering with the shame and rage that come from generations of loss and
hardship. Bits of goodness still manage to peek through,
a delicate balance Ryan strikes perfectly. – Elaine
In my attempt to
maintain the epic highs of reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The
Dispossessed last year, I recently read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The
Birthday of the World and Other Stories (HarperCollins), and I loved
it.
Readers of Le Guin will
find that the stories in this collection cover familiar topics: gender, social
dynamics, cultural practices, and the limitations of language. What I’ve really
come to appreciate about Le Guin’s body of work is that each book serves as
evidence of how deeply thorough her worlds are and of the endless ways to write
about her subject matter, without ever feeling like a mere retread. The story
“Coming of Age in Karhide,” for example, begins as a
small treat for fans of The Left Hand of Darkness, and by the end it had
deepened my love for that novel.
The star of this
collection is the novella “Paradises Lost,” which follows a ship on a
200-year-long, six-generation voyage. What does the concept of “world” mean for
a generation with no memories of their ancestors’ home planet, who will likely
never see the potentially habitable planet for which their ship is bound? From
that single question comes one of the best spacefaring stories ever written. – Marlowe
This month I read A
Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (Picador). His novel
The Hours has sat firmly on the “top-dog” shelf
of my bookcase for years now. I trust him as a writer and knew that this book
would introduce me to characters not only well rendered but also well loved by
their author. A Home at the End of the World is told through four points
of view: Bobby and Jonathan, best friends who fall into a sweet and awkward
teenage love, reconnecting in their late twenties in New York City; Alice,
Jonathan’s mother, who feels paralyzed by the suburban life she has chosen; and
Clare, a New York eccentric who insists on the freedom to never make a
decision, all while struggling against her own flightiness. These characters
ask the circular questions I often find myself asking: What does it mean to
stay too long and leave too soon? How does building a home, a family, seem both
dauntingly permanent and maddeningly fragile? Is this it, and is it enough? The
novel pulls these four (and the people around them) lovingly, grudgingly,
anxiously through their ever-changing answers to these questions. Characters
follow each other from Ohio to New York City, from Woodstock to New Mexico and
back again. Childhood promises break; families disintegrate; and parents change
their minds even though they believed they never would. As Clare observes,
“Some things couldn’t be willed. I’d spent a good deal of time learning even
that small lesson.” How affirming to watch these characters accept their lives
– the constant process of rebuilding and learning to love one another – even as
they watch so many versions of home burn down in the rearview mirror. – Sarah
I started my spring in
the perfect place – with Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling
(Doubleday). I tumbled headlong into this twisty tale of a young teenager
turned faux Russian oligarch, and I felt the murky, restless waters of the
Thames rolling under my feet as I read. All of Keefe’s books brim with empathy
for their human subjects, but London Falling is particularly
compassionate. Keefe turns his eye to the troubled boy’s parents, ushering the
reader through their excruciating grief and mission toward justice. The book is
more about parental love than about crime, and it’s all the better for it.
I’m devouring Scott
Anderson’s King of Kings (Doubleday), a nonfiction epic that
toggles between the cusp of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the present day.
It’s fascinating to learn more about a country whose reputation has
overwhelmingly been shaped by Western perspectives and stories, which Anderson
does his best to dispel. He is a charismatic storyteller, wry and eagle-eyed
with a flair for cinematic aplomb. For evidence, look no further than the
tracking shot of the shah’s advisor traversing the halls of Jahan Nama Palace:
“At the top of the landing, he was met by two liveried footmen who
ceremoniously swung open an oversized ivory-inlaid door. The room Alam stepped
into was spacious and, if the morning curtains had already been drawn back from
its exterior windows, almost dazzlingly bright…” – Kathryn
Across my bookselling
years much has been written about the staggering lack of books translated into
English and published into the American market. In the last ten years or so, a
cadre of small, independent publishers (see: Archipelago, New Vessel, Deep
Vellum, and Europa, among others) has turned that narrative, mining
the best of the world and bringing forth a dazzling array of translated works.
Not only are they bringing the best of the new, they
are also going back to uncover and publish long-neglected gems. As New
Directions has done for a number of authors, including
the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (see: The Wall, translated by Shaun
Whiteside, stunning), Transit Books is now publishing the Italian writer Fausta
Cialente (1898-1994) for the first time in the U.S. In A Very Cold Winter
(translated by Julia Nelsen), members of an extended family – shepherded by
their matriarch, Camilla – find a comfort of sorts in the small Milan apartment
they all share during the winter of 1946. Moments of genuine beauty and grace
lace this novel as the family navigates the travails and deprivations of
post-war Italy. – Toby
~ Sarah’s Poetry Nook ~
Every April we make room for poetry on our
center table. Currently we have a number of older
staff favorites: Love Is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill (New
Directions), Crush by Richard Siken (Yale University
Press), Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (Knopf). Joining them are some
new releases that have caught several booksellers’ eyes: A Suit or A
Suitcase by Maggie Smith (Washington Square) explores the expandability
of the self, all the different people we carry inside us from year to year,
decade to decade. (Diane Seuss described it as “the work of a polished mind and
an endlessly revised self.”) Philip Schultz’s Enormous Morning
(W.W. Norton) takes stock of the sacrifices women make: how the roles of mother, wife, and friend often
require sloughing off the self to leave space for unyielding compassion and
commitment. While exploring his relationships with the women in his life,
Schultz considers the untethering of democracy and the struggle to live
thoughtfully in a suffering world.
Also new and notable is Horses (Milkweed), the
second collection from Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets. The poems in
this collection bring a sense of rain – standing in a canyon trying to discern
if a storm has just left or is about to arrive. In both instances you are in a
state of reflection, a dual focus on what has ended or what might be coming.
Skeets combs through the soil of the Navajo Nation, reflecting on the 191 wild
horses that died there in 2018 during an extreme drought. They are found suspended
in mud, a wild-west Pompeii, mid-run to an apocalypse. Like these horses,
Skeets feels himself in suspense, waiting between storms, waiting for rain. But
this waiting is not at all passive: construction is underway. Even under the
constant threat of climate disaster, there is still love
to fight for and land to be tended. With every ending Skeets argues for a
beginning, as in the poem “If the End of the World”: “through an open window /
smoke settling in the leaves / like a bell ringing.”
I would also like to
highlight a poetry collection that I read back in the fall. From the
Founding of the Country by Cristina Pérez Díaz (Winter Editions) takes
on the task of constructing utopia in the shadow of colonialism. Two lovers
build a country from their bed, drawing maps and laws and borders. They believe
themselves to be two nations coming together. They dream up new words, see
their bodies as hills to climb, their lives as islands fusing into one.
Founding this country involves an escape from another, a promise that things
will be different this time: “Your body I will found
onto the landscape. / And on the landscape a home. / And I will cut your
outline and fold it. / And the paper in the shape of a boat. / I will sail you.
// I promise endless expeditions.”
~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~
Fiction
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult)
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (Random House)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)
Nonfiction
Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (Crown)
~ Signed Editions ~
Fiction
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Knopf)
The Rare Bird by Elisha Cooper (Roaring Brook)
Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco)
New York Ironweed by Amanda Deutch (Fence)
Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue (Riverhead, translated by
Natasha Wimmer)
The Keeper by Tana French (Viking)
Kin by Tayari Jones (Knopf)
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (Knopf, translated by Laurel
Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio)
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin Press,
translated by Martin Aitken)
The Hitch by Sara Levine (Roxane Gay Books)
The Complex by Karan Mahajan (Viking)
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy (Ballantine)
See You on the Other
Side by Jay McInerney (Knopf)
Under Water by Tara Menon (Riverhead)
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Summit)
Lover Girl by Nicole Sellew (Clash)
Go Gentle by Maria Semple (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
American Fantasy by Emma Straub (Riverhead)
Crux by Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead)
Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach (University of Iowa Press)
Nonfiction
No! by Sara Ahmed (Feminist Press)
Darkology by Lynn Rhae Barnes (Liveright)
The Best Things in Life
Aren’t Things by Joann Davis (Beacon)
At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Spirit Catches You
and You Fall Down by
Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Heating & Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly (W.W. Norton)
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly (W.W. Norton)
Working Waterfront by Bill Gerencer (Archway)
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod (Doubleday)
Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)
Walk With Me: New York by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe (Vintage)
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (Vintage)
The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe (Vintage)
Dear New York, I Love
You by Ria Sim (Countryman)
Dear New York by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s)
The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West (Knopf)
~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~
1. London Falling by
Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
2. Strangers by
Belle Burden (Dial)
3. Project Hail
Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine)
4. Transcription by
Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
5. Heart the Lover
by Lily King (Grove)
6. The God of the
Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
7. I Who Have
Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit, translated by Ros
Schwartz)
8. Lost Lambs by
Madeline Cash (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
9. The
Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown)
10. On the
Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (New Directions, translated by
Barbara Haveland)
11. Dear New York,
I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
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.