A Proper Marriage

Author: Doris Lessing

Category: Literary

Regular price: $8.99

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Deal starts: January 13, 2025

Deal ends: January 13, 2025

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"A totally modern work. Martha Quest is, above all, ironically percieved by the author in whose hands irony is an instrument of compassion." — New Republic

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.

A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

Girl Through Glass

Author: Sari Wilson

Category: Literary

Regular price: $7.99

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Deal starts: January 13, 2025

Deal ends: January 13, 2025

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Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

An Amazon Best Book of the Month 

A Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book of the Year

A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year & Bestseller

Selected as a Skimm Read 

A Refinery 29 Best Book of the Year

Chosen as a Rumpus Book Club Selection

Chosen as a Bustle Best Literary Debut Novel Written By Women in the Last 5 Years

An enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl’s coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.

In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet. Enduring the mess of her parent’s divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.

Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.

In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us.

Salon Fantastique

Author:

Category: Literary

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: January 12, 2025

Deal ends: January 12, 2025

Description:

Expand your vision of what a fantasy story can be with tales by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Di Filippo, and others.Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology Inspired by the literary salons of eighteenth-century France, Salon Fantastique brings together renowned authors to create and share new tales that show the fantasy form at its best. The resulting stories form a conversation between established and emerging writers, historical and contemporary fiction, timeless folklore themes and the immediacy of modern politics, traditional linear narratives, and more experimental storytelling. Kicking off the collection is Delia Sherman’s “La Fée Verte,” in which a nineteenth-century prostitute takes a lover among the other women in a Parisian bordello, a mysterious wraith who sees the past, present, and future. In Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Gray and Soundless Tide,” a woman shelters a selkie and learns her tragic story, while in Paul Di Filippo’s “Femaville 29,” a tsunami gives birth to a glorious new city rising from the imagination of children. In the intimate company of today’s master fantasists, you’ll be gifted with stories that will take the genre in directions you never could have imagined . . . “Bring[s] together mostly new fantasy writers, most of them contributors to previous Datlow/Windling books and perhaps forming a distinct ‘school.’ Call it American magic realism.” —Publishers Weekly “A roster of fifteen contributors to make any lover of literary fantasy go weak at the knees. . . . an anthology that rewards reflection.” —Strange Horizons

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

Author: G.B. Edwards

Category: Literary

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: January 12, 2025

Deal ends: January 12, 2025

Description:

A loveably cantankerous 80-year-old reflects on life, love, and solitude on the isle of Guernsey in this “masterpiece” hailed as “one of the best novels of our time” (New York Times).“Literally one of a kind . . . a true epic, as sexy as it is hilarious.” —O MagazineEbenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island. G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.

Vida

Author: Patricia Engel

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: January 12, 2025

Deal ends: January 12, 2025

Description:

A New York Times Notable Book, an NPR Best Debut of the Year, and a PEN/Hemingway finalist.   These linked stories follow Sabina as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora, and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.   In “Lucho,” Sabina’s family—already “foreigners in a town of blancos”—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy, who has a secret of his own. In “Desaliento,” Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it—until reality catches up with one of them. And in “Vida,” the urgency of Sabina’s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.   “Vida calls to mind some of the best fiction from recent years. Like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Engel uses stories about connected characters to illuminate her main subject, in this case Sabina, who moves with her family from Bogotá, Colombia, to New Jersey. Engel brings Sabina’s family and culture to life with a narrative style reminiscent of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . . . Vivid, memorable . . . An exceptionally promising debut.” —The Plain Dealer

The Beautiful Indifference

Author: Sarah Hall

Category: Literary

Regular price: $6.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: January 12, 2025

Deal ends: January 12, 2025

Description:

Winner of the Portico PrizeWinner of the Edge Hill University Short Story PrizeShort-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

“Every one of the seven tales here delights and disturbs in equal measure. The Beautiful Indifference illustrates that short fiction is indeed a finely wrought art form, and Hall is an artist of considerable and concise skill. Each story is a gem, but together they from a collection of astonishingly sensuous power.”  — Sunday Times (London)

Sarah Hall has been hailed as "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian). Now, in this remarkable collection of short fiction, she has created a work at once provocative and mesmerizing.