Three Lives & Company, Booksellers
154 W 10 Street NY NY 10014

Hours:
Sunday Noon-7pm
Monday and Tuesday 11am-8pm
Wednesday-Saturday 11am-8:30pm

www.threelives.com

Three Lives & Company is one of my favourite New York independent bookstores. They send me their occasional e-mail newsletter which follows. Please note that publishers quoted are the US publishers and there will be UK/Commonwealth editions also available for many of these titles.

Greetings from Three Lives & Company,
Here is where we'd normally try to say something witty about the weather, but we're sure you've heard enough of that the past week, so to keep it short and sweet we simply offer you our latest reading suggestions for your midwinter days and nights.

OUR RECENT STAFF FAVORITES:

Summertime
J. M. Coetzee
In one of Coetzee's more emotionally resonate novels, a biographer interviews a number of subjects regarding the late writer John Coetzee and his life in the mid-seventies, after returning to South Africa. Striking memories and poignant reflections from lovers, friends, and family make for an intriguing account of the deceased man and Coetzee's own play on memoir and fiction. (Viking)

Chronic City
Jonathan Lethem
Here is a Manhattan novel for the rest of us--a semi-alternate reality revealing and celebrating all that makes the city excruciatingly wonderful. It is a beautifully observed novel, written in the vein of populist McEwan, in which Lethem revels in the madness of New York, including its people, its culture, its infrastructure, its very existence. (Doubleday)

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel (right)
Hilary Mantel lyrically and tightly blends fact and fiction in her telling of the saga of Thomas Cromwell, the man who would allow King Henry VIII his desire, Anne Boleyn. Mantel's storytelling is filled with an overabundance of detail, but the author neither lost her sense of wit, nor my rapt attention the entire length of the novel. Wolf Hall is every bit as brilliant as you've already heard. (Henry Holt)

Joshua Ferris
The Unnamed
From the author of the staff favorite And Then We Came to the End, a moving and compelling novel about a man, a husband and father, afflicted by an unknown compulsion that leaves him unable to stop walking. As in his first novel, Ferris fashions a story that could have easily gone off the rails, but maintains a course straight and true with his integrity and mastery of the narrative. (Little, Brown)

The Privileges
Jonathan Dee
You'll want to slow yourself down to savor the prose, despite reading quickly to learn how this quintessential New York novel unfolds. Having garnered rave reviews from the Sunday NY Times Book Review ("...full of elegance, vitality and complexity") and other newspapers both here and in England, Dee's writing captures you from the first page. A rich couple--and their two children--achieve untold wealth and negotiate their way through life without a moral compass. We watch how each family member negotiates a personality of his or her own without that moral compass and without ever knowing want; the results are fascinating indeed. Come in and read that first page! (Random House)

A Single Man
Christopher Isherwood
By now many of you will have seen Colin Firth's amazing performance as "George" in the recent film of Isherwood's 1964 book. For once, I saw the movie first and read the book the next evening, and was very glad of it. The novel is elegantly written and deeply moving, as is the film, and each compliments the other. Haven't seen the movie? Read the book! Haven't read it since it the sixties? Dust it off and read it again! An unforgettable portrait of a man who feels he must hide in plain sight. (University of Minnesota Press)

Balcony of Europe
Aidan Higgins
In a small Spanish town on the Mediterranean, an Irish painter and a young American wife quickly initiate an affair under the gaze of their spouses and the residents of their adopted home. Set against the stifling Cold War era of the mid-sixties, and the stupor of a small town winter, the affair offers this couple the structure they've been missing in their ex-pat lives and in the world. Using stuttering vignettes and a rich cast of characters, Higgins has created an intriguing, free-flowing narrative of desire and angst. (Dalkey Archive)

Game Change
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
You probably think you've already heard all the really juicy parts, right? I'm happy to tell you that nope, you really, really didn't! Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker picked the perfect word (among other positive adjectives) to describe the book in his recent review: "potboiler." I couldn't wait to leave the shop and get home to read it each night. You'll read about the campaign plots and plans of a whole list of characters, Republican and Democrat, from the caucuses through the conventions, written in novelistic form. Plus, of course, there are those salacious nuggets of information that appear on every page. You'll be entertained mightily while feeling righteous about reading a nonfiction book about political high stakes. And it's all true, it seems! (Harper)

The Interrogative Mood
Padgett Powell
What if I told you there was a novel composed entirely out of questions? Would that appeal to you or would you imagine that the gimmick would get old very fast? What if I told you that it doesn't get old at all and that both Amanda and Joyce loved it? Do you think you would change your opinion, pick it up and give it a chance? How about if I told you that it's much more than just a string of questions? What if I said that as you read, you learn about the narrator, through the questions he asks, and about yourself at the same time through the answers you give in your mind? Do you enjoy thinking about philosophy, moral dilemmas, yourself, the world around you, and less substantial issues like, "With what frequency do you drink a commercial milk shake"? Are you intrigued? (Ecco)

Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Amy Bloom
These interconnected stories are at turns insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, as they illuminate the mysteries of passion, families, and friendship. Bloom is a master at examining serious, crazy human behavior, and making sense of it all. (Random House)

Just Kids
Patti Smith
Patti Smith's remarkable and moving account of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is the best love story I've read in years. Smith is a genuine poet, and this memoir simply stunning. (Ecco)

Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood
Caroline Blackwood
Although she is perhaps primarily known for her marriages to Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell, Caroline Blackwood was an accomplished artist in her own right. Combining pure fiction and autobiographical detail, she wrote with elegance and absurdity, humor and tragedy. While her stories certainly recall an older time and place, they feel amazingly fresh. (Counterpoint)

STAFF FAVORITES NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK:
Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin (Mariner)
The Believers by Zoe Heller (Harper Perennial)
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (Riverhead)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Picador)
How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) by Henry Alford (Twelve)
Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureshi (Scribner)
The Spare Room by Helen Garner (Picador)

POETRY ROUND-UP:
The Canterbury Tales translated by Peter Ackroyd (Viking)
Erotic Poems by E. E. Cummings (Liveright)
The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present edited by Peter Constantine (Norton)
If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems by Sherod Santos (Norton)
Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS edited by Philip Clark (Alyson)
Rose of Time by Bei Dao (New Directions)
Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman edited by Robert Hass (Counterpoint)
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasy by Tony Hoagland (Graywolf)
Where's the Moon, There's the Moon by Dan Chiasson (Knopf)

BOOKS WE'RE LOOKING FORWARD TO:
All That Follows by Jim Crace, April 20 (Nan A. Talese)
The Infinities by John Banville, February 23 (Knopf)
My Queer War by James Lord, April 27 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, March 20 (Knopf)
White Egrets by Derek Walcott, March 16 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

SIGNED EDITIONS:
Day Out of Days by Sam Shepard (Knopf)
Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martins)
Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Pantheon)
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (Reagan Arthur)