New This Week

Updates from Harvard Book Store

With the new year, we are once again bringing stacks upon stacks of new releases to our shelves each week—including new titles this week from Kevin Barry, George Saunders, and Angie Thomas.

We offer contactless curbside pickup for your online and phone orders, and we are open for shopping daily, 10am to 6pm. However you choose to shop, come browse our virtual "front tables" with this week's new arrivals, including the latest new releases in fiction, nonfiction, scholarly, new-to-paperback titles, and books for kids & young adults.

Featured New Releases

With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. His latest book, That Old Country Music, is a collection of stories that "conjures a dark and richly textured world haunted by history. Read slowly and savor,” writes Vulture.

From Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, author of the “propulsive and mesmerizing” (New York Times Book Review) Things We Lost in the Fire comes The Dangers of Smoking in Bed—a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, earning comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.

New novels this week include Summerwater by Sarah Moss, a devastating story of subtle menace, set in a small Scottish village; Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, which "insists on the psychic and social commonalities of cis and trans experience," writes The Guardian; and Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery The House on Vesper Sands—which writer Helen MacDonald calls "funny, eerie, tender, haunting and unsettling, smokily atmospheric, and fantastically enjoyable."

Find these titles and much more new fiction and poetry this week.

"To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works," writes George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December. In his latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders presents a masterclass in literature, guiding the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he’s been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy argues that "the greatest deliberative body in the world" has hijacked our democracy. Aftershocks is a memoir by Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through—in the tradition of The Glass Castle. In First Platoon, Pulitzer finalist Annie Jacobsen investigates warfare in the age of biometrics and the new technologies that allow the government to identify anyone, anywhere, at any time. In Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, Frank Wilczek—winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics—reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world.

We also have harrowing Arctic expeditions in Icebound, a masterclass in the southern civil rights movement with Julian Bond's Time to Teach, and three new memoirs: Pedro's Theory considers the many Pedros living in many Americas, Dog Flowers follows a daughter returning home to the Navajo reservation, and W-3 by Bette Howland, a new edition of the 1974 memoir by the author of the acclaimed collection Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. Browse these and more new nonfiction titles arriving on our shelves this week.

And among our new scholarly titles, you'll find Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations by Yale historian Odd Arne Westad. It's a concise overview of the deep and longstanding ties between China and the Koreas, providing an essential foundation for understanding East Asian geopolitics today.

A slew of revered 2020 titles is arriving in paperback this winter, including works by Gish Jen, Walter Mosley, Garth Greenwell, Melinda Gates, among many others.

International phenomenon Angie Thomas, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning young adult novels The Hate U Give and On the Come Up revisits Garden Heights in her third novel. Concrete Rose is set seventeen years before the events of The Hate U Give; it's a searing and poignant exploration of Black boyhood and manhood.

Also new in our kids and young adult section you'll find Tales from the Hinterland by Melissa Albert, a gorgeously illustrated collection of twelve original stories by the bestselling author of The Hazel Wood and The Night Country, plus the memoir The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a new edition adapted for young adult readers, and more.

Our Next Ticketed Event

Tue, Jan 26, 2020 at 7PM ET

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes Golden Globe–winning, internationally renowned actor Gabriel Byrne for a discussion of his highly anticipated memoir, Walking with Ghosts. He will be joined in conversation by acclaimed, bestselling novelist Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Let the Great World Spin.

Ticketing: All tickets include a hardcover copy of Walking with Ghosts and a bookplate signed by the author. Learn more and register here.

Upcoming Virtual Events

Upcoming Events

Tom Vanderbilt with Faith Salie Jan 12
Jane Smiley with Margot Livesey Jan 13
Jeanne Theoharis and Pam Horowitz with Vann R. Newkirk II Jan 14
Gary Taubes with Gretchen Rubin Jan 15

And Later This Month

Jenny Offill with Catherine Lacey Jan 19
Tyler Stovall Jan 20
Gabriel Byrne with Colum McCann Jan 26

All Upcoming Events

Thank you for supporting Harvard Book Store!

Harvard Book Store is locally owned and independently run, and has been since 1932. Your purchases support the future of this independent bookstore. Shop our shelves from home and learn more about curbside pickup and mailout services at harvard.com.