Happy International Women’s Day! Here are just a few of the many women we’re celebrating today.
Now available, The Tigress of Forli, a biography about the astonishing life of a long-misunderstood Renaissance virago. Wife, mother, leader, warrior. Caterina Riario Sforza was one of the most prominent women in Renaissance Italy—and one of the most vilified. In this glittering biography, Elizabeth Lev reexamines her extraordinary life and accomplishments. Raised in the court of Milan and wed at age ten to the pope’s corrupt nephew, Caterina was ensnared in Italy’s political intrigues early in life. After turbulent years in Rome’s papal court, she moved to the Romagnol province of Forlì. Following her husband’s assassination, she ruled Italy’s crossroads with iron will, martial strength, political savvy—and an icon’s fashion sense. In finally losing her lands to the Borgia family, she put up a resistance that inspired all of Europe and set the stage for her progeny—including Cosimo de’ Medici—to follow her example to greatness. A rich evocation the Renaissance, The Tigress of Forlì reveals Caterina Riario Sforza as a brilliant and fearless ruler, and a tragic but unbowed figure.
Happy Friday! How about some chick lit? Check out an excerpt from Elisa Lorello’s Faking It HERE.
More about Faking It:
After breaking off her engagement, thirty-something writing professor Andi Cutrone abandons New England for her native Long Island to focus on her career and start over. When she meets Devin at a cocktail party, the sight of an honest-to-goodness male escort shocks her—and fascinates her more than a little. Months later, Andi impulsively calls Devin. Over cheesecake in Brooklyn, she offers him a proposition: he will teach her how to be a better lover, and in return, she will give him writing lessons. He agrees, and together they embark upon an intense partnership that proves to be as instructive as it is arousing. For in the midst of lessons in rhetorical theory and foreplay, Andi and Devin delve into deeper questions about truth, beauty, and self, gradually coming face-to-face with the issues at the core of their emotional limitations. Smart, witty, and introspective, Faking It is an engrossing novel about two people discovering their authentic selves.
New today, a series of paperbacks from our partnership with Amazon’s ebook program, perfect for chick lit lovers!
A Scattered Life by Karen McQuestion
Free-spirit Skyla Plinka has found the love and stability she always wanted in her reliable husband Thomas. Settling into her new family and roles as wife and mother, life in rural Wisconsin is satisfying, but can’t seem to quell Skyla’s growing sense of restlessness. Her only reprieve is her growing friendship with neighbor Roxanne, who has five kids (and counting) and a life in constant disarray – but also a life filled with laughter and love. Much to the dismay of her intrusive mother-in-law, Audrey, Skyla takes a part-time job at the local bookstore and slowly begins to rediscover her voice, independence and confidence. Throughout one pivotal year in the life of Skyla, Audrey and Roxanne, all three very different women will learn what it means to love unconditionally. With the storytelling ingenuity of Anne Tyler, the writing talent of Jodi Picoult, and the subtlty of Alice Munro, McQuestion offers a satisfying debut that proves she is a gifted portraitist, a natural storyteller and an author to watch.
Easily Amused by Karen McQuestion
When twenty-nine-year-old Lola Watson unexpectedly inherits a rambling house in the suburbs, she thinks it just may be the cherry on a banner year. After all, she’s happily single, with fabulous friends and her dream job working at a popular magazine. Life is perfect—until her new neighbors make her their new “project,” a heartbroken high school friend crashes indefinitely at her house, and her younger sister announces she’s getting married…on Lola’s thirtieth birthday. Suddenly Lola’s not so keen on her newfound domestic bliss. But when she meets handsome, mysterious Ryan Moriarty, Lola dares to hope she’s found the perfect guy to one-up her sister and add a little spice back into her life. This light-hearted romantic comedy from Karen McQuestion is headlined by a charming cast of characters, led by the self-deprecatingly funny Lola. Breezy and fun, Easily Amused serves as a gentle, often amusing reminder that love can often be found in the place we least expect—under our very noses.
Faking It by Elisa Lorello
After breaking off her engagement, thirty-something writing professor Andi Cutrone abandons New England for her native Long Island to focus on her career and start over. When she meets Devin at a cocktail party, the sight of an honest-to-goodness male escort shocks her—and fascinates her more than a little. Months later, Andi impulsively calls Devin. Over cheesecake in Brooklyn, she offers him a proposition: he will teach her how to be a better lover, and in return, she will give him writing lessons. He agrees, and together they embark upon an intense partnership that proves to be as instructive as it is arousing. For in the midst of lessons in rhetorical theory and foreplay, Andi and Devin delve into deeper questions about truth, beauty, and self, gradually coming face-to-face with the issues at the core of their emotional limitations. Smart, witty, and introspective, Faking It is an engrossing novel about two people discovering their authentic selves.
Our Favorites…
Toni Morrison: Nobel and Pulitzer-Prize winning author. Novelist, editor and professor Toni Morrison is best-known for such works as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (which was adapted into a film). Morrison’s Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning work shakes readers to their cores by taking an unflinching and often haunting look at the black experience in America.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In 2000, Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her novels and short stories consistently deliver a fresh, insightful and deeply human account of the experiences of South Asian immigrants in America.
Very cool! We love those ladies, and shout outs to Alice Walker and Joyce Carol Oates, too.
(Source: vintageanchorbooks)
New this week, read a fresh take on the coming of age story in MISS NEW INDIA by Bharati Mukherjee.
Anjali Bose is “Miss New India.” Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali’s prospects don’t look great. But her ambition and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her expat teacher, Peter Champion. And champion her he does, both to other powerful people who can help her along the way and to Anjali herself, stirring in her a desire to take charge of her own destiny.
So she sets off to Bangalore, India’s fastest-growing major metropolis, and quickly falls in with an audacious and ambitious crowd of young people, who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like Seinfeld in order to get jobs as call-center service agents, where they are quickly able to out-earn their parents. And it is in this high-tech city where Anjali—suddenly free from the traditional confines of class, caste, gender, and more—is able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity does not come without a dark side …
OUR TRAGIC UNIVERSE by Scarlett Thomas is out today in paperback - and we guarantee it’s the most fun existential novel you’ll read this summer.
Can a story save your life?
Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend’s only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting.
But who wants to live forever?
Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what’s the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?
Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas’s trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.
We know you’re not the kind of son or daughter that would still be looking for a Mother’s Day gift. But just hypothetically, if you hadn’t picked anything out, and if your mom were a reader (we bet she is, hypothetically or not), she’d probably like one of these books!
Willa Cather, My Antonia/O Pioneers!
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding/The Ponder Heart
Margaret Drabble, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
Kevin Nugent and Abelardo Morell, Your Baby is Speaking to You
Ann Hodgman, Beat This!
Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars
Howard Norman, What is Left the Daughter
Rereleased in paperback today, we have two Ann Patchett classics: THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS and TAFT. You loved BEL CANTO and THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT - now discover Patchett’s earliest fiction. Click through for excerpts and more.
Since her first publication in 1992, celebrated novelist Ann Patchett has crafted a number of elegant novels, garnering accolades and awards along the way. Now comes a reissue of the best-selling debut novel that launched her remarkable career.
St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, usually harbors its residents for only a little while. Not so Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays. She plans to give up her child, thinking she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth’s extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls. Rose’s past won’t be kept away, though, even by St. Elizabeth’s; she cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind, even as she cannot change who she has become in the leaving.
Best-selling novelist Ann Patchett’s second, “strikingly original”* novel tells the moving story of John Nickel, an ex–jazz musician who wanted nothing more than to be a good father. When his lover takes away his son, he’s left only with his Beale Street bar. He hires a young waitress named Fay Taft, who brings with her a desperate, dangerous brother, Carl, and the possibility of new intimacy. Nickel finds himself consumed with Fay and Carl’s dead father— Taft—obsessing over and reconstructing the life of a man he never met.
A stunning artistic achievement,
Taft confirms Ann Patchett’s standing as one of the most gifted writers of her generation and reminds us of our deepest instincts to protect the people we love.
*Kirkus Reviews
New this week, YES SHE CAN from the GOOD SPORTS series by Glenn Stout!
Girls don’t do that.
Girls shouldn’t do that.
Girls can’t do that.
Not very long ago, that’s exactly what many people said whenever a woman tried to play a sport or do anything athletic. Most people believed that women were too weak and delicate to play sports. Fortunately, not all women believed what they were told. Trude Ederle, Louise Stokes, Tidye Pickett, Julie Krone and Danica Patrick didn’t. When these sports pioneers were told “Girls don’t,” they did. When they were told “Girls shouldn’t,” they asked “why not?” And when they were told “Girls can’t,” they showed girls most certainly can. This book tells the story of these pioneers in women’s sports. Thanks to them, everyone knows now that girls can do anything they want.
