Richard's 2017 Picks

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The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: Poems By Molly McCully Brown Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780892554782
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Persea - March 7th, 2017

Many of you have met Molly Brown in Square Books or around town, or at the reading with her parents, John Gregory and Carrie Brown this past July, and now we have the splendid pleasure of hosting a reading from her first book, winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.


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Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century By Jessica Bruder Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9780393356311
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 4th, 2018

"As I write this," Jessica Bruder says in Nomadland, "there are only a dozen counties and one metro area where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent" in America, where "the dream of a middle-class life has gone from difficult to impossible." Bruder spent several years following—existing herself as—one of the scores of thousands of older Americans who should be living happily in retirement but, because the social security check isn't enough and they mainly can't afford housing, ditch the mortgage or rental and buy an old RV, camper or pick-up, and take to the road in search of seasonal part-time jobs, many of them in the Orwellian warehouses of Amazon. Some are in despair, others liberated, but almost all have no choice. An eye-opening, important and very well-researched and written book.  


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Always Happy Hour: Stories By Mary Miller Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9781631493973
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Liveright - January 2nd, 2018

Mary Miller apparently used her time well while here as the Grisham visiting writer, 2014 – 15, for now, following Small World and The Last Days of California, she has given us a new book of smart, compelling stories.   These stories simmer with love, trouble, and sex.   As Amelia Gray said, “For anyone who’s ever looked for love in all the wrong places, this shoebox full of beating hearts is for you.”


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Signals: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) By Tim Gautreaux Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9781101972519
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage - December 12th, 2017

Signals is a keeper collection of stories from a modern master, twelve new tales combined with eight from his previous books that mostly hew to Gautreaux’s signature material of seemingly plain folk in Louisiana, where the human and natural world come to abundant and colorful display. An early Grisham visiting writer (1996-97), Gautreaux’s splendid two novels, The Missing and The Clearing, along with his excellent stories, clearly mark him as one of our greatest living writers in the South.


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The Underworld: A Novel By Kevin Canty Cover Image
$24.95
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ISBN: 9780393293050
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - March 7th, 2017

Kevin Canty, who has visited Square Books on several occasions and is one of the writers Larry Brown most admired, has published his first novel in many years. The Underworld takes its name literally, from the true story of a fire in a silver mining town whose survivors all were connected in some way to those who perished, a story of the necessity for love in a devastated community, the sort of story that few writers can penetrate and bring to life the way that Canty can.


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Village Prodigies By Rodney Jones Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780544960107
Availability: Usually Arrives in Store in 1-5 Days
Published: Ecco - March 21st, 2017

Born and raised in Alabama and now living in New Orleans, Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a long-time favorite poet at Square Books, and now has created a technical tour de force, with characters and voices coming from nine parts of poetry within the concept of a novel over a time span of fifty years. We are thrilled he will be here with this newest and most ambitious book, appearing at the Book Conference and on Thacker Mountain Radio.


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General Fox Conner: Pershing's Chief of Operations and Eisenhower's Mentor (Leadership in Action) By Steven Rabalais Cover Image
$34.95
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ISBN: 9781612003979
Published: Casemate - October 13th, 2016

Not many people today are familiar with Major General Fox Conner, John J. Pershing’s chief adviser in WWI.   Conner graduated 17th in his class at West Point and became a prominent military intellectual who influenced many of WWII’s greatest leaders.   Fewer people still know that Conner was born and raised in nearby Slate Springs, Calhoun County, Mississippi.    Early readers of this new biography are very enthusiastic about it.


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The Girl In Green By Derek B. Miller Cover Image
$15.99
ISBN: 9781328745507
Availability: Usually Arrives in Store in 1-5 Days
Published: Mariner Books - January 16th, 2018

The author is a career international diplomat and adviser whose first novel, Norwegian by Night, was a brilliant literary thriller set in Scandinavia, with a young boy and his grandpa on the run from a gang of thugs.   Miller relies again on his experience and Middle East PhD work to set his new highly engaging novel in Syria, “a suspenseful, character-driven and eerily prescient moral thriller.”   Miller is one of few writers whose work well may draw comparison to John LeCarre.


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The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence By Catherine Lacey, Forsyth Harmon Cover Image
$20.00
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ISBN: 9781632866554
Published: Bloomsbury USA - January 3rd, 2017

Tupelo native Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, which won her a Whiting Award, will have a new novel out early this summer and for which we are now taking orders entitled The Answers (26.00), from Farrar Straus & Giroux. Until then, you might amuse yourself with this interesting little powder room companion, illustrated by Forsyth Harmon.


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American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus By Lisa Wade Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780393355536
Availability: Usually Arrives in Store in 1-5 Days
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - March 13th, 2018

Wade is a New Orleans native and sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles who peels back the sensationalism implied in her title to report on what’s actually new and not-so-new on the campus scene.


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Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century By Geoffrey R. Stone Cover Image
$21.95
ISBN: 9781631494284
Availability: Usually Arrives in Store in 1-5 Days
Published: Liveright - July 3rd, 2018

Stone is a legal scholar (University of Chicago School of Law) who tracks the intersections and undulating movements of sexual mores, religion, and law over the course of American history, giving us a clearer perspective on where we are now, in 2017.  Laurence Tribe said “This masterpiece is the rarest of combinations, a page-turner that is also a magisterial font of wisdom.”


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Drunks: An American History By Christopher Finan Cover Image
$29.95
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ISBN: 9780807001790
Published: Beacon Press - June 27th, 2017

Drunks is a timely and important book, a social history of alcoholism in America since its beginnings, illustrated by such characters as the tragic son of John Adams; the Iroquois leader, Handsome Lake, who learned lessons from recovery that he imparted to members of his tribe; Carrie Nation and Prohibition; and two fairly anonymous men, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, who founded AA. By giving us this entertaining but measured narrative that deftly makes the case for recovery as a liberation movement, Finan ultimately shows how history is at its best when it illuminates the present.


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Between Them: Remembering My Parents By Richard Ford Cover Image
$25.99
ISBN: 9780062661883
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ecco - May 2nd, 2017

Thirty years after Richard Ford's "My Mother, a Memory" appeared in Harper's (its only publication in the U.S.), the prize-winning author has written a companion piece, "Gone: Remembering My Father," and combined the two into this new book, Between Them. Here we see these two people, and young Richard with them, come to life.  "To write a memoir," Ford says, "and to consider the importance of another human being is to try to credit what otherwise might go unremarked—partly by acknowledging that mysteries lie within us all, and by identifying within those mysteries, virtues." It is not quite right to compare Between Them to the remarkable One Writer's Beginnings by Ford's late friend and fellow Mississipian, Eudora Welty, as they are two fairly different kinds of books, with different motivations. But they share much in awareness, wisdom, candor, and tenderness, and in their composition, the very best writing a reader might hope for.


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Woman No. 17: A Novel By Edan Lepucki Cover Image
$16.00
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ISBN: 9781101904275
Published: Hogarth - February 13th, 2018

Edan Lepucki's second novel, following California, features a young woman who, trying to find breathing space enough to write a memoir, hires a young nanny, "S," or Esther, an artist, to live in the small guest hovel behind the house and take care of her toddler while also keeping an eye on her mute teenage son. A sometimes comical, psychologically complex and suspenseful story—a family noir—soon has you in its grip, pulling for these souls in the Los Angeles hills.


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The Answers: A Novel By Catherine Lacey Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781250183088
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Picador - June 5th, 2018

Mary is a young woman living in New York City when a mysterious ailment causes her to seek treatment she can't afford. In answering a bizarre Craigslist to serve as a job-specific female companion to Kurt—such as Anger Girlfriend, Sleeping Girlfriend, or, in the role Mary accepts, Emotional Girlfriend—The Answers poses unpredictable inquiries to its readers, and Catherine Lacey exceeds the high expectations set by her 2015 first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing. Join us in welcoming the 2017-18 John and Renee Grisham writer-in-residence for the event for The Answers and its author: Tupelo, Mississippi native Catherine Lacey.