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Together they illuminate a decade's rise and fall; its gods and devils; and a particular hour in American history when many young revellers seeking joy, fellowship and liberation fell under a darker spell, leading to unprovoked and inexplicable violence.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49539536355601,"sku":"GOR003797119","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099512297.jpg?v=1751443474"},{"product_id":"sway-book-zachary-lazar-9780316113090","title":"Sway","description":"\u003cp\u003eA YALSA 2015 Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick \u003cbr\u003eIn Kat Spears's hilarious and often poignant debut, high school senior Jesse Alderman, or Sway, as he's known, could sell hell to a bishop. He also specializes in getting things people want---term papers, a date with the prom queen, fake IDs. He has few close friends and he never EVER lets emotions get in the way. For Jesse, life is simply a series of business transactions. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut when Ken Foster, captain of the football team, leading candidate for homecoming king, and all-around jerk, hires Jesse to help him win the heart of the angelic Bridget Smalley, Jesse finds himself feeling all sorts of things. While following Bridget and learning the intimate details of her life, he falls helplessly in love for the very first time. He also finds himself in an accidental friendship with Bridget's belligerent and self-pitying younger brother who has cerebral palsy. Suddenly, Jesse is visiting old folks at a nursing home in order to run into Bridget, and offering his time to help the less fortunate, all the while developing a bond with this young man who idolizes him. Could the tin man really have a heart after all?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Cyrano de Bergerac story with a modern twist, Sway is told from Jesse's point of view with unapologetic truth and biting humor, his observations about the world around him untempered by empathy or compassion---until Bridget's presence in his life forces him to confront his quiet devastation over a life-changing event a year earlier and maybe, just maybe, feel something again.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49575344537873,"sku":"GOR008644255","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49796152492305,"sku":"CIN0316113093G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50960377020689,"sku":"CIN0316113093A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51334580732177,"sku":"CIN0316113093VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0316113093.jpg?v=1750974024"},{"product_id":"sway-book-zachary-lazar-9780224080880","title":"Sway","description":"By the end of the sixties, 'the decade itself knows that it can never return, that it has only this one chance to live up to its own extremes,' as Zachary Lazar writes in his extraordinary new novel. Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in \"Sway\" - the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers.Lazar illuminates a particular hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Running through all the life stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful Californian boy, who eventually joined the Manson 'family'. In 1969 he appeared - along with the Stones - and various \"Hell's Angels\" - in Anger's film, \"Invocation of My Demon Brother\". In \"Sway\", Bobby is the embodiment of how a rising tide of suppressed conflict and debauchery needed, among other things, real devils, like Manson, and iconic ones, like Mick Jagger, to permit its expression. Many young revellers, expecting only joy and camaraderie from the era's music and communes, fell under a darker spell. Zachary Lazar puts together the pieces of a decade's rise and fall with uncanny conviction and imagination.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49589102805265,"sku":"GOR003759375","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49620050542865,"sku":"GOR002804979","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224080881.jpg?v=1751195528"},{"product_id":"i-pity-the-poor-immigrant-book-zachary-lazar-9780316254052","title":"I Pity the Poor Immigrant","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eThis stunning novel by the author of Sway is another \"brilliant portrayal of life as a legend\" (Margot Livesey).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In 1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, \u003ci\u003eI Pity the Poor Immigrant\u003c\/i\u003e is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49607713653009,"sku":"GOR009542774","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347895521553,"sku":"CIN0316254053G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51083852316945,"sku":"NIN9780316254052","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0316254053.jpg?v=1751390087"},{"product_id":"apartment-on-calle-uruguay-book-zachary-lazar-9781646221110","title":"The Apartment on Calle Uruguay","description":"\u003cb\u003eLonglisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA haunting new novel by the author of \u003ci\u003eVengeance\u003c\/i\u003e in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBeginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time. He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, a rural nowhere...that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to reinvent herself as the kind of person she'd been before the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories--from the death of Bell's former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika's incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana's exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of home vanishes or becomes unrecognizable. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Apartment on Calle Uruguay \u003c\/i\u003eis a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49657216794897,"sku":"GOR013218028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49992595702033,"sku":"CIN1646221117G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52764369781009,"sku":"NIN9781646221110","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1646221117.jpg?v=1751343259"},{"product_id":"aaron-approximately-book-zachary-lazar-9780060392116","title":"Aaron, Approximately","description":"It starts with my family, of course. Childhood, adolescence, the American way of sorting out what is real from what is not. My family was credulous, idealistic, odd, old-fashioned. I trained myself to be otherwise. The result has been a kind of tetherball existence, an orbiting around the parental pole with more speed than grace, more movement than progress. \u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e Aaron, Approximately, \u003c\/em\u003efirst-time novelist Zachary Lazar's uniquely poignant coming-of-age novel, tells with heart-wrenching clarity the story of Aaron Bright, a fiercely intelligent and resilient young man struggling toward self-acceptance, identity, and human connection in the aftermath of his father's death. When 26-year-old Aaron's relationship with his girlfriend, Clarisse, threatens to crumble, he revisits the trials of his past in an attempt to unearth the root of his lifelong alienation. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAaron, Approximately\u003c\/em\u003e powerfully details the narrator's moving and often darkly humorous journey out of isolation and self-doubt and into adulthood. The Horace and Waldo Show is the most popular children's television hour in Colorado, but being the only son of Horace Bright, the show's top-hat-and-purple-tuxedo-wearing clown, is a dubious honor for eight-year-old Aaron. When the local radio station's resident shock jock comically spoofs Horace's show as a front for sexual misconduct, Aaron is ruthlessly ostracized by his peers. In a last-ditch attempt at positive publicity, Horace challenges the deejay to a parachute jump. But when the stunt ends in tragedy, Aaron is thrust prematurely into the adolescent sphere of dislocation, insecurity, and rebellion, struggling to find his way without his father. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntelligent, sensitive, and profoundly concerned with issues of identity, Aaron turns himself into a would-be clown, wearing strange vintage clothing and cracking jokes to hide his uneasiness, as he first rejects but ultimately comes to understand his inextricable link to his dead father.When Aaron's mother later remarries, proving she has escaped the torment of loneliness caused by Horace's death, Aaron is confronted by his core dilemma: Should he conform to his mother's wishes, sacrifice the comfort of his insular life, and move beyond his rage and self-pity, or should he continue to live in his self-styled world of purposeful isolation and boundless cynicism? Only by facing up to the reality of his situation can Aaron break free of his lifelong pattern of alienation and confusion. And only then will he be able to salvage his relationship with Clarisse.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Portrayed with both humor and compassion, Zachary Lazar's Aaron Bright searches for answers to the questions that plague us all. An outsider from the very start, the hilariously endearing yet overwhelmingly conflicted Aaron shows us what it is like to need attention so desperately that one would sabotage both family and love to satisfy its call. \u003cem\u003eAaron, Approximately\u003c\/em\u003e rings with the truth of what it means to have grown up at the tail end of the 20th century and marks Zachary Lazar's debut as a refreshing and profoundly intelligent new voice in American fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49810871288081,"sku":"CIN0060392118G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0060392118.jpg?v=1750693697"},{"product_id":"sway-book-zachary-lazar-9780316113113","title":"Sway","description":"Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary novel, Sway -- the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. 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Despite its powerful social critique, \u003ci\u003eVengeance\u003c\/i\u003e is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority. --Katy Waldman, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King's life--paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin--the writer's own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the free people while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as I just need to get out of here. The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. \u003ci\u003eVengeance\u003c\/i\u003e, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402640625937,"sku":"CIN1936787776G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51228080144657,"sku":"GOR010069084","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1936787776.jpg?v=1751438056"},{"product_id":"evening-s-empire-book-zachary-lazar-9780316037693","title":"Evening's Empire","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eWhen he was just six years old, Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, was shot dead by hit men in a Phoenix, Arizona parking garage. The year was 1975, a time when, according to the \u003ci\u003eArizona Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \"land-fraud artists roamed the state in sharp suits, gouging money from buyers and investors.\" How did his father fit into this world and how could his son ever truly understand the man, his time and place, and his motivations?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In Evening's Empire, Zachary Lazar, whose novel Sway was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by \u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e, and other publications, brilliantly attempts to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to his father's murder.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e How did Ed Lazar, a fun-loving but meticulous accountant, become involved in a multi-million dollar real-estate scandal involving politicians and Mafia figures? How much did he know about his colleagues' illegal activities? Why had he chosen to testify against his former business partner, Ned Warren, Sr.? Warren was \"a mystery man,\" according to \u003ci\u003e60 Minutes\u003c\/i\u003e, widely known as \"the Godfather of land fraud.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The day before Ed Lazar was scheduled to appear in front of a grand jury he was killed in a \"gangland-style murder,\" as reported by Walter Cronkite on the \u003ci\u003eCBS Evening News\u003c\/i\u003e. Four hundred mourners attended a memorial service for him the next day. \u003ci\u003eEvening's Empire\u003c\/i\u003e is based on archival research and interviews -- introducing a cast of characters as various as Senator Barry Goldwater and Cesar Romero -- and is clarified by scenes imagined in the context of this evidence. It is a singular and haunting story of American ambition and its tragic cost.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Of Zachary Lazar's previous book, Sway, the reviewer for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e wrote, \"This brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows.\" The same can be said of \u003ci\u003eEvening's Empire's\u003c\/i\u003e true story, but here the shadows are very close to home.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50463140741393,"sku":"CIN0316037699G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50761795174673,"sku":"CIN0316037699VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000980439313,"sku":"NIN9780316037693","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0316037699.jpg?v=1750738728"},{"product_id":"evening-s-empire-book-zachary-lazar-9780316037686","title":"Evening's Empire","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen he was just six years old, Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, was shot dead by hit men in a Phoenix, Arizona parking garage. 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The day before Ed Lazar was scheduled to appear in front of a grand jury he was killed in a gangland-style murder, as reported by Walter Cronkite on the \u003cem\u003eCBS Evening News\u003c\/em\u003e. Four hundred mourners attended a memorial service for him the next day. \u003cem\u003eEvening's Empire\u003c\/em\u003e is based on archival research and interviews--introducing a cast of characters as various as Senator Barry Goldwater and Cesar Romero--and is clarified by scenes imagined in the context of this evidence. It\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003eis a singular and haunting story of American ambition and its tragic cost.\u003cbr\u003e Of Zachary Lazar's previous book, \u003cem\u003eSway\u003c\/em\u003e, the reviewer for \u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e wrote, This brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows. 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