Category: Cuppa Pulp Selections

Welcome to spring!

We’re honoring the season with romance, rebirth, and great stories about human resilience.

It might seem like a no-brainer to call Louise Erdrich’s The Round House one of the best books published in recent years–it won last year’s National Book Award, after all–but we’ll go the extra step and say that it took our breath away. Erdrich handles the most devastating of subjects with a wealth of humanity, humor, and depth. An Ojibwe teen seeks to bring his mother’s rapist to justice, and along the way awakens to the sweetness and sorrow of his community’s long-threatened, intricately formed, and ultimately loving soul.

Tenth of  December, the much-anticipated  collection by George Saunders, has been an Indie favorite since it was published, and the New York Times called it “the best book you will read this year.” With characteristically unconventional style, Saunders taps into more mainstream cultural questions and fears, from a teen thwarting the kidnapping of a neighbor to two families’ very different ways of viewing parenting and puppies.

The Confidant, by Hélène Grémillon, is a soft-spoken psychological thriller translated from the French. A young editor mourning the loss of her mother begins to receive epistolary letters. Are they a clever ploy for attention by a budding novelist, or an elaborate message from a sinister stranger?

Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, a bestseller, is now out in paperback. This novel, based on historical fact, relates the romance, marriage, and eventual estrangement of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson, told from Hadley’s point of view. McLain sustains a lengthy and absorbing portion of the narrative exploring Hemingway’s fascination with bullfighting, weaving the conflicting passions of his artistic drive and intense love for Hadley throughout.

Eben Alexander, M.D.’s Proof of Heaven is another now-in-paperback bestseller, a memoir by a neurosurgeon who survived seven days in a brain-dead coma to relate his conviction that humankind’s spiritual existence is no ephemeral myth–it is the fabric of the universe. After relating his fantastic story, Dr. Alexander turns to the scientific process to analyze his own thesis, offering the conclusion that despite scientific resistance, human  spiritual experiences encountered near death have a logical basis for acceptance.

Thanks for visiting.

We are featuring five exciting new titles that are perfect as gifts, or for your own enjoyment.

Jonathan Evison’s Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving explores the relationship between a recently trained home care worker and his first client, a teenaged boy ravaged by disease but otherwise as willful, confused, and abrasive as any.

With The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers offers a war novel as beautiful for its poetry as its insightful and complex emotion.

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, by Emma Straub, romantically and wistfully paints a portrait of Hollywood in its glory years, through the life of one bright starlet.

Barbara Kingsolver’s eagerly awaited new novel, Flight Behavior, places imperiled butterflies at the forefront of a global climate crisis.

And Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist offers entertaining, outside-the-box tips for pursuing your creative dreams.

Enjoy!

The eagerly awaited new novel by Barbara Kingsolver offers another strong heroine, and a story about what the plight of the Monarch butterfly might tell us about our own destiny, and the future of the earth.

Dellarobia is already low on the totem pole of her husband’s family, as well as the entire local farming community in small-town Tennessee. When she happens upon a forested valley on her father-in-law’s land filled with silent red fire, she doesn’t understand the events past and present of which she is now the center.

The red fire turns out to be a multitude of butterflies, driven off-course by a series of weather-related events. Slowly, the community and Dellarobia herself learn what this miracle could mean for the fate of the earth. Meanwhile, Dellarobia comes to terms with the fire of her own life’s purpose, as the butterflies awaken her to the unbalance in her own life.

We asked an enthusiastic publisher’s rep why we would want to read another war novel, and his reply was simple: “Read the first sentence.” We did, and found a poetic voice so strong and true that we believe this novel is destined for a very long life.

“The war tried to kill us in the spring,” begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. During the Iraq War, young soldiers Murphy and Bartle do everything to protect each other from forces that press in on every side: insurgents, physical fatigue, and the intangible stress of constant danger.

As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, this is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war.

Don’t try to be a genius–work on being yourself! Austin Kleon, poet, digital artist, and formerly a librarian, a web designer, and copy editor, writes that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone.

Asked to address college students in upstate New York, Kleon shaped his speech around the ten things he wished someone had told him when he was starting out. The talk went viral, and its author dug deeper into his own ideas to create “Steal Like an Artist,” the book. The result is inspiring, hip, original, practical, entertaining, and filled with new truths about creativity.

Elsa Emerson is the youngest and blondest of three sisters, born in idyllic Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and the love of the stage comes as naturally to Elsa as breath. But when tragedy strikes her family, Elsa seeks something more.

Elsa marries a Door County actor and flees to Los Angeles. But as her husband’s star quickly rises and sets, Elsa is discovered by powerful studio executive Irving Green, and becomes Laura Lamont. Despite the challenges of motherhood, daughterhood, and the impossible task of living up to the image of a dead sister, Laura becomes an Academy Award­-winning actress—and a genuine movie star.

Ambitious and richly imagined, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is as lovely and colorful as the great films of Hollywood’s golden age.

Ben is unemployed and romantically on the rocks. With few options, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he learns to ply a much-needed trade. He also learns how to keep physical and emotional distance from clients. But one of Ben’s first clients won’t let him play by those rules.

Trevor, 19 years old, is in the advanced stages of muscular dystrophy. Other than that, he’s just a teenager–fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated, and with an ax to grind with the world at large.

Trev and Ben develop a close camaraderie, blurring the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev’s ailing father. A series of must-see roadside attractions divert them into an impulsive adventure interrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. Bursting with energy, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life’s terrible surprises and the heart’s uncanny capacity to mend.

Take a break from the season’s  hustle-bustle and browse our Fall Features, either in the store or online! (We’ve got magic,  dragons, a war zone, and Gatsbyesque New York for you, but stayed as far from school as possible.) From now through Thanksgiving, these titles are 10% off. And all other new hardcovers are still 10% off, now through September 30.

Rules of Civility, Amor Towles’ debut novel, features a strong young flapper ascending from typing pool to publishing executive in 1930s New York, a Gatsby-esque tale full of sparkle and grit.

Shadow of Night follows up on Deborah Harkness’s clever young witch, throwing real historical scholars into the magical mix. A Discovery of Witches, Harkness’ first book, was so much fun that we’re featuring it as well.

Seraphina, a debut by Rachel Hartman, may be the most surprising pick this fall, a dragon fantasy that we began to thumb through, then couldn’t put down!

And finally, Fobbit arrives on September 4. This much-anticipated, wry, and sobering look at the Iraq War is another bright debut, by former military journalist David Abrams.

Welcome, and thank you for visiting.

The lovingly awaited sequel to A Discovery of Witches.

Beginning where Discovery left off, Matthew and Diana have traveled back in time to Oxford in 1591, in search of a witch powerful enough to teach Diana how to use her magic. But they find themselves caught up in the intrigue that Matthew lived through as a member of the Shadow of Night, a group of academics whose lives will eventually make history, including Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh. The mystery deepens!

Matthew kept his eyes on the young man, his face expressionless as he drew our intertwined fingers to his mouth. “Diana, this is my dear friend Christopher Marlowe.”

Matthew’s introduction provided Marlowe with an opportunity to inspect me more openly. His attention crawled from my toes to the top of my head. The young man’s scorn was evident, his jealousy better hidden. Marlowe was indeed in love with my husband…

Ah, witches, vampires, and romance. It’s going to be a great fall!

Buy online

What if we tamed all the dragons–and they demanded equal rights? A wonderful fiction debut for fantasy fans, the music-oriented, and anyone who’s fallen hopelessly in love.

Seraphina is a secret abomination in the kingdom of Goredd—half human, half dragon. Her mother died when she was an infant, and her father is obsessed with suppressing the secret to protect the family, as well as Seraphina herself. But when her musical genius pushes her into the eye of the court, and her overpowering visions connect her with mysterious figures who might hold the keys to her mother’s memories, her secret identity becomes precarious.

Meanwhile, unknown powers threaten the fragile peace negotiated between humans and dragons. Is it a conspiracy of dragons, or a conspiracy of humans? Seraphina becomes inextricably involved in the intrigue as her friendship deepens with Glisselda, the youngest princess in line for the throne—and with Glisselda’s fiancé, Prince Lucian Kiggs, also Captain of the Guard.

An exploration of isolation, relationship, and responsibility, in a breathtakingly set and thrilling story of intrigue.

Buy online

The title refers to a derogatory term for soldiers that serve exclusively from the relative safety of the Forward Operating Base—out of the line of fire. Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding is a bona fide Fobbit in Baghdad. He works in the public affairs office, tapping out press releases that put a positive slant on the latest roadside bombing or strategic blunder. But, as he’ll soon learn, there’s a very real and bloody war outside the FOB.

We are so excited about this novel, a debut written by a 20-year Army veteran and Army journalist. His Baghdad journals became the blueprint for his novel, which features, among other ironic scenes, a sequence in which the FOB takes so long to spin one Army news item that it is obsolete by the time of its eventual release. Reputed by Publishers Weekly to be the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.

Buy online