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Fall 2024 textbooks are now available for purchase. All sales final after Friday, September 6, 2024.

Bio/autobiography

Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years

Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years

$27.00
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New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls "witty, sly, critical, inventive" and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls "electric."

"An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising."--George Saunders

That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?

One summer Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls "the end times of childhood." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming--and what qualifies me to be his guide?

The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability, as well as education and prevention. She begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what she must learn about herself to responsibly steer him.

Looking back to her childhood in Maine, where she and her family often navigated the tricky coastline in a small boat, relying on a decades-old nautical guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of family life alongside knottier questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the peril of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves and help others find us.

Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental, Directions to Myself cements Julavits's reputation as one of the most shrewdly innovative nonfiction writers at work today.

Improbable Possibilities: An Entrepreneur's Quest

Improbable Possibilities: An Entrepreneur's Quest

$18.99
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Observe Possibilities.Entangle Possibilities.Create Possibilities.Throw spaghetti against the wall of life and see what sticks.


Multi-business entrepreneur Linda Rawlings is perhaps best-known as co-creator of California-based Otis Spunkmeyer, Inc. Her debut book "Improbable Possibilities", reveals other entrepreneurial quests through childhood, a business career, a dance career, and three marriages--in twenty episodes of you-can't-make-this-up and you-can't-put-this-down true stories.


Diverse San Francisco entrepreneurial adventures include Robert C. Brown and Company, investment advisors; Triple 888 Manufacturing, the sheet metal company purchased created to manufacture ovens for baking Otis Spunkmeyer cookies; and Sentimental Journeys, the DC3 airline that promoted Otis Spunkmeyer Cookies. Her other entrepreneurial activities include founding and producing New Shoes Old Souls Dance Company, producing Yoga Garden Dancers, and working with Heterodoxy Magazine and George Magazine. Rawlings helped develop MANA!, a food brand in Hong Kong.


Rawlings has undergraduate degrees in Fine Arts and Mathematics (Bates College) and master's degrees in Business and Journalism (UC Berkeley). She has lived in Connecticut, California, Singapore, Hong Kong, Toronto, Sydney, and Las Vegas. Newport, Rhode Island is her home-for now. Her writing has appeared in Heterodoxy, The Oakland Tribune, and Newport Life Magazine. This is her first book, inspired by theoretical physics.


"Reading Improbable Possibilities, is like catching up with your most adventurous and entertaining friend."

Carolyn Wyman, author: "The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book"


"The author, who describes herself as a baby boomer with an old soul, opens with an account of her youth in Connecticut, and in a series of chapters filled with quotes from rock music . . . these chronological self-portraits unfold with a wonderfully readable combination of inner exploration . . . A lively, colorful memoir of corporate and personal growth."

KIRKUS REVIEWS


Sleeping Alone: Stories

Sleeping Alone: Stories

$16.00
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In this collection of rich and textured stories about crossing borders, both real and imagined, Sleeping Alone asks one of the fundamental questions of our times: What is the toll of feeling foreign in one's land, to others, or even to oneself? A cast of misfits, young and old, single and coupled, even entire family units, confront startling changes wrought by difficult circumstances or harrowing choices.

These stories span the world, moving from Maine to Sri Lanka, from Dublin to Philadelphia, paying exquisite attention to the dance between the intimate details of our lives and our public selves.

Whether Ru Freeman, author of the novel On Sal Mal Lane, is capturing secrets kept by siblings in Sri Lanka, or the life of itinerants in New York City, she renders the nuances of her characters' lives with real sensitivity, and imbues them with surprising dignity and grace.

The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

$30.00
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Gotham Book Finalist 2024
NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024
Winner of the Christopher Award 2024

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.


In the pre-antibiotic days when tuber­culosis stirred people's darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the stric­tures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed "the pest house," where it was said that "no one left alive."

Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the "Black Angels." For twenty years, they risked their lives work­ing under appalling conditions while caring for New York's poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system--and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculo­sis at Sea View--these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

The Folded Clock: A Diary

The Folded Clock: A Diary

$20.00
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A New York Times Notable Book

Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they "revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor." Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life--now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with her trademark humor, honesty, and searing intelligence.