Counterpoint (Over 32,000 results)

Hardback. Condition: Very Good. Morality Tale is a novel about the triangular complications of a modern marriage and the comedy that flows from them. When the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layperson's line in Zen philosophies) meets this novel's narrator, he offers her a friendly escape from her own daunting domestic life. Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex-wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a second marryer leaves much to be desired. As her friendship develops with Richard, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage by his presence, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing together on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais. There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layperson's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Told with unwavering honesty and wit, Morality Tale explores what it means to be married a second time around--and the crucial universal truth that change is often the key to staying together.…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi'ite skinhead, and Rabeya, a burqa-wearing punk, have kidnapped Matt Damon and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light--"just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes." But Damon's concerned they're playing into that same terrorist paradigm, thereby furthering the neoconservative perception of Islam. Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face-to-face with his creator--no, not Allah, but the author. This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn't all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. This Washington Post Best Book of the Year grapples with the complexities of the second-generation American experience, what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace, and a sister, a wife, and a mother to daughters in today's America. When a woman--known only as Mother--moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American-born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer―Here―is never enough. Mother's simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a violent and unfounded police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent. As she lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, her thoughts race from childhood games with her sister and visits to cousins in India, to her time in the newsroom before having her three daughters, to the early days of her relationship with a husband who now spends more time flying business class than at home. Drawing inspiration from the author's own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, Devi S. Laskar's debut novel explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been. The entire novel takes place over the course of a single morning. . . and the effect is devastatingly potent. --Marie Claire Devi S. Laskar's The Atlas of Reds and Blues is as narratively beautiful as it is brutal . . . I've never read a novel that does nearly as much in so few pages. --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi'ite skinhead, and Rabeya, a burqa-wearing punk, have kidnapped Matt Damon and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light--"just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes." But Damon's concerned they're playing into that same terrorist paradigm, thereby furthering the neoconservative perception of Islam. Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face-to-face with his creator--no, not Allah, but the author. This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn't all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation. …

Paperback. Condition: Good. In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields--walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing--play central roles in the sweeping panorama of world history and in the lives of individuals. In Dee's telling, a field is never just a setting for great battles or natural disasters, though it is often this as well. A field is the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life, especially when looked at, contemplated, worked in, lived with, and written about. Dee's four fields, which he has known and studied for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his private garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie in Little Bighorn, Montana, and a grass meadow in the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild. …

Paperback. Condition: Good.

Paperback. Condition: Good. "Finely wrought; Ollestad builds a delicate tension between the characters, exposing their raw desire and exploring the concept of artistic inspiration.A quietly tense and absorbing read." -Kirkus French Girl with Mother is a provocative, propulsive thriller that marries the spirit of James Salter with a hint of Patricia Highsmith and the velocity of The Art Forger. Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work. He's been deemed by his mentors and critics as technically skillful but uninspired -criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with the woman and it very quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty just may conjure the electricity he has been seeking for his work. So when the woman invites him to her parents' crumbling, centuries-old chateau in the country to allow him to sketch her, he accepts, knowing that this proposition is both ill advised and thrilling. Once enveloped by this isolated estate, a door opens to a world Nathan is not prepared for. The arrival of the young woman's family-her mother, a volatile, voracious former ballerina, her father, a mysterious businessman with secrets of his own, and her uncle, who might be trafficking in art forgeries.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. " This Is What We Do is.Atlas Shrugged jammed in reverse and with the tires smoked. It's Ayn Rand for people with a brain. And a gun. It's a kick. Read it." -Sean Beaudoin, author of You Killed Wesley Payne and The Infects James Nethery is at the end of his rope. Unable to find meaning in his comfortable life, he has cut himself off from everyone and fled to Paris. His mission; to rid himself of a lifetime of baggage, erase the past, and start over. He wanders Paris aimlessly until he meets Lily, a Ukrainian model and hooker. They form a unique bond, and together take the first steps toward writing new stories of their lives. Soon, Lily's past catches up with her and they are forced to go on the lam in a strange country. Together they must decide between justice and vengeance, and, when forced to take action, between what is too much-and not enough. This Is What We Do is part neo-noir thriller, part love story, and part cautionary tale of the perils of trying to write a new life from nothing-and the stories that will be written for you by others if you find yourself in the public eye.…

Paperback. Condition: Fair.

Hardback. Condition: Good. Everyone wants to write a book. Arlette Rosen knows this and earns her living helping strangers with their book ideas: books about Derrida and dieting, books of psychic exercises, a compendium of Alzheimer's jokes, and of course, an infinite number of books about love. Enter Harbinger Singh: a tax lawyer still in love with his ex-wife and set on revenge, who believes he can win her back by writing a book. All he needs is help with the actual writing. The lives of Arlette and Harbinger intertwine in unexpected ways as they meander along a path filled with writing, sex, movies, love, music, and continual revelation. Cohen has crafted a modern-day romance and a hilarious, knowing look at the troublesome process of bringing a book into the world--for readers and struggling writers everywhere. …

Paperback. Condition: Good.

Hardback. Condition: Good. Ever since the explorations of Marco Polo and the travels of Montaigne, a lively dialogue has persisted about the pros and cons of travel. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises both serious and amusing questions about travel, using her own experiences as vivid illustrations. Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. She makes an adolescent visit to Miami Beach, where she confronts the powerful sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to startling realizations of their own. Schwartz's personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows us who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, this memoir exemplifies a mode of travel in and of itself- the mind on a journey or quest, pausing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.…

Paperback. Condition: Fair. Menace both real and imagined haunt two Dubliners in this "unsettling . . . seductive" modern Gothic "that ultimately leaves one gasping" (Irish Times). "Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan's films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic novel . . . of two look-alike men who feed off each other's souls all their crisscrossed lives" (The New York Times). Kevin Thunder and Gerald Spain have grown up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Kevin's father is a bookie and his mother takes in lodgers on the city's impoverished northside. Gerald, a lawyer's son, is afforded a more well-heeled upbringing. Yet they share a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. At first, innocent enough--one approached by the other's confused girlfriend, or being called out to in the street. But Kevin is unnerved by more than a doppelganger. He lives next door to the one-time home of Bram Stoker. And the shadows of the author's evil creation, as well as those cast by a lookalike stranger, stretch far across his early years. It's only when a tragic death sends both young men down a darker path, that Kevin and Gerald are destined to meet. A "beautifully enigmatic . . . darkly luminous" (The New York Times Book Review) thriller, Mistaken is also "the best novel I've read about Dublin in years" (The Independent).…

Hardback. Condition: Very Good.

Paperback. Condition: Good.

Paperback. Condition: Good.

Hardback. Condition: Very Good. Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven't spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret. Set against the vivid landscapes of Los Angeles and unfolding with the evanescence of a dream or a memory, Goldenseal peels away the layers of an intimate female friendship to reveal a stirring and haunting story about the search for connection and the lingering echoes of lost love.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. Menace both real and imagined haunt two Dubliners in this "unsettling . . . seductive" modern Gothic "that ultimately leaves one gasping" (Irish Times). "Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan's films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic novel . . . of two look-alike men who feed off each other's souls all their crisscrossed lives" (The New York Times). Kevin Thunder and Gerald Spain have grown up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Kevin's father is a bookie and his mother takes in lodgers on the city's impoverished northside. Gerald, a lawyer's son, is afforded a more well-heeled upbringing. Yet they share a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. At first, innocent enough--one approached by the other's confused girlfriend, or being called out to in the street. But Kevin is unnerved by more than a doppelganger. He lives next door to the one-time home of Bram Stoker. And the shadows of the author's evil creation, as well as those cast by a lookalike stranger, stretch far across his early years. It's only when a tragic death sends both young men down a darker path, that Kevin and Gerald are destined to meet. A "beautifully enigmatic . . . darkly luminous" (The New York Times Book Review) thriller, Mistaken is also "the best novel I've read about Dublin in years" (The Independent).…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. A tantalizing true story of one of literature's most enduring enigmas is at the heart of this "lively, even sprightly book" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)--the quest to find the personal library of the world's greatest writer. Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the bard's manuscripts, books or letters has ever been found. The search for Shakespeare's library is much more than a treasure hunt. Knowing what the Bard read informs our reading of his work, and it offers insight into the mythos of Shakespeare and the debate around authorship. The library's fate has profound implications for literature, for national and cultural identity, and for the global Shakespeare industry. It bears on fundamental principles of art, identity, history, meaning and truth. Unfolding the search like the mystery story that it is, acclaimed author Stuart Kells follows the trail of the hunters, taking us through different conceptions of the library and of the man himself. Entertaining and enlightening, Shakespeare's Library is a captivating exploration of one of literature's most enduring enigmas. "An engaging and provocative contribution to the unending world of Shakespeariana . . . An enchanting work that bibliophiles will savor and Shakespeare fans adore." ―Kirkus Reviews.…

Hardback. Condition: Very Good. The need to reexamine assumptions about how we feed ourselves becomes ever more important. McWilliams does not shy from imagining radical solutions to these issues . . . Sure to be controversial. ―Booklist The human practice of farming food has failed. There are 7,500 known varieties of domesticated apples; we regularly eat about five. Seventy-five percent of the world's food derives from five animals and twelve plants. Factory farmed meat is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions (about 14 percent, larger than transportation) and consumes 75 percent of the water in drought-prone regions such as the West. We are stuck in a rut of limited choices, and the vast majority of what we eat is detrimental to our health and the welfare of the planet. But what if we could eliminate agriculture as we know it? What if we could start over? James McWilliams's search for more expansive palate leads him to those who are actively exploring the fringes of what we can eat, a group of outliers seeking nutrition innovation outside the industrial food system. Here, we meet insect manufacturers, seaweed harvesters, road kill foragers, plant biologists, and oyster farmers who seek to open both our minds and our mouths--and to overturn our most basic assumptions about food, health, and ethics. Eating Promiscuously generates hope for a more tasteful future--one in which we eat thousands of foods rather than dozens--with a new philosophy that could save both ourselves and our planet. The author's overriding assumption is that it would be better for people, animals, and the environment if our diets were more diversified. Hundreds of plants and protein sources, he rightly notes, are overlooked in favor of a narrow range of food . . . McWilliams presents a solid argument. --Kirkus Reviews.…

Hardback. Condition: Very Good. When first published in 2004, Danger on Peaks was the poet's first new collection of poems in twenty years. Perhaps his most personal, autobiographical collection, it begins with the young poet ascending Mt. St. Helens in 1945, a climb accidentally timed with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was 15 years old. Almost sixty years later, after the great Buddhas at Bamiyan Valley were bombed and with the victims of the World Trade Center also "turned to dust," the poet composed a prayer while at Short Grass Temple in Senso-ji, a pilgrim on the path of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy. This remarkable collection was greeted with broad praise, and as Julia Martin proclaimed, "Moving between relative and absolute ways of seeing, [Snyder] responds to the experience of global conflict and personal pain by reminding readers of the continuity of wildness, affirming the value of art, and invoking an ancient practice of wisdom and compassion.".…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Michaelo O'Dell is hit by a car, and when he doesn't die, he is surprised and pleased. But he can't seem to move, frozen in the crash position. He can't concentrate, or control his anger and grief, or work out what to do about much of anything. His professional life begins to crumble, and although his wife Wendy is heroically supportive, his teenage children only exacerbate his post-accident angst. His daughter Rosie punches out a vindictive schoolmate, plunging the family into a special parent-teacher hell. Meanwhile, his son Declan is found with a stash of illicit drugs, and a strange policeman starts harassing the family, causing ordinary mishaps to take on a sinister desperation. Equal parts hilarious and painful, this compelling novel delves into the difficulties of family, love, and the precarious business of being a man. Mark Lamprell's extraordinary debut examines the terrible truth: sometimes you can't pull yourself together until you've completely fallen apart.…

Hardback. Condition: Good. Morality Tale is a novel about the triangular complications of a modern marriage and the comedy that flows from them. When the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layperson's line in Zen philosophies) meets this novel's narrator, he offers her a friendly escape from her own daunting domestic life. Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex-wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a second marryer leaves much to be desired. As her friendship develops with Richard, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage by his presence, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing together on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais. There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layperson's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Told with unwavering honesty and wit, Morality Tale explores what it means to be married a second time around--and the crucial universal truth that change is often the key to staying together.…

Hardback. Condition: Very Good. A beautifully rendered memoir about creative beginnings in the vein of Umberto Eco's classic Confessions of a Young Novelist.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. As the oldest of institutions, marriage seems outdated in modern times, when each individual is encouraged to break with tradition in order to fulfill him- or herself. And so artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo seem to be paving the way toward a brave, new kind of marriage, where spouses would be allowed-even encouraged-to fulfill different aspects of themselves in outside relationships. Shared creativity, they believed, would transcend their jealousies and compensate their sufferings: through art, they would rise above conventional marital fidelity, and prove a higher fidelity to art and to themselves. The Love Lives of the Artists tells the stories of Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Diego and Frida, and Henry Miller and Anais Nin-five couples who approached their relationships with the same rebellious creativity as they practiced in their art. From their early artistic development and their first experiences in love, to their artistic marriages and their affairs-and then to their fights and reconciliations, addictions, nervous breakdowns and continued creativity-The Love Lives of the Artists describes the promise and the price of freedom and creativity in love.…

Paperback. Condition: Fair. It is 1998. In the safe haven of her London office--a room her husband jokingly calls "The Delivery Room"--therapist Mira Braverman listens to the stories of her troubled patients, including an aristocratic woman going through an intense infertility drama, an American journalist who is eager to have a baby, and an irritable divorcé who likes to taunt Mira about her Serbian nationality. As the novel unfolds, Mira discovers she is not as distant from her patients' pain as she might once have been: her husband Peter struggles with illness, NATO's threats against her country grow more serious, and submerged truths from her own past seem likely to erupt. Compelling, complex, and always deeply human, The Delivery Room is an engaging examination of the incomplete understandings that course between therapist and patient, and a set of variations on the theme of motherhood--as well as a timely meditation on the meanings of wars fought from a distance, when ordinary citizens have to measure their personal griefs against the outrages experienced by those under attack.…

Hardback. Condition: Good.

Hardback. Condition: Good. Some may remember Robert Finigan's private wine newsletter, published from 1972 to 1990. Others will know him as the author of the esteemed Robert Finigan's Essentials of Wine. As a critic-at-large, Finigan has dined in the best restaurants and tasted in the finest cellars of the world, and in Corks and Forks he jovially recounts his experiences and the celebrity chefs and winemakers he met along the way. The events Finigan took part in are now legendary. For the famous Paris Tasting of 1976, Finigan recommended many California Cabernets and Chardonnays that shockingly outpointed their French counterparts. With nine of the world's most distinguished wine tasting professionals, he conducted the re-evaluation of the 1855 Bordeaux classification - the first in 140 years. He has stepped into the private kitchens of Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Jeremiah Tower, Michel Guerard, and Jean Troisgros, and sipped wine with Robert Mondavi, Ernest Gallo, and Kermit Lynch - to name just a few of the luminaries profiled in this delightful collection. As much a chronicle of the developments in food and wine as it is a memoir of the man who witnessed them, Corks and Forks is sure to whet anyone's palate.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. A master of the short form, Gina Berriault stands somewhere between Chekhov and Isaac Babel in style and psychological acuity. The seven stories - 'Infinite Passion of Expectation,' 'Tea Ceremony,' 'The Mistress,' 'The Overcoat,' 'Stolen Pleasures,' 'Works of the Imagination,' and 'Women in Their Beds' - offer a glimpse into the oeuvre of one of the most celebrated voices in American letters.…

Hardback. Condition: Good. Richard Selzer is one of America's most accomplished stylists, a physician turned writer in the grand tradition that stretches from Chekhov to William Carols Williams to Oliver Sachs. As Iliana Semmler notes in her introduction, over fifteen years ago he] substituted the pen for the scalpel, the desk for the operating table, his carrel in Yale's Sterling Library for the Operating Room, but] the consciousness of the physician remains a guiding force in all his work. The Whistlers' Room collects twenty-four pieces, from diaries and memoirs to essays on painting and sculpture, from essays on travel to translation and fiction. The title piece recounts the compassion and camaraderie between three soldier-patients in what was dubbed the Whistlers' Room: Each had been shot in the throat and sustained a more or less identical wound, destruction of the larynx. The whole book is an exhilarating tour, led by a remarkable imagination.…