The Corner Bookstore

What if you could go back to a moment in time and change one crucial thing? How would your life be changed? In what ways would it be the same?

It’s 1982, and Lisa is twenty-four years old, a waitress, an aspiring singer-songwriter, and girlfriend to a famous Latin musician. That year, she makes a decision, almost without thinking about it.

But what if her decision had been a different one?

In the new 1982, Lisa chooses differently. Her career takes another direction. She becomes a mother. She loves differently, yet some things remain the same.

Alternating between two very different possibilities, THE ORIGINAL 1982 is a novel about how the choices we make affect the people we become-and about how the people we are affect the choices we make.

Bio: Lori Carson is a singer/songwriter whose albums include: Shelter, Where it Goes, Everything I Touch Runs Wild and Another Year. A former member of the seminal band The Golden Palominos, she has contributed to the soundtracks of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead, and others. THE ORIGINAL 1982 is her first novel.

Memorial Day, 1938: New York socialite Lily Dane has just returned with her family to the idyllic oceanfront community of Seaview, Rhode Island, expecting another placid summer season among the familiar traditions and friendships that sustained her after heartbreak. That is, until Greenwalds decide to take up residence in Seaview. Nick and Budgie Greenwald are an unwelcome specter from Lily’s past: her former best friend and her former fiancé, now recently married—an event that set off a wildfire of gossip among the elite of Seaview, who have summered together for generations. Budgie’s arrival to restore her family’s old house puts her once more in the center of the community’s social scene, and she insinuates herself back into Lily’s friendship with an overpowering talent for seduction…and an alluring acquaintance from their college days, Yankees pitcher Graham Pendleton. But the ties that bind Lily to Nick are too strong and intricate to ignore, and the two are drawn back into long-buried dreams, despite their uneasy secrets and many emotional obligations. Under the scorching summer sun, the unexpected truth of Budgie and Nick’s marriage bubbles to the surface, and as a cataclysmic hurricane barrels unseen up the Atlantic and into New England, Lily and Nick must confront an emotional cyclone of their own, which will change their worlds forever.

We are all storytellers – we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen.

In his work as a practicing psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behavior. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon.

This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient.

These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.

“The work of Sylvia Lyon Rodman defies categories. These interconnected stories (illuminated with the author’s illustrations) display far more than the trappings of magic realism. Her saga of a South American family, simultaneously privileged and haunted, professional and impractical, touches on Catholic rites, secular myths, masculine roles, feminine strategies–as well as the collision of cultures, languages and traditions…Readers searching for something new in style and substance need look no farther. This is truly breakthrough fiction.”                                         ~Stefan Kanter

“There’s a major new presence on the crime scene…Reba White Williams. Restrike will strike a big hit with sophisticated readers who love culture, uncommon criminals and terrific writing. You won’t be able to put this book down!”

–Alexandra Penney, bestselling author of How to Make Love to a Man, former editor-in-chief of SELF magazine

Reba White Williams has written articles for American Artist, Art and Auction, Print Quarterly, and Journal of the Print World. She served on the Print Committees of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, and The Whitney Museum. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly, and an Honorary Keeper of American Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University. She currently lives in New York City and has recently founded the Willie Morris Award for best southern writing. She divides her time between New York and Palm Springs.

From the critically acclaimed and “bitingly intelligent” (The New York Times Book Review) author of December comes a buoyant and beautiful new novel about a family struggling in the aftermath of a suicide.

Since her seventeen-year-old daughter’s suicide less than a year ago, Joan Jacobs has been working to keep her once tight-knit family from coming apart. Now, arriving one June evening at their summer home in Massachusetts, she and her husband, Anders, and their two younger daughters stumble across another tragedy: a pickup truck has, inexplicably, driven straight into a quarry in their backyard. Within hours, divers drag up the body of a young local man, James Favazza.

As the Jacobs learn more about the events that led up to that fateful evening, each member of the family becomes increasingly tangled in the emotional threads of James’s life and death: fifteen-year-old Eve grows obsessed with proving that James’s death wasn’t an accident, though the police refuse to consider this; Anders finds himself forced to face his own deepest fears; and seven-year-old Eloise unwittingly adopts James’s orphaned dog, all while Joan herself becomes increasingly fixated on James’s mother, a stranger whose loss so closely mirrors her own.

Crazy Rich Asians is the outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season. When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn’t know is that Nick’s family home happens to look like a palace, that she’ll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia’s most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back. Initiated into a world of dynastic splendor beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and Eleanor, Nick’s formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should—and should not—marry. Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider’s look at the Asian JetSet; a perfect depiction of the clash between old money and new money; between Overseas Chinese and Mainland Chinese; and a fabulous novel about what it means to be young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.

“A heartfelt, intimate, and painfully honest account of the coming of age of one shy boy and of the exotic city he left behind, but will never forget. A story of the courage of breaking away and the “you are there” descriptions of places and people that make the reader part of this narrative of struggle and triumph.”
- Barbara Goldsmith, author of the bestselling Little Gloria, Happy at Last

“My New Orleans, Gone Away is the triumph of a memoirist with the eye of an architect and the heart of a poet. With admiration, and occasionally, awe, I shared the development of his feelings and taste. This may very well be a modest classic of that enchanted city’s art, culture, lifestyle and vanishing monuments.”
– Sidney Offit, Memoir of the Bookie’s Son

1941 is a year of drama and spectacle for Americans. Joe DiMaggio’s record-breaking hitting streak enlivens the summer, and winter begins with the shock and horror of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The news from Eu­rope is bleak, especially for the Jewish population. Joltin’ Joe, possessing a sweet swing and range in center, also has another gift: he can see the future. And he sees dark times ahead. In her inventive novel The Powers, Valerie Sayers, in both realistic and fantastic chapters, transports the reader to an age filled with giants: Dorothy Day and Walker Ev­ans appear beside DiMaggio. The problems they face, from Catholic antisemitism to the challenge of pacifism in the face of overwhelming evil, play out in very public media, among them the photography of Evans and the baseball of DiMaggio. At once magical and familiar, The Powers is a story of witness and moral responsibility that will, like Joe DiMaggio, find some unlikely fans.

“She’s smart and irreverent, but she’s also kind and compas­sionate; she gives us imperfect people and makes us like and care about them, an essential task for any novelist but one accomplished by surprisingly few.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post