Greetings from Three Lives & Company!
There is no getting around it: fall is the most exciting season for booksellers. Summer brings more (and better) books than it used to, but the fall is still the cream of the year, and 2026 will be no exception – new work from Marlon James, Hernan Diaz, Min Jin Lee, Emma Cline, Kate Atkinson, Chang-rae Lee, Chad Harbach and many more will soon be vying for room on our fiction displays, and that’s not even to mention new cookbooks from Melissa Clark, Ina Garten, Yotam Ottolenghi…. This will be quite a season. You can read about some of these titles in our Staff Favorites section below, along with our usual assortment of backlist treasures.
But first, a couple of quick announcements. We are still taking preorders for signed copies of Hernan Diaz’s Ply (Riverhead, September 29). Please get us your orders by September 21 if you would like a signed or personalized copy, and remember that we can ship books almost anywhere.
We are also delighted to announce a breakfast signing with Maira Kalman on Wednesday, October 28 for her new book Joy (Harper). We will share a few more details in a future email, but add this morning event to your calendar now – 9 to 10 a.m., coffee and scones provided – and feel free to reach out any time between now and the event if you know you would like a signed copy but will not be able to attend.
~ Recent Staff Favorites
~
After a night spent
tending to her boyfriend’s bad mushroom trip, the narrator of Courtney Bush’s Learning
(Joyland) finds herself doling out the same patience and presence to her class
of three-year-olds at a progressive daycare in Manhattan. The children are
simply trying their best: they make mistakes loudly; they act on every desire; they
look to the adult in the room and ask, without shame, “How can you help me? How
can you make this better?” After Courtney cries in a meeting, her boss tells
her that, much like the children, she seems incapable of a dishonest
experience. (This is probably what makes her a good teacher.) The children act
as small mirrors for Courtney throughout her day – their attempts to try new
things, even when they’re unsure or embarrassed, prompt her repeatedly to do
the same. She reflects on the loss of a friend, the risk of teetering into love
with her boyfriend, and her previous marriage. As the day progresses, the chaos
of the classroom slowly merges with the chaos of Courtney’s inner world.
There is a freedom in
hyperpresence. Young children experience it effortlessly and artists strive for
it – to capture something in a single moment, to hook onto and experience its
every detail. Indelicacy by Amina Cain (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux) is all about an artist’s desire for this sort of presence. Vitória
wishes only to write, to have the time to study every shining leaf and slow
roll of fog, to “remember what it’s like to emerge…” But there are so many
other things she must tend to. She is constantly pulled away from her notebook;
there is never enough time. Then one day, as if plucked from a fairytale, a
rich man asks her to marry him. She agrees, hoping that no longer having to
work will mean endless hours of writing. Of course, as Vitória quickly
realizes, it is never that simple. – Sarah
Andrea Wulf’s biography
of the naturalist George Forster, The Traveler (Knopf), lives up
to the high nonfiction standards that she herself set with The Invention of
Nature over a decade ago. Wulf is clearly a tireless researcher, but what
sets her apart is both her knack for picking the choicest morsels to lay out
for the reader and a rare talent for prose. The Traveler is a rollicking
adventure story (Forster was a member of James Cook’s second voyage), an
Enlightenment drama, and a political primer for late-1700s European
revolutionary movements.
The narrator of
Chang-rae Lee’s A Tender Age (Riverhead) relates a childhood
troubled by the impossibility of fitting in but cushioned by a caring family.
He tries to be both tough and good, each with mixed results. At a summer camp
for Korean kids, his pre-adolescent confusion comes to a head: he likes a girl
and he hates the slick kid who hangs out with that girl. Lee writes subtly
about the muck of motivations we have as children and the shame we can feel
when our desires don’t match what we know is right.
Without quite intending
it, I have been often in Greece this summer. Following my reading of Daniel
Mendelsohn’s riveting translation of The Odyssey (University
of Chicago Press), I sailed through Emily Wilson’s essay collection Crossing
the Wine-Dark Sea (Liveright). Learned, breezy and opinionated, Wilson
dispels modern misconceptions about ancient authors and their motives, and lays
out how translators like herself decide how their stories appear on the page
for today’s readers. I also enjoyed trekking with Henry Miller in his classic
Greece travelogue The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions).
Henry’s a bluffer and blowhard, but never a bore. – Ryan
Paul is an interior
designer of some renown, living a secluded life in the Orkney islands,
surrounded by the objects – carefully selected, precisely described – that
constitute his world: a handsomely dented vintage bicycle, a sofa upholstered
in worn sailcloth. But Paul is also a character in the novel Air
by Christian Kracht (Liveright, translated by Daniel Bowles), and his author
has higher ambitions than a simple satire of Scandinavian design trends. After
traveling to a data center in Norway (he has been hired to paint it the perfect
shade of white), Paul vanishes, and suddenly we find ourselves in a dark wood.
A girl with a bow has shot a deer, only it’s not a deer, but a man in a long
white cloak. Is he a wizard? Is he Paul? Is this all a hallucination? No time
to find out; the Duke’s men are almost to the Firnbrook, and the only place
safe from the Yellow Death they carry is a fabled land in the far south, on the
coast of the Frozen Sea…. Air is a beautiful dream, full of tenderness
and invention, and if this is all Kracht’s idea of a joke then the joke is
surely on me for falling headlong into the fantasy.
Rebecca Perry is up to
something similar in May We Feed the King (Transit, September
29), though her methods are more realistic. Here our modern-day aesthete is a
curator of sorts, responsible for furnishing and appointing the banquet halls,
chambers, and sculleries of palaces-turned-museums: rooms you glance into for a
moment as you hurry along on a walking tour. Grieving an unspecified loss, our
narrator has taken a commission for a 750-year anniversary at a former palace,
where she begins to read the histories of the kings who once lived there. As
she sinks deeper into the tragedy of one particular king, the novel follows
her: in a slow progression of delicate vignettes, Perry shows us just enough
detail to conjure a world, to shade it with danger, to suggest an answer to her
deeply ambiguous ending. All you get are glimpses through doorways, whispers
from an open window, but these are enough. The present is loud; history is
quiet, quiet and dark. – Lucas
More people seem to know
In a Lonely Place (New York Review Books) from the Bogart movie
than from the spellbinding and extremely enjoyable Dorothy Hughes novel on
which the movie was based. Narrated from the perspective of a serial killer on
the prowl in Los Angeles as the net closes around him, In a Lonely Place features
two stellar femmes fatales (who of course are light-years ahead of the men in
sussing out who is responsible for these murders) and an indelible portrait of
the City of Angels. Although the book is clearly steeped in a post-war
mentality, it also feels like it could have been written in the last decade –
propulsive, tense, hard to look away.
If my knowledge of noir
is slim, my familiarity with contemporary literary journals is nonexistent. I
picked up Granta’s latest issue on Scandinavian writing because I
was headed to Denmark and I loved the idea of having a compilation of the
greats at hand: Helle Helle, Jon Fosse, Solvej Balle, Vigdis Hjorth, Olga Ravn,
Karl Ove Knausgaard…. And boy did it not disappoint. I read the volume cover to
cover and discovered so many new authors I want to read further (and shopped
for their books while wandering through Copenhagen!). Those Helle Helle
stories…simply breathtaking.
And now to comfort
reading, to my tried and true – Kate Atkinson. I started her forthcoming novel Our
Noble Selves (Doubleday, September 15) and found myself wondering if I
could call in sick or neglect my child just to race through it. Reading
Atkinson is like sitting with a friend spinning an incredible yarn: she nails a
story well-told, an abundant cast of characters, and a vibrant, mid-twentieth
century London milieu. Our Noble Selves is set around the Festival of
Britain – a real fair that aimed to rally the nation after so many years of war
– and the individuals (spies, returning veterans, former journalists) who
banded together to get it off the ground. Throw in some dead bodies and hidden
identities, and you’ve got an Atkinson novel that may necessitate some calendar
clearing. – Miriam
Set in Botswana in the
late 1980s, Mating by Norman Rush (Vintage) is the story of a
nameless anthropologist and her relationship with a charismatic academic,
Nelson Denoon, creator of an experimental, matriarchal utopia deep in the
Kalahari. Rush’s protagonist may be one of the great literary characters of all
time: brilliant, funny, an unreliable narrator who describes her own behaviors
through the same anthropological lens she uses to observe the people she’s
there to study. Mating is also deeply romantic. In her pursuit of an
“intellectual love between equals,” our narrator makes some bewildering choices
in the hopes of finding someone on her wavelength. The novel doesn’t shy away
from complication: a student falling in love with her mentor is never a simple
affair, and nor is the project of white expatriates performing social
experiments in post-colonial Africa. But Mating also refuses to
undermine the importance of the relationship or the meaning of Denoon’s utopia.
Another great book I’ve
read this summer is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon (Random House), the story of cousins Josef Kavalier, an
escape artist, and Sammy Clay, an aspiring cartoonist, who team up to create a
successful comic-book hero during the Golden Age of comics. As with Mating,
the best part of Chabon’s novel is the characters. Even after 600-plus pages
with Sammy, Joe, and Rosa, I found myself missing them once I’d finished the
novel. And what amazing scenes! There are chapters in this book I’ve returned
to at random in the weeks after my first reading, just because I wanted to live
in them again. – Marlowe
In Diane Cook’s The
New Wilderness (Harper), an ecologically devolving country holds
onto a final patch of wild, preserving it from human ruin. A government
experiment allows a small group of people into the wild to see if they can
coexist without leaving a trace. But the landscape, though untouched, is still
dangerous, marred by the oversight and demands of a faceless administration and
the true deadliness of the environment itself. At the heart of the story are Beatrice
and her young daughter, Agnes, who Beatrice has brought to the wild in a
desperate attempt to heal her failing lungs. Years later Agnes has become
irrevocably tied to the only world she has known. A psychological
group-dynamics study set atop a dystopian hell is my perfect summer reading combination.
The
Witch by Marie NDiaye
(Vintage, translated by Jordan Stump) is a modern fantasy tale of female power
within the boundaries of marriage and motherhood. Lucie is a witch whose meager
abilities still garner resentment from her husband, who’s threatening to leave
for good. Just as her twin daughters begin to develop their magical ability,
slipping further from her grasp, Lucie learns that her mother has separated
from her husband, finally fed up after decades spent burying her gifts to
appease him. The novel quivers with the inexplicable force passed down through
generations of women in Lucie’s family: natural and good, yet flexible,
ambivalent, just as willing to be used for darkness as it is for light. – Elaine
Five-year-old Marili
lives on a farm with her grandparents, their farmhands, and the cows. Over the
course of a year she begins to make some sense of the world around her, of the
pastoral life across the seasons, and her child’s mind comes to understand the
circumstances that brought her to live with her grandparents. In The
Fifth Year (New Directions, translated by Shaun Whiteside) Marlen
Haushofer, the mid-twentieth century Austrian novelist (and author of a big
Three Lives favorite, The Wall), has fashioned an exquisite novella of a
thoughtful, mercurial girl and the family and the land in which she is raised.
At a slim 80 pages, The Fifth Year is a lovely gem.
At the end of college
and almost on a whim, Polly Barton applies for an English teaching position in
the Japanese national school system, where she is dispatched to Sado Island in
the Sea of Japan. There she takes on the tasks of teaching her young students,
assisting the local English teacher, and immersing herself in the Japanese
language. As an account of that time, Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo)
is a glorious mix of memoir, reflection, and travel narrative, and a
fascinating exploration of the humility and risk necessary to open oneself to
another language. Using common Japanese onomatopoeia as an entry point, the
inquisitive and observant Barton (now an acclaimed translator) offers a
dazzling look at a culture and her relationship to it as she makes her own way
out in the world.
In Nightjar
(Random House), Emily Ruskovich has written psychologically astute,
just-this-side-of-unsettling short stories set in the big land of the Great
Northwest. Looking for a new collection of stories for a mid-summer read, I
stumbled upon the Publishers Weekly rave, and after reading Nightjar
I have to agree: a marvel.
Late breaking review! I
have just now finished Marlon James’s latest, The Disappearers
(Riverhead), and it is absolutely staggering. I will save a fuller review and
appreciation for the next newsletter, after I have had a moment to sit with
this incredible novel. – Toby
~ Staff Favorites Now in
Paperback ~
Pan by Michael Clune (Penguin)
Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin)
The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
~ Signed Editions ~
Fiction
The Stalker by Paula Bomer (Soho)
Dèy by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
How to Dodge a
Cannonball by Dennard Dayle (Holt)
Contrapposto by Dave Eggers (Knopf)
James by Percival Everett (Vintage)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Riverhead)
A Brief History of Seven
Killings by Marlon James
(Riverhead)
The Disappearers by Marlon James (Riverhead)
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (Summit, translated by Benjamin Ross)
A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)
Country People by Daniel Mason (Random House)
Wreck by Catherine Newman (Harper)
Sunrise by Téa Obreht (Random House)
Under the Falls by Richard Russo (Knopf)
The Unknown by Riley Sager (Dutton)
Go Gentle by Maria Semple (G.P. Putnam)
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
John of John by Douglas Stuart (Grove)
Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Nonfiction
Working Waterfront by Bill Gerencer (Archway)
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe (Vintage)
Three Tenses by Ed Park (Random House)
~ The Three Lives &
Company Bestseller List ~
1. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
(Knopf)
2. Dear New York, I Love You by
Ria Sim (Countryman)
3. Whistler by Ann Patchett
(Harper)
4. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)
5. Cool Machine by Colson
Whitehead (Doubleday)
6. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
(Atria)
7. The Wedding People by Alison
Espach (Holt)
8. The Things We Never Say by
Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
9. Etna by Paul Yoon (Scribner)
10. I Who Have Never Known Men by
Jacqueline Harpman (Transit, translated by Ros Schwartz)
11. Life of M by Rachel Cusk
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
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.