New Arrivals
This varied list of unique books represents just a few of the fascinating and exciting new titles that have come into our store recently.
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The Black Nile: One Man’s Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World
by Dan Morrison
With news of tenuous peace in Sudan, foreign correspondent Dan Morrison bought a plank-board boat, summoned a childhood friend who’d never been off American soil and set out from Uganda, paddling the White Nile on a quest to reach Cairo – a trip that tyranny and war had made impossible for decades.
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Bay Area Graffiti
by Steve Rotman
Fabled as a region that embraces freedom of expression in all of its guises, the San Francisco Bay Area has long been a world-renowned cultural hotbed. “Bay Area Graffiti” is the first comprehensive retrospective of the area’s vibrant contemporary street-art scene. Documented by the distinctive photographic eye of Steve Rotman, the book’s images showcase innovative art made all over the Bay Area, as well as how it blends into the region’s stunning landscapes.
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The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson
Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, “The Rum Diary “is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing books.
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The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica
by Ian Thomson
Named the Dolman Travel Book of the Year, “The Dead Yard” paints an unforgettable portrait of modern Jamaica. Since independence, Jamaica has gradually become associated with twin images–a resort-style travel Eden for foreigners and a new kind of hell for Jamaicans, a society where gangs control the areas where most Jamaicans live and drug lords like Christopher Coke rule elites and the poor alike.
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Chasing the Devil: Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene
by Tim Butcher
Of all the anarchic and war-torn African nations, none is more forbidding than Liberia, the land that nurtured child soldiers, the violent trade in “blood diamonds,” even ritual murder. Graham Greene, in search of extreme adventure, ventured through its dense jungles to write the travel classic Journey Without Maps; three-quarters of a century later, Tim Butcher decided to follow Greene’s footsteps, only to find the path even more ominous and overgrown than in his predecessor’s day.
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Columbus: The Four Voyages
by Laurence Bergreen
Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus’s uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills.
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Driving Home: An American Journey
by Jonathan Raban
For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, “Driving Home” charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by “a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers” (“Newsday”).
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My Little Paris: The Best Kept Parisian Secrets
by Fany Pechiodat
My Little Paris is the favorite website of Parisian women (200,000 women in Paris are members). In their first book, the creators of the site share their best-kept secret addresses in this book, to be the first in a series.
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Oxtravels: Meetings with Remarkable Travel Writers
introduction by Michael Palin
Introduced by Michael Palin, “OxTravels” features original stories from twenty-five top travel writers, including Paul Theroux, Sara Wheeler, William Dalrymple, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lloyd Jones, Rory Stewart, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Rory MacLean, Nicholas Shakespeare, Peter Godwin, Victoria Hislop, and others. Each of the stories takes as its theme a meeting–life-changing, affecting, amusing by turn–and together they transport readers into a brilliant, vivid atlas of encounters.
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Travels: Collected Writings, 1950 – 1993
written by Paul Bowles, introduction by Paul Theroux
In more than forty essays and articles that range from Paris to Ceylon, Thailand to Kenya, and, of course, Morocco, the great twentieth-century American writer encapsulates his long and full life, and sheds light on his brilliant fiction. Whether he’s recalling the cold-water artists’ flats of Paris’s Left Bank or the sun-worshipping eccentrics of Tangier, Paul Bowles imbues every piece with a deep intelligence and the acute perspective of his rich experience of the world. Woven throughout are photographs from the renowned author’s private archive, which place him, his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, and their many friends and compatriots in the landscapes his essays bring so vividly to life.
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Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
by Alexandra Fuller
In this sequel to “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and the story of her unforgettable family. In “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness” Alexandra Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother’s childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father’s English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood.
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Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.Michael Lewis’s investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand t
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Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
by William Kennedy
When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, in 1957, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight. So begins Kennedy’s novel of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro.he reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.
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Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi
by Steve Inskeep
The co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” explores how the epic migration of mega-cities has transformed one of the world’s most intriguing instant cities: Karachi, Pakistan. Drawing on interviews with a broad cross-section of Karachi residents, Inskeep has created a vibrant and nuanced portrait of the forces competing to shape the future of one of the world’s fastest growing cities.
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The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples
by David Gilmour
Did Garibaldi do Italy a disservice when he helped its disparate parts achieve unity? Was the goal of political unification a mis-take? The question is asked and answered in a number of ways in this engaging, original consideration of the many histories that contribute to the brilliance–and weakness–of Italy today.
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The Wandering Falcon
by Jamil Ahmad
Jamil Ahmad’s new novel is an unforgettable portrait of a world of custom and compassion, of love and cruelty — of the life in the wild, astonishing place where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet-the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It is a formidable world, and the people who live there are constantly subjected to extremes-of place and of culture.
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Running Away To Home: Our Family’s Journey to Croatia
by Jennifer Wilson
Jim and Jennifer Wilson had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. The family packed up and left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj: land of Jennifer’s ancestors.
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Shucked: Life On a New England Oyster Farm
by Erin Byers Murray
In March of 2009, Erin Byers Murray ditched her pampered city girl lifestyle and convinced the rowdy and mostly male crew at Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, Massachusetts, to let a completely unprepared, aquaculture-illiterate food and lifestyle writer work for them for 12 months to learn the business of oysters.
