San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2004)

Baxter Parish, Louisiana, is a bloody place where family tradition is stronger than law and pride is more valuable than life. Twenty-seven-year-old Jesse Tadlock returns home after a peaceful Army hitch to claim his inheritance, but he finds he can't outrun the legacy of violence that has haunted his family.

New York, NY: Knopf (2004)

Hailed by Kent Haruf as "one of the truest and most original new voices in American letters," Mark Spragg now tells the story of a complex, prodigal homecoming. Jean Gilkyson, pregnant when her husband was killed, is raising their daughter, Griff, in an Iowa trailer house with yet another brutal boyfriend when she realizes this can't go on. But the only refuge available is a town in Wyoming where her loved ones are dead and her father-in-law wishes she was too. For a decade he has blamed her for his son's death, choosing to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend otherwise couldn't survive. Bound as close as brothers, they face old age on a faltering ranch, their interdependence even more acute after one was crippled and the other mauled by his own pain. Suddenly Griff meets this grandfather she'd never heard about, not to mention a black cowboy confined to the bunkhouse, and irrepressibly claims her new life in hopes of turning grievous loss and recrimination toward reconciliation and love. Immediately compelling and constantly surprising, rich in character, landscape, and compassion, An Unfinished Life shows a novelist of extraordinary talents at the height of his power.

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2004)

With his previous novels, Francisco Goldman has reaped immense acclaim and established himself as an American voice of vital importance. His third novel is a marvelous tale of great love, the soul of the Americas and the birth of the modern spirit, set in the convents, ballrooms, and coffee plantations of late-nineteenth-century Central America and the docks, rooming houses, and stately Fifth Avenue addresses of New York. When we meet Marí a de las Nieves Moran, she is a bookish and dreamy novice nun-until the country's new ruler closes the convents. What will be her fate in the secular world? When Marí a de las Nieves enrolls in a writing class under José Martí , her life is transformed by the brilliant poet and hero of Cuban independence, whose year in that Central American capital results in Latin America's most famous love poem. Marí a de las Nieves's story unfolds among an unforgettable cast of characters striving for love or success. And when Marí a de las Nieves departs for New York years later, young daughter in tow, she continues to evade the mystery of who, of her many suitors, is the girl's father, and what really happened between her and José Martí .

Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (2004)

Sixteen essays that lyrically affirm writer Ellen Douglas's lifelong role as a witness to humanity and history.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2004)

Contributors Include:
Rick Bragg, Sonny Brewer, Mary Ward Brown, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, Matt Baggett, Garic Barranger, Bart Barton, Barry Bradford, Matthew Brock, Grayson Capps, Jan Chabreck, Brock Clarke, Doug Crandall, Joe Formichella, Juliana Gray, Wayne Greenhaw, Donald Hays, Bret Anthony Johnston, Jack Kerley, Michael Knight, Mack Lewis, Chip Livingston, Jonathan Odell, Jack Pendarvis, David Poindexter, Brewster Milton Robertson, Dayne Sherman, Alix Strauss, Brad Vice, Daniel Wallace, D.B. Wells, and James Whorton

This signed first edition is sold out. Please check back with us again.

New York, NY: Knopf (2004)

Near fine in dust jacket.

0ne of the most beloved novels in recent years, "Plainsong" was a best-seller from coast to coast--and now Kent Hand returns to the high plains around Holt, Colorado, with a story of even greater authority. When the McPheron brothers see the single mother they'd taken in move away to college, an emptiness opens before them, and for many other townspeople as well it promises to be a long, hard winter. A young boy living alone with his grandfather helps out a neighbor whose husband, off in Alaska, suddenly isn't coming home, leaving her to raise their two daughters. The children of a disabled couple suffer indignities at school that their parents know all too well, with only a social worker to look after them. But in a small town a great many people encounter one another frequently, often surprisingly, and destinies soon become entwined as they confront events that sorely test their resilience, with no shelter available except their own character. Spring eventually reaches across the land, and how the people of "Eventide" get there makes for an engrossing, profoundly moving novel rich in the wisdom and humanity for which Kent Haruf is justly acclaimed.

New York: Grove (2004)

Fine in dust jacket.

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, and his own father's more personal violations, True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force, and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible. In the story of the Burketts, Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal and amends, joy and grief, and justice for the worst of our sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul.

New York, NY: Ballantine (2004)

Dan Chaon's novel You Remind Me Of Me is nothing short of brilliant. The novel is haunting me and I can't stop thinking about it--both as a reader and as a deeply admiring writer. I wish I had a better adjective than superb."
-Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble

"One of Dan Chaon's many gifts is his ability to probe deeply and delicately into sorrow. This gift serves him beautifully in You Remind me of Me, a novel about adoption, about the quiet sadness that lies at the bottom of all his characters' troubles."
-Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of The World

"Beautiful, painful, and sure-footed, You Remind me of Me tracks the delicate connections between a handful of lost and poignant lives, in the process giving them the radiance of a stained glass window. What a writer. Dan Chaon is going to have a breathtaking literary career."
-Peter Straub, author of lost boy, lost girl

New York, NY: Norton (2001)

The stories in "Island" tell about death, family ties and the pull of traditions transplanted from Scotland to the harsh New World. Sixteen spare, evocative masterworks: men and women acting out their own peculiar mortality against the unforgiving landscape of cape Breton Island.

New York, NY: Scribner (2004)

Cliff Janeway, the cop-turned-rare-book-dealer, returns in a new "Bookman" mystery set in the arcane world of collectible books--from the award-winning author who captivated readers with "Booked to Die" and "The Bookman's Wake."

New York: Doubleday (2004)

In 1970, one of Mississippi's more colorful weekly newspapers, "The Ford County Times, went bankrupt. To the surprise and dismay of many, ownership was assumed by a 23 year-old college dropout, named Willie Traynor. The future of the paper looked grim until a young mother was brutally raped and murdered by a member of the notorious Padgitt family. Willie Traynor reported all the gruesome details, and his newspaper began to prosper. The murderer, Danny Padgitt, was tried before a packed courthouse in Clanton, Mississippi. The trial came to a startling and dramatic end when the defendant threatened revenge against the jurors if they convicted him. Nevertheless, they found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. But in Mississippi in 1970, "life" didn't necessarily mean "life," and nine years later Danny Padgitt managed to get himself paroled. He returned to Ford County, and the retribution began.

New York, NY: FSG (2003)

Fine in dust jacket.

From the prizewinning writer Stuart Dybek comes a superb new work: a novel-in-stories, eleven masterful tales told by a single voice with remarkable narrative power. In I Sailed With Magellan, Dybek finds characters of irrepressible vitality amidst the stark urban landscapes of Chicago's south side; there, the daily experiences of the neighborhood are transformed in the lush imaginative adventures of his hero, the restless Perry Katzek.

There is remarkable music in each of Dybek's intertwined episodes, the rhythm of street life captured in all its emotional depth and unexpected humor: a man takes his young nephew to a string of taverns where the boy sings for his uncle's bourbon; a small-time thug is distracted from making a hit by the mysterious reappearance of several ex-girlfriends; two unemployed youths hatch a scheme to finance their road trip to Mexico by selling orchids stolen from the rich side of town; a young couple's amorous beach adventure is interrupted when an unexpected visitor washes ashore. As these poignant, often funny chapters unfold, Perry grapples toward the exotic possibilities the world offers him, glimpsing them even beneath the at times brutal surface of the inner-city. Throughout I Sailed With Magellan, fans of Dybek will find the captivating storytelling, the sharp, spare prose, the brilliant dramatization of resilient, inventive humanity that they have come to expect from him.