Joe Murphy on Absalom, Absalom!
Hi Everyone-
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like a drowned rat. Thank heavens we seem to be done with three straight days of torrential downpours. I need to get back to bailing out my poor basement (the good news--I came across some books I always meant to get around to), so I'd like to make just a brief mention of the ongoing Random Summer buy two-get-one-free sale on all titles from Vintage, Anchor, and Broadway. Great books, incredible deal: stop by now!
Among the great authors they have is William Faulkner. Faulker wrote too many of the twentieth century's greatest novels to even list, but my personal favorite is Absalom, Absalom!, the story of Thomas Sutpen's attempt to establish a dynasty in Faulkner mythical Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi... at any price. 
It's Faulkner at his very best: the most baroque, beautiful prose, the greatest sense of the truly epic, and the most towering, unforgettable, and sometimes insane characters. It's also an important link to Quentin Compson's state of mind in The Sound and the Fury. It's on my very shortlist for great American novel. So take advantage of the Vintage sale and give it a try!
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like a drowned rat. Thank heavens we seem to be done with three straight days of torrential downpours. I need to get back to bailing out my poor basement (the good news--I came across some books I always meant to get around to), so I'd like to make just a brief mention of the ongoing Random Summer buy two-get-one-free sale on all titles from Vintage, Anchor, and Broadway. Great books, incredible deal: stop by now!Among the great authors they have is William Faulkner. Faulker wrote too many of the twentieth century's greatest novels to even list, but my personal favorite is Absalom, Absalom!, the story of Thomas Sutpen's attempt to establish a dynasty in Faulkner mythical Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi... at any price. It's Faulkner at his very best: the most baroque, beautiful prose, the greatest sense of the truly epic, and the most towering, unforgettable, and sometimes insane characters. It's also an important link to Quentin Compson's state of mind in The Sound and the Fury. It's on my very shortlist for great American novel. So take advantage of the Vintage sale and give it a try!See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
Hope all is well during this quickly-warming summer. I've been keeping cool in the evenings by re-watching the brilliant Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy miniseries with Alec Guinness in (for me) his greatest role as George Smiley. I think it may be the single most faithful adapation of a literary work I've ever seen, down to almost the last details. It's a fascinating story of a hunt for a Kim Philby-style mole at the highest levels of British intelligence. Smiley's quest to find the mole is fraught with betrayals both personal and professional, and John Le Carré's seamless vision of the secret world transfers perfectly to the screen, thanks to pitch-perfect performances by Guinness, Ian Richardson, and a host of other great British actors. The plot veers from the Byzantine to the merely labyrinthine, yet it all hangs together beautifully and handsomely rewards close attention. It's truly indispensible viewing.
Just to mention a recent favorite, newly available in paperback from Vintage: Richard McCann's Mother of Sorrows, a heartbreaking evocation of postwar surburban life (local suburban life as it happens; McCann is a native of the DC region and teaches at American University). The narrator's accounts of his beloved, highly unpredictable mother and his reckless, doomed brother, as well as many friends, lovers, and aquaintances, make for highly personal, powerfully affecting reading. It's a really unique work, and well worth checking out, especially as part of our current sale. (Richard McCann will be reading from Mother of Sorrows on Thursday July 13, 7pm at our Dupont Circle store.)
And this is an incredible list of books: all of Ian McEwan, including Atonement and Saturday, all of Faulkner, including The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Mark Haddon's mega-bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, perennial favorite The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, Toni Morrison's Beloved (picked by the New York Times as the best novel of the last 25 years), Margaret Atwood's great novels, including 
The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale, Bill Bryon's marvelous oeuvre, including A Walk in the Woods and I'm a Stranger Here Myself, all of Alexander McCall Smith's much-loved Number One Ladies Detective Agency series, Orhan Pamuk's works, including Snow and My Name Is Red, John Krakauer's hard-hitting Under the Banner of Heaven, Mitch Albom's sentimental favorite Tuesdays With Morrie, Alice Munro's great short story collections, including the recent Runaway, Richard Ford's multi-prizewinning novels 
The Sportswriter and Independence Day (the third in the series is coming this fall), Karen Armstrong's provocative memoir The Spiral Staircase, and, I can't overstate this, too many more fantastic books to even begin to begin mentioning. We were very gratified with your response to the Penguin sale, so here's another chance with another great publisher with a truly stunning breadth of titles. The sale starts Friday, so get ready to stock up on your summer (and beyond) reading.
To make a particular suggestion: summer is a great time to take up Richard Russo. If you've been putting off reading his wonderfully character-and-plot driven, poignant but often astonishingly hilarious novels, now's the time. To name my personal top three, in no particular order: Empire Falls, Nobody's Fool, and The Risk Pool are all impassioned, brilliantly plotted, and occasionally, gut-bustingly funny portrayals of small town life and families with some unforgettable characters. Russo's books also make perfect Father's Day gifts, so stop in right away and pick up three great books for Dad - at the price of two!
Just a brief note this week - I was up late last night at what turned out to be a terrific event with Anderson Cooper at our Arlington/Courthouse store. He attracted a large and very faithful following: I'd say we had at least 400 people in attendance. He also gave a great talk and, I'm pleased to say, signed some stock for us. There are a limited number of signed copies still available, so check with one of our stores or our Mail Order department right away. And remember: Al Gore at our Lansburgh/Penn Quarter store on the 15th at lunchtime followed by this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, Claudia Emerson, the very same night at Old Town, Alexandria!!!
Also: if you have some home improvements hanging fire, stop in for the last week of our Taunton sale. This terrific line of books for the home are on sale for 20% off through next Thursday (again, the 15th).
And coming soon (I'll talk more about it next week): the great Vintage/Anchor/Broadway Books buy-two-get-one-free sale! Trust me: the titles will impress you.
Well, it would appear that summer is here, whether we're ready for it or not. I decided to give that William Gaddis book I mentioned a few weeks ago - The Recognitions - a try. So far it's an amazing book, in some ways a mid-twentieth century version of Moby Dick, dazzling in its ambition but with a solid, intricate plot (and a ton of characters). It's hard to imagine one could find a better fictional look at midcentury Manhattan or a more darkly comic meditation on art. That being said: I'm not yet even a third of the way through this massive tome. I'll tell you more when (hopefully not if) I get to the end.
And of course, I have to mention at least one other book (that I've actually finished): Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray. Right now I'm doing everything I can to promote great memoirs that help redeem the genre, which, as you may recall, has had a tough year for about a million little reasons. This memoir is by someone with some amazing real experiences, raised by two people with even more exciting and glamorous lives: Tatiana du Plessix Liberman, refugee from the both the Russian revolution and World War II, lover of the great Russian poet Mayakovsky, and world-famous designer of hats as "Tatiana of Saks"; and Alexander Liberman, editorial head of the entire Condé Nast empire. If you're going to have brilliant, glamorous, incredibly well-connected, and occasionally monstrous parents, you'd do well to learn to write as elegantly as Ms. Gray. The paperback edition finally comes out on Tuesday (June 6th). Stop by one of our stores and remind yourself why memoirs are worth reading.