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Holiday Wrapped in Words

A curated book collection
perfect for gifting (or keeping)

Best-Sellers
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James Baldwin 3-Book Box Set by James Baldwin

James Baldwin
3-Book Box Set

James Baldwin

Celebrating the Centenary of James Baldwin's birth, a box set of Baldwin's principal novels, featuring Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk.

Toni Morrison Box Set: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Box Set: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved

Toni Morrison

A box set of Toni Morrison's principal works, featuring The Bluest Eye (her first novel), Beloved (Pulitzer Prize winner), and Song of Solomon (National Book Critics Award winner).

Stephen King Three Classic Novels Box Set: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot,The Shining by Stephen King

Stephen King Three Classic Novels Box Set: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot,The Shining

Stephen King

A beautifully designed box set of Stephen King's early #1 bestsellers—Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining—that will make the perfect gift. 

Classics
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct.

Juneteenth (Revised) by Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson

Juneteenth (Revised)

Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson

From the author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition.

"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula

Toni Morrison

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. 

The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, David M. Shapard

The Annotated Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, David M. Shapard

Of course, one can enjoy the novel without knowing the precise definition of a gentleman, or what it signifies that a character drives a coach rather than a hack chaise, or the rules governing social interaction at a ball, but readers of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice will find that these kinds of details add immeasurably to understanding and enjoying the intricate psychological interplay of Austen’s immortal characters.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

No holiday season is complete without Charles Dickens’s timeless tale of redemption starring the tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, the long-suffering Bob Cratchit, kindhearted Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. But A Christmas Carol was only the first and most famous of Dickens’s holiday tales. In this edition, everyone’s favorite misanthrope appears in company with four more Dickens stories—The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man.

History Buffs
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The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

American Prometheus by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

American Prometheus

Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE ACADEMY AWARD®-WINNING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER • "A riveting account of one of history’s most essential and paradoxical figures.”—Christopher Nolan

In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

The Power Broker

Robert A. Caro

Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon

David Grann

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven

Jon Krakauer

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

The River of Doubt

Candice Millard

“A rich, dramatic tale that ranges from the personal to the literally earth-shaking.” —The New York Times
The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

Bios & Memoirs
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Committed by Suzanne Scanlon

Committed

Suzanne Scanlon

Transporting, honest, and graceful, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

Disability Intimacy by Alice Wong

Disability Intimacy

Alice Wong

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms.
What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love...

Tacky by Rax King

Tacky

Rax King

An irreverent and charming collection of deeply personal essays about the joys of low pop culture and bad taste, exploring coming of age in the 2000s in the age of Hot Topic, Creed, and frosted lip gloss—from the James Beard Award-nominated writer of the Catapult column "Store-Bought Is Fine”

Where I Was From by Joan Didion

Where I Was From

Joan Didion

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.

The Other Family Doctor by Karen Fine

The Other Family Doctor

Karen Fine

Calling all animal lovers! A heartwarming memoir about one woman's career as a vet and the unique role pets play in our lives • “Filled with compassion and wisdom, Karen Fine is a healer whose own wounds have deepened her gifts for bringing animals and their people comfort and peace.” —Sy Montgomery, bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Nadia Murad, Otto M. Frank, Mirjam Pressler, Susan Massotty

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank; Edited by Otto M. Frank and Mirjam Pressler; Translated by Susan Massotty; Introduction by Nadia Murad

In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and...

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen

The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

The Source of Self-Regard

Toni Morrison

Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR).An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains... 

Literary Fiction
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Green Frog by Gina Chung

Green Frog

Gina Chung

Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy. 

The Society of Shame by Jane Roper

The Society of Shame

Jane Roper

THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR SEMI-FINALIST • In this timely and witty combination of So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? a viral photo of a politician's wife's “feminine hygiene malfunction” catapults her to unwanted fame in a story that's both a satire of social media stardom and internet activism, and a tender mother-daughter tale.

Kathleen Held’s life is turned upside down when she arrives...

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me by Alana Saab

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

Alana Saab

Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today’s world, challenging all we’ve been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with...

The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore

The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Edward Kelsey Moore

This diner in Plainview, Indiana is home away from home for Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean. Dubbed "The Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they’ve weathered life’s storms for over four decades and counseled one another through marriage and children, happiness and the blues...

The Best Short Stories 2024 by Amor Towles, Jenny Minton Quigley

The Best Short Stories 2024

Amor Towles, Jenny Minton Quigley

Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Amor Towles has brought his own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices.

Dis//Integration by William Melvin Kelley

Dis//Integration

William Melvin Kelley

The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English...

The Secret History: A Read with Jenna Pick by Donna Tartt

The Secret History: A Read with Jenna Pick

Donna Tartt

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote

Answered Prayers

Truman Capote

Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a...

Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition) by James Baldwin, Roxane Gay

Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition)

James Baldwin, Roxane Gay

Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.

Romance
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Director's Cut by Carlyn Greenwald

Director's Cut

Carlyn Greenwald

After taking a guest teaching gig, Oscar-winning Valeria Sullivan finds herself trapped in a battle of wits with her sexy co-professor, but can she keep her cool when things heat up in and out of the classroom?
At twenty-nine, Valeria Sullivan is a celebrated, award-winning actress. But when her acting options start to decline and her attempt...

Making It by Laura Kay

Making It

Laura Kay

From the author of Wild Things comes a heartwarming and relatable queer coming of age story about an isolated young woman whose artistic celebration of her pet chinchilla suddenly launches her into the professional art world, reality TV fame, and first love. Isobel's life is small: just her, her mum, and her pet chinchilla, Abigail, in their...

One Day by David Nicholls

One Day

David Nicholls

It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. They face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears...

The Lifestyle by Taylor Hahn

The Lifestyle

Taylor Hahn

A heartwarming and hilarious novel about swinging, marriage, and complexities of the heart. Georgina Wagman has it all—a great marriage, a great job at a prestigious law firm, and great friends. She’s living the life she always wanted, and everything is perfect. Until, that is, she walks in on her husband Nathan in a compromising position with a junior associate.

Sizzle Reel by Carlyn Greenwald

Sizzle Reel

Carlyn Greenwald

An unputdownable queer coming-of-age rom-com about life and love in Hollywood. For aspiring cinematographer Luna Roth, coming out as bisexual at twenty-four is proving more difficult than she anticipated. Sure, her best friend and fellow queer Romy is thrilled for her—but she has no interest in coming out to her backwards parents, she wouldn't know...

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements...

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Possession

A. S. Byatt

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

Mystery / Thrillers
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The Verifiers by Jane Pek

The Verifiers

Jane Pek

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S BEST MYSTERY BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Introducing Claudia Lin: a sharp-witted amateur sleuth for the 21st century. This debut novel follows Claudia as she verifies people's online lives, and lies, for a dating detective agency in New York City. Until a client with an unusual request goes missing....Claudia is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy... 

Conclave by Robert Harris

Conclave

Robert Harris

"Pulsates with intrigue. . . . Ambition, sex scandals, financial corruption and terrorism all rear their ugly heads. And Harris saves one whopper of a surprise for the final pages." —USA Today

The pope is dead. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will gather to cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they are not immune to the human temptations of power and glory...

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray

The Murder of Mr. Wickham

Claudia Gray

A summer house party turns into a thrilling whodunit when Jane Austen's Mr. Wickham—one of literature’s most notorious villains—meets a sudden and suspicious end in this brilliantly imagined mystery from a New York Times bestselling author featuring Austen’s leading literary characters.
“Had Jane Austen sat down to write a country house murder mystery, this is exactly the book she would have written.” —Alexander McCall Smith.

The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a party at their country estate, bringing...

Catchpenny by Charlie Huston

Catchpenny

Charlie Huston

A thief who can travel through mirrors, a video game that threatens to spill out of the virtual world, a doomsday cult on a collision course with destiny, and a missing teenager at the center of it all. With the world on the brink of every kind of apocalypse, humanity needs a hero.

What it gets is Sid Catchpenny.

Shady Hollow by Juneau Black

Shady Hollow

Juneau Black

The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony—until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.

Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

Grave Expectations

Alice Bell

A fast-paced and hilarious debut crime novel, in which a burnt-out Millennial medium must utilize her ability to see ghosts and team-up with a band of oddball investigators to figure out which member(s) of a posh English family are guilty of murder. “This book has bags of humor, bags of heart, and a proper murder mystery at its core.” —Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Alexander McCall Smith

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a...

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie, Laura Thompson

The Mystery of the Blue Train

Agatha Christie, Laura Thompson

When the fabled Blue Train, the luxury overnight passenger express to the Riviera, arrives at Nice, a guard attempts to awaken Ruth Kettering from her slumbers. But the wealthy American socialite will never wake again, for a brutal blow has killed her, disfiguring her almost beyond recognition.

Horror
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'Salem's Lot (Movie Tie-in) by Stephen King

'Salem's Lot (Movie Tie-in)

Stephen King

NOW A NEW FILM STREAMING ON MAX • #1 BESTSELLER • Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book. 

Monsters We Have Made by Lindsay Starck

Monsters We Have Made

Lindsay Starck

A poignant and evocative novel that explores the bounds of familial love, the high stakes of parenthood, and the tenuous divide between fiction and reality.
Thirteen years ago, Sylvia Gray's young daughter, Faye, attacked her babysitter in order to impress the Kingman, a monster she and her best friend had encountered on the Internet.

The Shining by Stephen King

The Shining

Stephen King

In this masterpiece of modern American horror that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, Jack Torrance takes a job as the caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel. As the brutal winter sets in, the hotel’s dark secrets begin to unravel.
“An undisputed master of suspense and terror.” —The Washington Post

The Ruins by Scott Smith

The Ruins

Scott Smith

Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine in "the best horror novel of the new century" (Stephen King). Also a major motion picture!. Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England.

Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie

Stephen King

Stephen King's legendary debut, the bestselling smash hit that put him on the map as one of America's favorite writers • In a world where bullies rule, one girl holds a secret power. Unpopular and tormented, Carrie White's life takes a terrifying turn when her hidden abilities become a weapon of horror.

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