The Concord Bookshop - Established 1940

This is a story of one year in the life of a New England country vet and his family told in a journal-entry format that works surprisingly well to convey a warm, caring, yet distinctly masculine voice.

Ms. Murphy humorously and unsentimentally captures the marriage and family dynamic and though a lot happens in this spare, 220-page paperback original some of my favorite parts are those that depict their day to day life.

~Jill

This quiet meditative book can be used as a field guide for spiritual awareness. Barbara Taylor, an ordained Episcopal priest, reflects on living in the here and now. Among others, she cites the poet Rumi, the Old and New Testaments, Buddha, and Thoreau, in showing how there are altars everywhere. The wilderness chapter on the “holy art of being lost” is particularly engaging. Reverend Taylor currently teaches religion at Piedmont College in Georgia.

~Carolyn

This slim volume was awarded the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow award (by a panel including Phillip Roth) and for good reason -- in just over 100 pages, with sparse prose, he expresses more than lesser writers do in their entire careers. If I were forced to make a pretentious distinction between fiction and literature, I would say that not only is DeLillo in the latter category, he is at the very top of it (when it comes to writers currently publishing).

Point Omega, like every other work by this master writer, is a novel of ideas that helps us to make sense of modern life. It both carries you along and demands that your mind actually does some work while reading. Being that it is so packed with meaning, you will want to savor it and may even be compelled to read it several times!

~Dave

Markson's novel may seem to be simply a long and rambling stretch of monologue, jam packed with pretentious allusions to painters and philosophers, but the purpose of framing the novel in such a juvenile and showy way is as sophisticated as it is ostensibly simplistic. These allusions are offered freely until they are eventually jumbled and confused in the mind of our unreliable narrator. Perhaps this is hinting that the "white noise" (as novelist Don DeLillo put it) of information we are constantly receiving gives even the most educated only a scattered understanding of our cultural history. The protagonist, alone on earth, often writes messages in the sand of the beach and streets of the city, in the hope that someone else will see it -- Markson likens these messages to the sum of what western culture has produced. The messages will be washed away by the rain and ocean, just as our seemingly permanent and all-important culture will be washed away by Time.

~Dave

A middle-aged woman dreams of being courted by Prince William; another fantasizes about being murdered as a dramatic ending to a stagnant marriage; still another teaches swimming lessons on her kitchen floor to eighty-year-olds in search of companionship. In this wonderful first collection, Miranda July writes convincingand compassionate stories of characters whose fantasies of happiness and intimacy are rarely satisfied by reality. Their sixteen stories of loneliness and longing are funny and honest, though July never fails to surprise with odd plot turns and charmingly bizarre fantasies. Though she writes beautifully, it is July's sharp wit and surprising humor that make me love this collection. These stories are profound, slyly witty, and ultimately uplifting, but never quite in the way you expect.

~Katie

If you think this is one of those urban-couple-heads-for-the-country-and-creates-an-idyllic-pastoral-life-and-makes-it-sound-easy, you’d be a little bit right. But this is so much more than that.

Kessler, a novelist, brings a literary sensibility to this memoir that, beyond acquiring a few goats and learning to make cheese, touches on the pastoral songs of herders, the teamwork involved in haying, Thomas Merton, monastery bells and the sex life of goats!

~Jill