These just in. . .

June tends to be a good month for new books and this year is no exception. Today alone we received new books from favorite authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (author of The Shadow of the Wind). Nigerian born Adichie gives us a new collection of stories called This Thing Around Your Neck, which is already garnering positive reviews. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s new novel, Angel’s Game, is another literate mystery about the book world. We are offering both books at 20% off for a limited time. For more discounted new releases, see our list of Spotlight Titles.

On the scholarly front, just in is an irresistible little book by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy called On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Bookstores.

“More than an éloge to books and bookstores or to the book or the bookstore, . . . Nancy touches suggestively on the book as what Stéphane Mallarmé called ‘a spiritual instrument,’ illuminating the epochal philosophical and religious developments for which books have been the indispensable material support. Nancy’s book contains the philosophical weight and literary flair that have made him one of the most important thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” –Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University

More New Scholarly Books of Note:

Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, by David Harvey

Cotton Climate and Camels in Early Islamic Iran, by Richard Bulliet

Gerhard Richter Writings, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist (20% off at Book Culture)

Nietzsche: Writings from the Early Notebooks, edited by Raymond Geuss

The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, by Guobin Yang

Spotlight Titles: 20% off all year long

Thank you to all of our customers who made this weekend’s sale a success.  It’s extremely heartening in this economy and with all the “dire” predictions we hear about the book industry to see how many people there are who still enthusiastically read and buy books.

I know that the 20% discount during the sale makes a difference, and so I want to make sure that everyone is aware of our Spotlight Titles program.  It’s an opportunity to get the sale discount on a rotating selection of our newest and most popular titles.

These are some of our current Spotlight Titles:

Prices on our website reflect the discounted price.

Moonshot! and Spring Sale!

During our upcoming sale weekend, we will host a special event for children on Saturday morning. New York-based author/illustrator Brian Floca will read from and sign copies of his new book: Moonshot! The Flight of Apollo 11. All the details about Brian Floca’s visit are here.

And check out this cool trailer for the book:

Hope to see you soon at the store – great savings all weekend long!

Spring Sale and Buy Backs!

As the spring semester draws to a close, we shift our focus towards two things here at the store:

First – It’s Buy Back time!
Sell your gently used books back to Book Culture for CASH or for even more in STORE CREDIT! We will look at ALL books. No receipt necessary. They do not need to be coursebooks and they do not have to be books purchased from us. Once we assign a retail value to your books, we will give you up to 25% in CASH or up to 40% in Store Credit. We can look at books from 10 AM to 5 PM Monday through Saturday.

Second – our Spring Sale is coming soon!
Next weekend, Friday May 15 – Sunday, May 17 we’ll be offering up big savings all weekend long – 20% off everything!** Plus, this year we are hosting a special event for kids on Saturday morning, May 16 at 11 am during the sale weekend. Hear Brian Floca read from Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11! Bring the entire family and save big!

(**Cannot be combined with other sales. Usual exclusions apply: Not valid on textbooks, periodicals or short discount titles.)

Buyer’s Picks: Children’s Books

Of everything I do at Book Culture, buying the children’s books is certainly the most fun. I always pull out the kids catalogs first and go through them, first quickly and then again more slowly. I’m searching for reprints of long lost favorites and those few special new books that do emerge every season.

Below are my favorites so far this year. I’m particularly attached to the first title about life in a traditional Mongolian home, told from the point of view of a baby. It combines beautiful illustrations and a simple, charming story in a way that is both strikingly unusual and comfortingly familiar.
-Annie

	My Little Round House by Bolormaa Baasansuren Hardcover $18.95 Groundwood Books In this delightful picture book, baby Jilu recounts his first year of life in a nomadic Mongolian community. He remembers being cradled by his singing mother, the delicious smells from the cooking pot, his first meeting with his grandparents, and the family’s wandering life with a camel caravan. They celebrate Tsagaan Sar, the new year, and later revel in the warmth and freedom of summer. Richly illustrated by a young Mongolian author/illustrator, “My Little Round House” reveals a world very different, and yet surprisingly similar, to that of young readers and their parents.
	Jacob Lawrence in the City by Susan Goldman Rubin Board Book $7.99 Chronicle Books Lawrence’s exuberant artwork guides readers through a bustling city. With rhythmic text and 11 iconic paintings, this book is both an introduction to an influential artist and a celebration of city life. Full color.
	The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer Hardcover $16.95 Phaidon Press First published in 1962, this classic has delighted readers around the world for generations. Unavailable in English for years, this international bestseller is now reissued in a lovely new edition. Full color.
	A Walk in New York by Salvatore Rubbino Hardcover Our Price: $13.60 (Retail Price: $16.99) Candlewick Press Spotlight Title – 20% off New York City — the perfect place for a boy and his dad to spend the day. Follow them on their walk around Manhattan, from Grand Central Terminal to the top of the Empire State Building, from Greenwich Village to the Statue of Liberty, learning lots of facts and trivia along the way. In this unabashed ode to America’s biggest city, Salvatore Rubbino’s fresh, lively paintings and breezy text capture the delight of a young visitor experiencing the wonders of New York firsthand.
	Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes, Adapted by Martin Jenkins, Illustrated by Chris Riddell Hardcover Our Price: $22.40 (Retail Price: $27.99) Candlewick Press Spotlight Title – 20% off From the award-winning team behind the acclaimed retelling of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver” comes an accessible, lavishly illustrated edition of one of the most beloved stories in the world. Full color.
	Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle Hardcover $16.99 Henry Holt & Company Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba. Yet even in Cuba, the Nazi darkness is never far away.
	Toby Alone by Timothee de Fombelle Hardcover $17.99 Candlewick Press Translated into 22 languages, this imaginative debut is a gripping and witty eco-adventure set on a Lilliputian world where a tree is under threat and a boy hunted by his own people must protect his father’s secrets. “The impressive debut novel from French playwright de Fombelle deftly weaves mature political commentary, broad humor and some subtle satire into a thoroughly enjoyable adventure.” –Publishers Weekly
	Book of Cities by Piero Ventura Hardcover Our Price: $15.16 (Retail Price: $18.95) Universe Publishing Spotlight Title – 20% off Ever wondered what people are doing in cities all over the world at any given moment? Piero Ventura’s charmingly illustrated children’s book—appreciated by both young and old—brings bustling scenes of major cities to life in intricate detail. This facsimile edition of Ventura’s original book, first published in 1975, provides a colorful, educational, and unique tour of major world cities. Delight in each city as you look for the London policeman holding up traffic, children shoveling the heavy snow of the side streets in Moscow, clerks waiting on customers in a huge Parisian department store, or the steam rising from the Chinese food cooking on a tiny houseboat in Hong Kong. The finely drawn illustrations and humorous details in Book of Cities are a celebration of the many ways people live, work, travel, and have fun in the major cities of the world.

For Earth Day: New Books about our Planet

These are a few of the newest and most interesting books on the environment and the natural world.

To see more titles, visit our website or better yet, come by the store!

	Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery by Steve Nicholls Hardcover $30 University of Chicago Press The first Europeans to set foot on North America stood in awe of the natural abundance before them. The skies were filled with birds, seas and rivers teemed with fish, and the forests and grasslands were a hunter’s dream, with populations of game too abundant and diverse to even fathom. It’s no wonder these first settlers thought they had discovered a paradise of sorts. Fortunately for us, they left a legacy of copious records documenting what they saw, and these observations make it possible to craft a far more detailed evocation of North America before its settlement than any other place on the planet. Here Steve Nicholls brings this spectacular environment back to vivid life, demonstrating with both historical narrative and scientific inquiry just what an amazing place North America was and how it looked when the explorers first found it.
	Climate Change: Picturing the Science by Gavin Schmidt & Joshua Wolfe, Foreword by Jeffrey D. Sachs Paper $24.95 W.W. Norton & Company An unprecedented union of scientific analysis and stunning photography, this work illustrates the effects of climate change on the global ecosystem.
	The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability by James Gustave Speth Paper $18 Yale University Press How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with “no” growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels–they are accelerating, dramatically–and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of “Red Sky at Morning” and a widely respected environmentalist, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline, to the point that we are now at the edge of catastrophe. Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is now to change the operating instructions for today’s destructive world economy before it is too late. The book is about how to do that.
	Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples by Mark Dowie Hardcover $27.95 MIT Press How native peoples–from the Miwoks of Yosemite to the Maasai of eastern Africa–have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation. “Mark Dowie is one of the finest investigative journalists we have, and his talent has rarely been on better display than in this book. And not just because he has gone to all corners of the Earth to get his raw material. More than that, in typical Dowie fashion, he upends his readers’ expectations about who’s the good guy and who’s the villain, and is not afraid to step on toes that more timid or conventional writers would avoid. He makes us rethink our usual one-size-fits-all assumptions about environmentalism, and in the process tells some moving and fascinating human stories.” —Adam Hochschild, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, and co-founder of Mother Jones Magazine
	Hijacking Sustainability by Adrian Parr Hardcover $24.95 MIT Press How the sustainability movement has been co-opted: from ecobranding by Wal-Mart to the “greening” of the American military. “None of us can afford to ignore sustainability today since the very life of the planet is at stake. And yet it is easy to forget that sustainability is a political problem and a cultural problem too. Hijacking Sustainability is a timely reminder that sustainability is not something we should leave to the market to sort out. Parr makes clear that sustainability is a matter for which we all have to take responsibility and that to do that we have to wake up to what’s really going on. Critical theory can scarcely have hoped for a more important book.” —Ian Buchanan, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University
	Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot Paper $18 South End Press “If you care about the future of the planet, you should read “Heat,” and then give a copy to a friend.”-Elizabeth Kolbert “A dazzling command of science and a relentless faith in people.”-Naomi Klein

Spring in Morningside Heights!

Spring has finally come to Morningside Heights and the Columbia neighborhood is suddenly awash in color. This is possibly the most beautiful moment of the year in New York and this cozy area of the Upper West Side that feels almost like a town within the city is a great place to experience it.

The tree in front of our store is in bloom and inside we’re excited about all the new spring titles that are flowing in.  A few of the highlights so far:

These are some of our favorite books from the past year that have just been released in paperback:

And if you mix in academic circles, you might want to check out the new (and popular) How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement.

Many more new spring titles are due in over the next several weeks, so come back regularly to see what new “must reads” are in store for you this summer.

Professor’s Picks with Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of a new book: The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. She will be reading and signing books at Book Culture on Thursday, April 16 at 7 pm. (Learn more about the book and event here.) We recently asked Helen a few questions about what she has been reading:

1) What books are you currently reading?

Sowing Crisis by Rashid Khalidi, endless books about the Iraq War, and, for relief, I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

2) Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to the publication of?

The next fiction titles by Paula Sharp, Joan Silber and Mary Morris.

3) Are there standard titles or writers you like to recommend, either within or outside of your field?

Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Tolstoy and Charlotte Bronte.

4) Do you have a personal favorite book of all time? If so, can you share it and tell us why?

I have three: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – a work that is so human and honest it captures the struggle for freedom that not only women experience, but anyone who has been pigeonholed, oppressed, suppressed anywhere in the world. A highly underrated novel. George Eliot’s Middlemarch – as big and important as my other favorite book, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These books have the sweep and complexity of life, contain deep wisdom, and grow and grow with each reading. They capture humanity in all its complexity much better than any psychology or nonfiction I have ever read.

5) What’s next? Any upcoming book projects in the works that you can tell us about?

I have a new novel coming out in November that I’m just proofing now. Called THE EDGE OF EDEN, it is a tragicomic novel about an English family living in the Seychelles in 1960, a remote group of islands tucked under the equator in the Indian Ocean. The story weaves between wartime London and tropical colonial decadence in a tale of power, lust and witchcraft.

Where can you find a great book for under $10?

At Book Culture, of course!

Hit the stairs first, which are lined with stacks of remainders. On the first landing you’ll find Mark Mazower’s recent book Hitler’s Empire for only $8 and Tony Judt’s Reappraisals for $7. Turn the corner and check out the literary criticism section, where you’ll find Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi for only $4.99 and the timely Panic! Markets, Crises & Crowds in American Fiction for $5.98. There are several gems lining the stairs, including two titles by Pamuk, Snow and Other Colors, each for $7.98. Stop at the next landing to browse the philosophy sale books and then continue on up to the tables on the 2nd floor. Here you’ll find, among many other things, a new crop of architecture titles, more literature and poetry (look for DeLillo’s Falling Man and Coetzee’s Inner Workings), and an overflowing table of history and african-american studies books.

Don’t miss the carts featuring a selection of the very newest remainders (on the carts now: Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil by John Ghazvinian, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion by Maria Misra).

If energy and time allow, head on to the cases of bargain books, where you will find a wonderful mix of mostly used books on every topic, all at excellent prices.

More new remainder titles to watch for while browsing at Book Culture:

What Ed Park’s Students Are Reading

Ed Park, a founding editor of The Believer and author of Personal Days, is currently teaching two classes at Columbia University. He received his M.F.A. at Columbia, and this semester is a lecturer in the graduate writing program. His two courses are The First Person and A Comic Novel. Here’s a look at the required reading for the comic novel class:

Ed Park will be appearing at Book Culture on April 29th with Damion Searls. More info about the event can be found here.