The lights are back on! | 05.04.20
Things are changing fast around here. We have some new offerings, and some things remain the same. Here's an overview:
New: Curbside!
We now get to turn our lights back on and offer curbside service! We'll still offer $5 shipping and free deliveries in the best loop. But if you're itching to get out, we'd love trade smiling faces with you at our front door. (Yes, you can see a smile behind a mask. The eyes give it away every time.) To place an order for curbside pick-up, you can do so at madstreetbooks.com, call us at 312-929-4140, or, if you don't mind waiting at the door for us to walk back and forth across the store, you can place an order curbside. If you're jonesing for more personal conversation...
New: Personal FaceTime Appointments
We love offering recommendations over the phone, and we've posted many book recommendations on our 'about us' pages at madstreetbooks.com, but sometimes it's nice to see your reaction to a suggestion. If you'd like to book a special FaceTime appointment with us, go ahead and call the store or send us an email directly. Mary or Javier will get back to you.
New: Curated Bundles for Mother's Day
FaceTime appointment or not, we can help you choose some books for that special mother in your life. Give us an indication of what she likes, and we'll bundle two or more books together. And you'll receive 10% off of all of them. We've already got the brown paper packages in place. Now we'll even tie them in string.
Same: #MadStreetMixers and Virtual Events
Last week we were joined by a Newbery Medal winner from Wichita, Kansas. This week we'll be joined by the director of a press in Edinburgh, Scotland. And we'll always be joined the best of Chicago's literary society. Pour a beverage and join us every Thursday at 7:00 pm for Mad Street Mixers. (And if you missed our first three, you can find the videos and reading lists on our website.)
Same: The Mad Street Challenge
This will continue through the remainder of 2020, so you have plenty of time to read books in all 9 categories. Join through our Facebook group here and share your favorite reads. And here’s a handy printable list so you can keep track of your books.
Thanks for reading,
Mary & Javier
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Upcoming Events
Wednesday, May 6 @ 10 am - Virtual Toddler Jam! through Facebook Live.
Thursday, May 7 @ 7 pm - Mad Street Mixers: Translation Edition. The mixer this week will be moderated by Maryse Meijer, author of the short story collections Rag and Heartbreaker, the novel Northwood and a novel from FSG in the fall, The Seventh Mansion. Our guests include :
- Carolina Orloff, press director and co-founder of Charco Press.
- Catherine Lacey, author of the short story collection Certain American States and the novel Pew which comes out this July.
- Tom Roberge, co-owner of the Riffraff, an independent bookstore/bar in Providence RI and publicist and bookstore liaison at New Directions.
We'll be broadcasting live through the @MadStreetBooks Facebook page. Questions for our panel are encouraged. You may ask them in the comments section during the event, or you can send them in ahead of time here.
Looking ahead to next week, on Thursday, May 14 we'll have a special virtual event through our Facebook Live channel with Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot, and Lindsay Hunter, author of Eat Only When You're Hungry.
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Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman’s Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes. With unwavering empathy and bittersweet humor, and facing some of the most urgent environmental concerns of our time, it is about the resilience of humankind, and the beauty that can emerge from broken things.
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For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power, and desire finally converge in the present day. In Anna Solomon's The Book of V., these characters' riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.
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In All Adults Here, Emma Straub's unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.
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The characters in Samanta Schweblin's new novel reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls—but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love, playful encounters, and marvelous adventure, but what happens when it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror? Schweblin creates a dark and complex world that's somehow so sensible, so recognizable, that once it's entered, no one can ever leave.
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Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost. Told over the course of a single day in 1927, The Paris Hours takes four ordinary people whose stories, told together, are as extraordinary as the glorious city they inhabit.
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In 2010 a Buddhist scroll was found in the ruins of Yankee stadium, and it proved what Buddhist scholar/award-winning author Donald Lopez, Ph.D., had suspected: the Buddha created the game of baseball.
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Through baseball, finance, media, and religion, Beha traces the passing of the torch from the old establishment to the new meritocracy, exploring how each generation’s failure helped land us where we are today.
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New Releases in Paperback
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Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
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A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.
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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
4 3 2 1 is Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself.
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When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself.
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An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.
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Karen Russell's comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories.
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From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.
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Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.
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Combining deep historical research with novelistic flair, The Ghosts of Eden Park is the unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story of a rags-to-riches entrepreneur and a long-forgotten heroine, of the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, and of the infinite human capacity to deceive.
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