The year is 1987...
tracyramone This book is so rad. 8y
The year is 1987...
What happens when a statistician brings big data to the literary canon?
Gizelle was always a reminder that as self-centered as New York seemed to make you think you needed to be, I wasn‘t the only thing that mattered, and my closet job wasn‘t my only purpose. Gizelle didn‘t care if I unpacked boxes of denim for a living...Gizelle helped me stop thinking about myself and my job and just feed my dog because she needed to be fed.
pickGorgeous writing, fascinating history, spellbinding love story - what else could you want?
Can't wait for the next Jeff Guinn on Jim Jones later this year!
"A sweet, funny, and moving tribute to nerds and misfits everywhere" (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES author Seth Grahame-Smith)
pick"Heffernan is a gleeful trickster, a semiotics fan with an unabashed sweet tooth for pop culture...MAGIC BRINGS JOY [in this] enjoyable snapshot."— The New York Times
"A sweet, funny, and moving tribute to nerds and misfits everywhere" (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES author Seth Grahame-Smith)
A love letter to the 1980s, to the dawn of the computer age, and to adolescence - a time when anything feels possible - THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTRESS will make you laugh, will make you cry, and make you remember in exquisite detail what it feels like to love something - or someone - for the very first time.
"Even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself - your hair, your skin, your nails - I was falling apart..."
"This is me. This is my real life"
pick"Shannon Leone Fowler's restlessness in the face of her unimaginable loss makes the reader feel her battered Lonely Planet travel guide was aptly named. Like Cheryl Strayed's WILD, Fowler makes us feel that a hero's journey is our only hope for surviving grief. TRAVELING WITH GHOSTS is a brace and necessary record of love, and beautiful as it is heartbreaking." - Ann Patchett, author of BEL CANTO and STATE OF WONDER
Hide and seek may be just a game, but it's a game you ought to know how to play...
"To each of the women on the pages of this book, I thank you. I am honoured to have - finally - found my heroes."
Sometimes the big things in life start out small...
"In this affectionate and insightful history of American cookery, Sarah Lohman tells a story filled with surprising characters, unexpected history - and the occasional irresistible recipe. EIGHT FLAVORS is a flavourful delight, start to finish." - Deborah Blum, author of THE POISONER'S HANDBOOK
Suzanne lay in bed staring at the television, waiting for her bacon sandwich, thinking about infinity.
"A 24 hour read. A rip-roaring memoir of addiction that is at once glamorous and nasty, both gaspingly funny and thoroughly gutting. Cat Marnell may have murdered her life but certainly not her writing. These pages have a pulse." - LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE author Jessica Knoll
"Told with humour and compassion, this book will also move you to tears." -Larry Levin, author of Oogy: The Dog Only A Family Could Love
"Funny, relevant, and often shocking....Even if your own life is far from a fairy tale, OPENING BELLE will allow you to laugh, learn, and maybe even lean in - to hug your own family a little closer." -The Washington Post
Congrats to Steven Rowley for making the Washington Post list of notable fiction in 2016 - this debut was definitely one of our favorites! 🐶🐙🐶
The unknown true story of the most daring mission in WWII...
(Goes well with pizza!)
"Shelby hadn't expected anyone else to know how she felt, but clearly someone did. There was no return address, no signature, only a scrawled message:
Say something."
"We'll never forget where we were the exact moment we found her. We never saw it coming, and we were never the same. She was a storyteller, a mind-reader, a believer, and a friend. She was one of us. She was Taylor Swift."
On August 11, 2009, I set out to eat a plain slice from every pizzeria in Manhattan.
On November 22, 2011, two years and 435 slices later, I ate the last one.
This is my story.
"Ellie, a wonderful mistake, is two and a half years old. Amazing. Mele remembers bringing her home from the hospital, her little head not yet fitting in the support cushion of the car seat. Mele kept looking back in disbelief. Two days prior she had left her apartment without a baby and now she was returning with one."
"I was into success, just like everyone else who'd gotten in here, but admitting that was taboo."
"Time. How can I be so old? Where's little Harriet? What happened to the big, ungainly frizz-head who studied so hard?..."
"Music played all the time in our Manhattan West Side apartment..."
"I always hated it when my heroines got married."
"Ashes was cheating, and he was pretty sure the man sitting across from him was going to figure it out soon..."
"The city was like a beacon. And it drew us from wherever we'd been left. For me, the outskirts of a smoke jumped's base in a cold mountain town, for Jasper and Milo the London suburbs and rain-soaked council housing of Manchester. We were looking for nothing and had found it in Athens: Demeter's lips white as stone, Apollo's yellow mantle sun washed, sanded, wind blown to granite..."
"Jay Zeamer Jr.'s parents suspected early on that their oldest child was a born renegade."
"Market research shows that Haribo gummies are the leading candy consumed by voracious readers..."
"My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us."
"The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover - after one was taken - that it hadn't been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn't love, and then to discover years later - old and unconsoled - that it had been. No: the worst thing - the worst, worst thing - was this having to decide."
"At the hospital nobody visited except her mother. Nobody phoned. Nobody missed her. Rumors had begun in town. She was crazy. It was all her fault. She was bad luck and should be avoided at all costs. Girls who had been friends with Helene and Shelby decided they had lost both friends. It was easier that way. What was gone was gone."
"Though the house cats' play for survival in a human-dominated world is striking and unique, their story has universal implications. It's an example of how a single, small, and seemingly innocent human act - taking up with a petite species of wild cat, and giving it the run of our hearths and, ultimately, our hearts - can have cascading global consequences..."
"How differently our lives would have unraveled over these years if the computer program generating the room assignments had started up a millisecond later, spat out another random number, and the two of us had never had a chance to meet..."
"You wouldn't think a twelve-year-old dachshund would be good at Monopoly, but you'd be wrong there."
"In bewildering times - when all the old ways seem to be dissolving into mire - it serves us well to turn our eyes earthward and study the oft-overlooked wisdom beneath our feet."
"I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl..."
"I had known long before I rode a covered wagon to Oregon that naïveté was the mother of adventure. I just didn't understand how much of that I really had..."
"Yes to everything."
