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At least we're finished with March. | 04.07.20

If you kept up with us during the months leading up to our store opening, you know that we like to hold events. We hosted close to a dozen before we even opened and had a bunch on the schedule before the shelter-in-place order was issued.

Just as we figured out how to get books into the hands of readers, and recommendations out to quarantine book clubs, we’re actively planning how to best deliver an author experience into your homes. Because while reading a book is fantastic, it’s a completely new experience to listen to an author talk about their art.

We’ve been in communication daily with the powers that be to set up not only an author event, but a book launch and nationwide series of events for Adam Levin’s Bubblegum. The book is scheduled to be published on April 14. We’ll release details about our virtual event next week, but here’s one detail you won’t want to miss, especially if you’re a collector. For the first printing of this book, the dusk jacket smells like bubblegum. If you want one of these first printings, you can preorder the book here.

And since we’ve discovered that so many of you are reading at home, we’re including a fresh batch of releases. We’re dividing them into two groups: hardcover, so you can discover for yourself the next big read, and paperback, perfect for virtual book clubs.

One last thing. If you’d like to purchase through our secure website, you must first create an account on the page. And to remove the unknown, here’s a description of the steps you’ll go through:

At madstreetbooks.com, click on the “Log In” button in the upper right corner, and select “Create An Account”.
You’ll be asked to enter an email address. Once you do, you’ll receive a message guiding you to click on the activation link sent to that email address.
The activation link will take you back to madstreetbooks.com where you will be asked to create a password, and provide your first and last name, phone number, address, and the company or school, if you are buying on their behalf. You’ll also select your preferred method of communication at that time.

That’s it! You’re ready to shop. And remember, shipping is only $1.

You can practice with some of these new releases. They are all featured on the front page of our website.

Thanks for reading,
Mary & Javier

New Releases in Hardcover

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”) tells him she’s facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah’s meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

The intimate bonds and transgressions among people and across racial divides, during both times of slavery and times of freedom, are at the heart of this mesmerizing and surprising first novel. Like her mother, Rue is an all-knowing midwife, healer, and conjurer of curses on the plantation of Marse Charles. Moving back and forth in time between the years before and after the Civil War, Conjure Women tells the story of Rue, the families she cares for, and the mysteries and secrets she knows about the plantation owner’s daughter, Varina.

* Staff Pick *
"Those of you who couldn't put down The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will thoroughly enjoy Hidden Valley Road. Robert Kolker (The Lost Girls) explores the mystery of schizophrenia in the 1960's through the lives of Don and Mimi Galvin, who while raising a family of twelve, ten boys and two girls, realize that as the older siblings start exhibiting strange and unruly behavior that they just couldn't chalk it up as boys being boys. What follows is one family's struggle to deal with a disease nobody could diagnose or treat at the time and the tragic aftermath that still affects the family decades later. Kolker balances the Galvin's struggle with how the scientific community rose to the challenge and changed the way schizophrenia has been dealt with since." - Javier

The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

From the author of Before We Were Yours comes a new novel inspired by historical events: a dramatic story of three young women on a journey in search of family amidst the destruction of the post-Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who rediscovers their story and its vital connection to her own students’ lives. In her distinctive voice, Lisa Wingate brings to life startling stories from actual “Lost Friends” advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold off.

New Releases in Paperback

* Staff Pick *
"What starts out as a child abduction tale in the Kamchatka region of the Russian peninsula veers into the unexpected through the stories of multiple perspectives in this stunning and stylistic debut that was a finalist for The National Book Award in 2019 for fiction." - Javier

When asked simple questions about global trends—why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, statisticians Hans, Anna, and Ola Rosling offer a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective.

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love.

Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other superb books about World War II, has long been admired for his ability to write deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative history. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the first volume of the Revolution Trilogy he tells the story of the first twenty-one months of America’s violent effort to forge a new nation.

The Last Summer of Ada Bloom is an honest and tender accounting of what it means to come of age as a teen, or as an adult. With a keen eye for summer’s languor and danger, and a sharp ear for the wonder, doubt, and longing in each of her characters’ voices, Martine Murray has written a beguiling story about the fragility of family relationships, about the secrets we keep, the power they hold to shape our lives, and about the power of love to somehow hold it all together.

Beautifully illustrated in full color by Gina Triplett, this gorgeous and profound book will charm a generation of students—and their parents. Ward’s inimitable voice shines through as she shares her experience as a Southern black woman and addresses the themes of grit, adversity, and the importance of family bonds. Navigate Your Stars is a perfect gift for anyone in need of inspiration from the author of Salvage the Bones, Men We Reaped, and Sing, Unburied, Sing.

August 1992. One afternoon during a heatwave in a desolate valley somewhere in eastern France, with its dormant blast furnaces and its lake, fourteen-year-old Anthony and his cousin decide to steal a canoe to explore the famous nude beach across the water. The trip ultimately takes Anthony to his first love and a summer that will determine everything that happens afterward. Winner of the 2018 Prix Goncourt, this is a paperback original.