Featured Selections

Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie
Short Stories/Anthologies
Grove Press
Hardcover, 480 pages
$27.00

In this collection of thirty one short stories about Native Americans, Alexie, a Native himself, shows his genius as he brings characters and scenarios to life. They penetrate and expose the essence of the grief and shame that haunts the Native cultures across the U.S. - the result of genocide, persistent discrimination and neglect. It would be easy to dismiss Alexie as a profane cynic, a glib comedian, but that is exactly the problem as we continue to ignore the profound yearning for purpose this indigenous community is desperately yearning to achieve. In crisp prose, with a strident voice, much like a traditional storyteller, Alexie paints a mosaic infused with complicated visions, age old wisdom, modern dissonance, and sweet sentimentality. The stories are masterful with powerful imagery, stark frankness and ingenious metaphors. One of the metaphors that threads its way through many of the stories is the game of basketball. Read the book and see if you can figure it out - why basketball?
 

TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann
General Fiction
Random House
Hardcover, 320 pages
$27.00

The book begins with three transatlantic crossings, each a novella within a novel: Frederick Douglas’s 1845 visit to Ireland; the 1919 flight of British aviators Alcock and Brown; and former US senator George Mitchell’s 1998 attempt to mediate peace in Northern Ireland. McCann then loops back to 1863 to launch the saga of the women we’ve briefly met throughout Book One, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, whose bold escape from her troubled homeland cracks open the world for her daughter and granddaughter. McCann’s sixth novel is a brilliant tribute to his lyrical and complicated Irish homeland, and an ode to the ties that bind Ireland and America. McCann's writing style is challenging and beautiful - sometimes reading more like poetry than prose.

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey
Reflections on Nature
Ballantine Books
Paperback, 352 pages
$14.95

This book was first published in 1968. It was tumultuous time and the neo-conservationist /environmental movement was just budding. Abbey left New York City and took up lonely residence as a part-time ranger in Utah’s Arches National Park. It is fierce writing (which many dismiss as arrogant) and it is poetic writing (which many find inspiring). The intimacy with which he describes the flora, fauna and landscape of the Moab area, and his experience living in it, is rich and detailed. He was before his time – Earth Day didn’t come until 1970 – and (in his way as a polemicist) is in the tradition of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson and others of an earlier wave of bold defenders of nature and the wild. He gives no quarter!

Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline
General Fiction
William Morrow Paperbacks
Paperback, 304 pages
$14.99

This masterfully written, recently released work of fiction, is a hard one to put down. Kline takes us on a journey through the lives of two orphans tossed together in a twist of serendipity. Molly is a teenaged orphan with a Goth exterior and an attitude to match who is sentenced to do 50 community service hours helping 91 year old Vivian clean out the boxes in her attic. It turns out Vivian was an orphan as well and, as these two women open the old boxes in the attic, the story unfolds from Ireland, New York City, Minnesota and then Maine. What can these two learn from each other? 
At the turn of the 19^th century thousands of east coast orphans were put on trains and sent to the Midwest. There the children were lined up for potential adoptive couples to take their pick. Kline has delved deeply into how this process worked and her level of detail paints pictures with words that leave you feeling like you are one of those orphans. Of course the train is a metaphor about each of our lives and our own ride and the thin line that often separates one possible outcome from another.

When Women Were Birds

by Terry Tempest Williams
Memoirs
Picador; Reprint edition
Paperback, 256 pages
$15.00

A week before Terry Tempest Williams' mother died, she told Williams that she was leaving her all of her journals, but she also asked that she not read them until after she was gone. A short while after her mother passed away she finally felt the time had come to read her journals. There were three shelves of beautiful journals all lined up. When she opened the first journal, it was empty. They were all empty. These empty journals are the inspiration for Williams' latest work When Women Were Birds. In 54 short chapters, we are challenged to discover what it means to have a voice. While this book is really about growing as a woman, and finding that voice as a woman, this is still a book that will inspire anyone.
It's not often that words can inspire or even change a person. For some, this may be just that memoir. Written with passion, intelligence and beauty, this is a book you will not be able to put down.

Otis and the Puppy

by Loren Long
Childrens
Philomel; First Edition
Hardcover, 40 pages
$17.99

We are always so excited when we see a new Otis book! Loren Long is not only an astounding illustrator, but the stories he has created with our little friendly tractor, Otis, are perfect for kids of all ages!
In the latest installment, Otis has a new friend on the farm, a little puppy who loves to play, run around and lick faces. But, while playing hide-and-seek, this little puppy gets lost in the forest in the dark. Both Otis and his new friend are afraid of the dark. His friend is alone and in need, though, so Otis takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and sets off on a different game of hide-and-seek.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl
General Fiction
Penguin Books
Paperback, 528 pages
$15.00

We really enjoyed this highly unusual debut novel by Marisha Pessl, a vibrant young voice in literary fiction. Cleverly and playfully structured as a college lit course curriculum, Special Topics is a postmodern murder mystery featuring a handsome, intellectually demanding, and emotionally challenged father and his high school age daughter. She is lured by her mercurial, charismatic Film Studies teacher into a specially chosen off-beat clique of students at her new school. Pessl’s story dips, weaves, spins and races toward its climax textured by rich vocabulary, lush descriptive style, and startlingly fresh insight. The narrative is intricately interwoven with literary and film citations and, if you can wink at some of the gimmicks, Special Topics is an exhilarating read

Ales Cross, Run

James Patterson
Mystery
Little, Brown and Company
Hardcover, 432 pages
$28.99

Sometimes in these pages we note books that we don’t like very much. This latest Alex Cross mystery from the wildly popular James Patterson is a case in point. It reeks of formula, fairly pedestrian writing and rehashes yet again the far-fetched travails of a DC cop (in our humble opinion!). Actually, we liked the early Alex Cross books. Perhaps Patterson is tiring or perhaps he himself is falling victim to his expanded definition of authorship – books by James Patterson with... a myriad of otherwise unknown names. It seems to reduce writing to a cottage industry like that of Thomas Kinkade the painter. But, we carry the books by James Patterson himself and will cheerfully provide them over the counter.

Ordinary Grace

William Kent Krueger
Mystery
Atria Books
Hardcover, 320 pages
$24.99

It is no secret that we at Apostle Islands Booksellers are very partial to William Kent Krueger. We have highly recommended his Cork O’Connor mystery series to many satisfied readers who keep coming back for more. So, it is a huge bonus for us to be able to say that his newly published stand-alone novel, Ordinary Grace, is also terrific, a must-read for Krueger fans and for all readers who appreciate a deeply moving story with richly developed characters, beautiful narrative and a captivating mystery. It is the summer of 1961 in a small town in Southern Minnesota. A thirteen-year-old boy; his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; his Juilliard-bound older sister; and his wise-beyond-his-years kid brother are about to be changed forever by the events that unfold. We’re looking forward to Kent’s visit to the store later this year!

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini
General Fiction
Riverhead Hardcover
Hardcover, 416 pages
$28.95

This much-awaited follow-up to The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns is gripping and deeply satisfying. At its center is diaspora – the human diaspora, the Afghan diaspora, the family diaspora, and the personal diaspora. The book dances nimbly from setting to setting – Kabul, Paris, Silicon Valley, and the Greek Islands. It ranges from the mid-1940’s until yesterday. Each character grows and morphs with time and place. This is different from Hosseini’s earlier work – more layered and complex – but the writing has the same magic. Available May 21st.

Laughing Boy

Oliver Lafarge
Native American Fiction
Mariner Books; Reprint edition
Paperback, 208 pages
$12.95

We are a new bookstore – a store that sells new rather than used books. That does not mean that we are a recent bookstore. In fact most of our inventory is dated and classic. Like most serious readers, we like to look back and often go back. Jim Harrison said, “Most of us read Laughing Boy when we were young…” We read this sweetly tragic Navajo love story fifty years ago – some thirty years after it had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Having read it again now, it is not surprising that it has stayed close to our heart. It is simple, poetic and uncompromising. The description of Navajo life in the early years of the 20^th Century, as white “civilization” accelerated its stranglehold on the Southwest, is rich, nuanced and damning. A classic!

Pitch

Todd Boss
Poetry
W. W. Norton & Company
Hardcover, 112 pages
$24.95

The pickup truck hit a patch of black ice and the family's vintage Steinway was pitched into the ditch. These poems pick up the pieces. Like Michael Perry, Todd Boss explores the grace and pathos of country life as he grew into and through it on the family farm in western Wisconsin. Again like Michael Perry, Boss's language is accessible and straightforward yet tethered to deep experience and wonder at the poignant themes of home, family, loss and the inner music of our lives. The thoughts and words flow light and dark like the keys of a piano keyboard. As Sherman Alexie says of Boss, "He can make any rhyme feel like a concealed weapon". This is a slim gem of a book!

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

John Vaillant
General Non-Fiction
Vintage
Paperback, 352 pages 
$16.00

Perhaps the only thing more fearsome than a Siberian tiger attack is life itself in the post-Soviet taiga of Russia’s far east. This book covers both in exquisite and frightening detail. The story line – all true and meticulously researched – is basically that a tiger goes rogue, begins to hunt down human pray with a vengeance, and finally is hunted down itself. But there’s more to it than that. There is much about tigers generally, rogue or not. Mysterious and illuminating. There is much about life in the taiga – “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as Hobbes would say, with the tiger as Leviathan.

The River Swimmer

Jim Harrison
Short Stories/Anthologies
Grove Press
Hardcover, 240 pages
$25.00

Jim Harrison is one of those authors we call “regional” up here because of his frequent settings in the north woods of the nearby Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He is also one of those “regional” authors of “universal” appeal and scope. These two small novellas span the lifetime of this fictional memoir-writer - Thad, the “River Swimmer” is 17; Clive, the art professor returning to “The Land of Unlikeness,” is 60. Both play out in the hardscrabble farm country of the western Great Lakes. The land and water have much to do with both, as do the tragic longings and wanderings of his human characters. The New York Times noted that, “Harrison is a writer of the body, which he celebrates as the ordinary, essential and wondrous instrument by which we measure the world. Without it, there is no philosophy”. Nicely said!

Things That Are

Amy Leach
Reflections on Nature
Milkweed Editions
Hardcover, 192 pages
$18.00

So, what shelf do we put this one on?  Humor? Science? Poetry? Nature? Essays? General Non-fiction? Fantasy? We should probably get seven copies and put one in each. Leach’s range is cosmic – from tiny warblers weighing a third of an ounce to the Pinwheel Galaxy twenty-two million light years away; from thirteen billion years into the past to the year 3,000,2012 in the future. This is an absolutely original, totally idiosyncratic book. We have not read anything quite like it. It is mainly in the realm of the biological sciences, but, as David Abram puts it, it is "Loopy, mad-hatterish, infernally addictive writing that makes you sneeze.” Yup!

Thresholds: Connecting Body and Soul After Brain Injury

Lawrence M. Pray with Dr. David Gumm
General Non-fiction
Ruder-Finn Press
Paperback, 303 pages
$24.95

Our cousin, Larry Pray, who spends a lot of time up here at the family cabin near the sea caves, has written a new and important book about healing after a stroke or other brain injury. He writes from his personal experience as a life-long Type-1 diabetic who has survived two heart attacks and two major strokes. Larry is a writer, painter, teacher and pastor. His story addresses the physical, emotional, and spiritual side of what it’s like to experience, heal from, and live with brain damage. Dr. Gumm places that story in the context of how the brain works and what happens when it is injured. Inspiring and moving!  Check it out.

Extra Yarn

Mac Barnett
Childrens
Balzer + Bray
Hardcover, 40 pages
$16.99

This is a heartfelt book about the happiness a little girl can bring to a dark world. Annabelle finds a box of yarn that seems to be never-ending. She uses the box of yarn to knit sweaters for everyone and everything in her dreary town. This magical box of yarn brings light to this little girl, her dog, and the world around her. She is not even phased when a rich Archduke comes to offer her millions of dollars for her box of yarn. It will only work for her as she does the job of lifting this town up with a little bit of extra yarn. With beautiful illustrations, this book is perfect for a dreary winter day!

Eleanor & Park

Rainbow Rowell
Young Adult
St. Martin's Griffin
Hardcover, 336 pages
$18.99

The teenage years are often remembered as some of the hardest of our lives. This beautiful and haunting love story reminds us of exactly that. This is the story of Eleanor, a "big girl" with red hair, and Park, a half-Korean kid whose passions are comic books and good music. These two meet, fall in love, and quickly discover that their biggest obstacle isn't their relationship, but the pressures of the world around them. By society's standards, Eleanor shouldn't have a boyfriend because she's fat, poor, and dresses funny. Park shouldn't have a girlfriend because he likes wearing eyeliner, and everyone knows that’s gay. Is it possible for their love to conquer and overcome these obstacles? We won't spoil that one for you!

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Michael Moss
Health
Random House
Hardcover, 480 pages
$28.00

Have you seen those images of the "pink slime" that is what many fast food chains use to create their "meat" on their menus? Michael Moss was one of the first who brought these practices to our attention. In Salt Sugar Fat, Moss illustrates how our country has become obsessed and at times addicted to consuming processed foods. This is not a scathing expose, but more a truly helpful book offering resources for those who want to simply learn to eat better and more responsibly. The simple practice of limiting your grocery shopping to to outer aisles of your grocery store is a great place to start!

Going Blue: A Teen Guide to Saving Our Oceans, Lakes, Rivers, & Wetlands

Cathryn Berger Kaye and Philippe Cousteau
Middle Reader Non-fiction
Free Spirit Publishing
Paperback, 128 pages
$14.99

Going Blue: A Teen Guide to Saving Our Oceans, Lakes, Rivers, & Wetlands is a manual stuffed with helpful information to help teens and tweens to organize to help save our oceans, lakes, rivers and wetlands. Geared for readers age 11 and up, Going Blue is an exciting challenge to kids to analyze the issues about water purity, investigate our dependency on clean water supplies, prepare with further understanding of the immensity of the issues and problems, suggested ways to take effective action, a chance to step back and reflect, and finally a chapter on publicity, or demonstration by sharing your stories of going blue. Going Blue is a mini treasure trove of information and well documented research and action stories about communities which have made positive choices to help clean up water resources.

Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court

Sandra Day O'Connor
Memoirs
Random House
Hardcover, 256 pages
$26.00

We recently featured Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir My Beloved World in these pages.  It seems only right to follow that up with this new volume by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She served on the court from 1981 to 2006 and was the crucial swing-vote at what then was a delicate center of the now deeply divided court. We feature it not because it is a terrific book – in fact it is somewhat pedestrian – but because it illustrates what many consider her legacy on the court – a very sharp and thoughtful legal analyst, but one so aversive to controversy that she often seemed to side with Justice Rehnquist and others just to avoid conflict. That characteristic shows in this book also. Her vote on Bush vs. Gore is the most compelling case-in-point! If she’s one of you heroines, it’s worth the read.

Pulse

Jullian Barnes
Short Stories/Anthologies
Vintage
Paperback, 240 pages
$15.00

2011 Man Booker award winner for The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes, says that he writes about “memory and time.  What time does to memory and what memory does to time, how they interact.”  In this collection of short stories, written at around the same time as the novel, he explores that theme. The book is anchored by four pieces all titled At Phil & Joanna’s composed almost entirely of dialogue around the dining room table. The couples share wit and sexual innuendo long into the night as they shave tidbits from the “cliff-face of cheese.”  Interwoven with these conversations are poignant tales, often about other couples, that are similarly anxious and glib. Some of our favorites include The Limner, The Marriage Lines, and Carcasonne. Updike like!