Counterpoint: 634 books

Our Town is the debut of a striking literary voice, one that captures the disillusion at the fringes of Hollywood as seen through a haze of drugs, alcohol, abuse, and fallen aspirations. An unseen narrator guides us through the dark fairy tale of Dorothy White, an aspiring actress who “never quite...

Don Carpenter wrote about Hollywood like no one else. Hollywood Trilogy collects, for the first time, Carpenter’s most significant Hollywood novels-A Couple of Comedians, The Turnaround and The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan-into a single volume. Here readers will find the jungle of “B” movie...

Best known as a novelist, Nicholas Christopher began publishing poems in The New Yorker in his twenties, and has published eight collections, praised over the years by poets and critics as being among America’s most important poets. Reviewing his selected poems, Crossing the Equator, published eight...

An omnibus of three essential, darkly humorous novels from a master of his own, unique genre and an influential voice in contemporary literature. David Markson’s unique novels earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson...

A young Mexican mother struggles to reconnect with her child in America—a “heartrending, take-no-prisoners” novel (Publishers Weekly) and National Book Award finalist. As an undocumented migrant worker, Serafina has scratched together a life for herself and her three-year-old daughter,...

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign. A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker’s...

The debut collection of essays by one of America’s most acclaimed literary lights, celebrating his deep love for language, the land, and humanity.   Published in 1969, The Long-Legged House was Wendell Berry’s first collection of essays, the inaugural work introducing many of the central themes...

Author Ismail Kadare is often touted as a strong and beloved potential recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2005 he won the inaugural International Man Booker prize Kadare's fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny . . . But his books are of more than just political...

A collection of essays on food, love, and guilty pleasures from the pioneering culinary writer whose delightful prose offers “one feast after another” (Frank McCourt). Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is hailed as one of America’s preeminent writers about gastronomy, but her work reaches far...

The book highlights her strong sense of place - Fisher’s Celtic eye for detail - with a comparison of Aix-en-Provence, a university town, the site of an international music festival and the former capital of Provence, and Marseille, the port town. Fisher’s description of the sights and...

From Mesopotamian adultery to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde: an “enormously informative and entertaining” history of Western sex laws (The Boston Globe). The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. That’s not to say that the Sumerians,...

**Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award “Tonic for the spirit: a charming, deeply moving, unerringly human story, perfectly shaped and beautifully told.” —The Globe and Mail** Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute and her daughter. But living back in...

It is the autumn of 1913. Sir Randolph Nettleby has assembled a brilliant array of guests at his Oxfordshire estate for the biggest hunt of the season. An army of gamekeepers, beaters, and servants has rehearsed the intricate age-old ritual, the gentlemen are falling into the prescribed mode of fellowship...

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections...