"A fresh, funny take on the search for a soulmate." (People)

Laura Dave has already won adoring fans everywhere from Hollywood to the heartland. Now, with a slew of rave reviews and astute insights about modern love, The First Husband is certain to deliver her breakout success.

Los Angeles–based travel writer Annie Adams thinks she has it all. Nick, her longtime film director boyfriend, has finally hit the big time, her column is syndicated, and they've got a great dog. Then Nick moves out. Three months later, Annie is married to Griffin, a down-to-earth chef with a restaurant in the Berkshires. When Nick asks for a second chance, Annie is torn between her husband and the man she might have been meant to marry.

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"One of the most absorbing, chilling, beautifully written &
important novels I've read in many years." (Alice Walker)

Before she met Il-sun in an orphanage, Gi was a hollow husk of a girl, broken from growing up in one of North Korea’s forced-labor camps. A mathematical genius, she has learned to cope with pain by retreating into a realm of numbers and calculations, an escape from both the past and present. Gi becomes enamored of the brash and radiant Il-sun, a friend she describes as “all woman and springtime.” But Il-sun’s pursuit of a better life imperils both girls when her suitor spirits them across the Demilitarized Zone and sells them as sex workers, first in South Korea and then in the United States.

This spellbinding debut, reminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha, depicts—with chilling accuracy—life behind North Korea’s iron curtain. But for Gi and Il-sun, forced into the underworld of human trafficking, their captivity outside North Korea is far crueler than the tight control of their “Dear Leader.” Tenderhearted Gi, just on the verge of womanhood, is consigned to a fate that threatens not only her body but her mind. How she and Il-sun endure, how they find a path to healing, is what drives this absorbing and exquisite novel—from an exciting young Algonquin discovery—to its perfectly imagined conclusion.

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 Finally back in print, Any Similarity is a collection of Drew Friedman’s earliest comic strips and illustrations, featuring his most obsessively stippled black-and-white panels and his most hilarious wise-guy takes on the stars and demi-stars and never-quite-stars of that swamp we like to call showbiz.

In these strips, many of them written by his brother Josh Alan Friedman (both are sons of the legendary Bruce Jay Friedman: humor genes will tell!), the artist works out his obsession with such celebrities as Jim Nabors, Frank Sinatra Jr., Joe Franklin, Bob Hope, Andy Griffith, and Ed Wood, Jr. film star Tor Johnson, whom Friedman actually catapulted back into some sort of semi-fame when these strips were first published in the 1980s.

Friedman is the kind of pop-culture aficionado whose Three Stooges worship is focused not on Moe, Larry or Curly but on Shemp (whose unmistakable mug graces the new cover of this edition), and whose teasing adoration can often be mistaken for mockery or contempt. But who but a worshipful fan would lavish quite so many dots on the loving delineation of these greats’ every pimple and wrinkle?

 $27.50 adv, $35 dos

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 A good marriage lasts forever... until it doesn’t.

From the start, Lynn and Jamie Prosper were one of those couples who seem meant to be—so content with each other that they barely notice the rest of the world nodding approvingly at their wedded bliss. But sometimes, even in the very best of marriages, all it takes is a mischievous outsider to bring the perfect couple toppling off the top of the wedding cake… True, Jamie has been working so hard and traveling so much as a young lawyer that he hardly has enough energy to show his devotion. Not that Lynn, a junior museum curator, has any reason to question it. But when Lynn’s old college friend turns up at a cocktail party, chinks in their marriage’s previously unassailable armor start to show.

Suddenly, without meaning to, Lynn and Jamie have both acquired divorce lawyers. And those benevolent onlookers—meddling in-laws and competitive friends alike—eagerly bear witness to each new misstep. Is love really enough to make a marriage last? 

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 An enigmatic and surprisingly successful politician, Texas Representative Ron Paul is unique among Republican candidates. He has strong traditional conservative bona fides: he supports cutting taxes, shrinking government spending, cracking down on illegal immigration, and outlawing abortion. But he is an equally passionate advocate for such seemingly progressive-left stances as ending the drug war, opposing military interventions in the Middle East, abolishing the PATRIOT Act, and constraining the Federal Reserve.

Despite such seeming contradictions, he has represented his conservative Texas district for twelve terms now, on and off since 1976, and has twice won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where the right wing's most energetic young activists gather, in 2010 and 2011.

Paul has been condemned across the political and media spectrums as an unbearably radical kook since rising to national prominence with his 2008 presidential bid. But to his growing number of activist supporters, he is the only national politician standing for the Founding Fathers' vision of constitutional liberty. He has touched a constantly growing number of government skeptics who see the political status quo as increasingly unsustainable. In the early days of the 2012 primary season, Paul is capturing a surprising number of votes, highlighting a division between libertarians and big-government conservatism that will define the future of both the Republican Party and American politics.

In this indispensable guide, journalist Brian Doherty details Paul's career, traces the evolution of his ideas, and explores his significance in American politics. Ron Paul's rEVOLution introduces us to Paul's revolutionary ideological armies, many of them Americans previously divorced from the political process because they believe no one speaks for them. The Paul Revolution is a rising generation of cross-partisan activists concerned with government overreach. These supporters see this freethinking, plain-talking iconoclast as the lone leader prepared to grapple radically with the realities of a government crippled by debt that has dramatically expanded domestically and overseas.

 $35 adv, $40 dos, $85 Golden Idol tickets, $120 The Crystal Skull tickets

 A modern homage to William S. Burrough’s classic Junky, the new novel Drugs is the sparse, beautifully unassuming account of one man’s life of drug use.

As Robert Crumb, who illustrated the book jacket, says, “J. R. Helton really speaks to me—starkly honest, darkly funny, acutely observant, and captures the tragic absurdity of human life... [H]e’s right up there with the best of them.”

This fictionalized memoir is told in masterfully wry, Spartan prose with no apologies for a drug-user’s lifestyle, and instead looks back on it with clever insight and an appreciation for everything felt and observed. With self-awareness and conviction, Helton avoids the sensationalist commentary so common to drug memoirs and instead favors the honest details, the effects of each drug on his body and on his soul. The result is a sincerely told tale of adventure, debauchery, and absurdity. 

 $35 adv, $40 dos, $85 Golden Idol tickets, $120 The Crystal Skull tickets

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 $35 adv, $40 dos, $85 Golden Idol tickets, $120 The Crystal Skull tickets

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 $19 child, $32.50 senior, $40.50 adult

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