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On September 10, Presse Bookstore will throw a benefit for Action Against Hunger at our store and online. A good portion of the proceeds of our in-store and online sales will be donated to help people around the world, especially in Pakistan, Haiti, Chad, the West Bank, Niger and many other countries. Join us during Fashion's Night Out in Georgetown from 6 to 11 p.m. or order online anytime on September 10!

 

 

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of “woman” and to postulate on the power of sexuality.

Sixty years after its initial publication, The Second Sex is still as eye-opening and pertinent as ever. This long-awaited new translation pays particular attention to the existentialist terms and French nuances that may have been misconstrued in the first English edition, and reinstates significant portions of the “Myths” and “History” chapters, including Beauvoir’s accounts of more than seventy historical female figures that were originally cut due to length.

A groundbreaking exploration of woman as “other,” The Second Sex is a document that continues to provoke and inspire, continually and dramatically revising the way women talk and think about themselves.

20% off in store purchase before September 10 - $32.00

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Sunday, September 19 Two Booksignings!
1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.

Lori Tharps, author of Substitute Me reads and signs her novel at Presse Bookstore

Lori L. Tharps is the author of Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain, named by Salon.com as one of their top ten books for 2008, and the co-author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. She is an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, where she makes her home with her husband and family. She doesn’t have a nanny.

A fresh, fun, view of "the help" from a writer to watch. -- Benilde Little, author of Good Hair

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Wednesday
September 29

7:00 to 8:30 p.m.

Meet Ellen Crosby at the Georgetown Club

Tickets on sale September 2

Join us for a reception and book signing with the author of the Viognier Vendetta, a mystery set right here in Washington, DC, written by bestselling author Ellen Crosby! Tickets cost $45.00 for the reception and a signed copy of the hardcover book. Purchase before September 16 and save $10!

Hear more from Ellen about The Viognier Vendetta and another one of her five books, The Riesling Retribution at Simon & Schuster.

The Sonderberg Case (Hardcover)

$25.00
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Description


From the Nobel laureate and author of the masterly Night, a deeply felt, beautifully written novel of morality, guilt, and innocence.

Despite personal success, Yedidyah—a theater critic in New York City, husband to a stage actress, father to two sons—finds himself increasingly drawn to the past. As he reflects on his life and the decisions he’s made, he longingly reminisces about the relationships he once had with the men in his family (his father, his uncle, his grandfather) and the questions that remain unanswered. It’s a feeling that is further c

Product Details ISBN-10: 0307272206
ISBN-13: 9780307272201
Published: Knopf
Pages: 192

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Hardcover)

By James Baldwin, Randall Kenan (Introduction by)
$26.95
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The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form.
 
James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; t

Product Details ISBN-10: 0307378829
ISBN-13: 9780307378828
Published: Pantheon
Pages: 336

I Curse the River of Time (Hardcover)

$23.00
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An enthralling novel of a mother and son's turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing Horses

It is 1989: Communism is crumbling, and Arvid Jansen, thirtyseven, is facing his first divorce. At the same time, his mother gets diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told

Product Details ISBN-10: 1555975569
ISBN-13: 9781555975562
Published: Graywolf Press
Pages: 224

Ninth Ward (Hardcover)

$15.99
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Twelve-year-old Lanesha lives in a tight-knit community in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. She doesn't have a fancy house like her uptown family or lots of friends like the other kids on her street. But what she does have is Mama Ya-Ya, her fiercely loving caretaker, wise in the ways of the world and able to predict the future. So when Mama Ya-Ya's visions show a powerful hurricane--Katrina--fast approaching, it's up to Lanesha to call upon the hope and strength Mama Ya-Ya has given her to help them both survive the storm.

Ninth Ward is a deeply emotional story about transformati

Product Details ISBN-10: 0316043079
ISBN-13: 9780316043076
Published: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Pages: 224

Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life (Paperback)

$14.99
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Cold Tangerines---now available in softcover---is a collection of stories and ideas about the life of celebration that God gives you. This book offers a vision of life as a collection of bright and varied glimpses of hope and redemption and celebration, in and among the heartbreak and boredom and broken glass.

Product Details ISBN-10: 0310329302
ISBN-13: 9780310329305
Published: Zondervan
Pages: 250

Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Hardcover)

$35.00
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The definitive history of the infamous scandal that shook a nation and stunned the world

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Over the following years, attempts to correct this injustice tore France apart, inflicting wounds on the society which have never fully healed.

But how did a fairly obscure miscarriage of justice come to break up families in bitterness, set off anti-Semitic riots across the French empire, and nearly trigger a coup d'état? How did a v

Product Details ISBN-10: 0805074716
ISBN-13: 9780805074710
Published: Metropolitan Books
Pages: 560

Broken Glass (Paperback)

$13.95
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Alain Mabanckou's riotous new novel centers on the patrons of a run-down bar in the Congo. In a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering, a former schoolteacher and bar regular nicknamed Broken Glass has been elected to record their stories for posterity. But Broken Glass fails spectacularly at staying out of trouble as one denizen after another wants to rewrite history in an attempt at making sure his portrayal will properly reflect their exciting and dynamic lives. Despondent over this apparent triumph of self-delusion over self-awareness, Broken Glass drowns his

Product Details ISBN-10: 1593762739
ISBN-13: 9781593762735
Published: Soft Skull Press
Pages: 176

French Grammar Made Easy (Paperback)

$19.95
Special Order - Subject to Availability
Product Details ISBN-10: 0340900946
ISBN-13: 9780340900949
Published: Oxford University Press, USA
Pages: 176

Freedom Summer (Hardcover)

$27.95
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A majestic history of the summer of '64, which forever changed race relations in America

In the summer of 1964, with the civil rights movement stalled, seven hundred college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters, teach in Freedom Schools, and live in sharecroppers' shacks. But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom.

This remarkable chapter in American history, the basis for the controversial film Mississippi Burning,

Product Details ISBN-10: 0670021709
ISBN-13: 9780670021703
Published: Viking Adult
Pages: 384

The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, a Life (Hardcover)

$27.50
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One of the Western world's most epic uprisings, the French Revolution brought an end to an absolute monarchy that had ruled for almost a thousand years. And George-Jacques Danton was a driving force behind it. In the first biography of Danton in over forty years, the historian David Lawday reveals the tragic, larger-than-life figure who joined the fray at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 at age twenty-nine and was dead five years later. Danton's booming voice was a perpetual roll of thunder that-excited bourgeois reformers and the mobs alike; his impassioned speeches, often hours long, dro

Product Details ISBN-10: 0802119336
ISBN-13: 9780802119339
Published: Grove Press
Pages: 294

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth (Hardcover)

$27.00
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One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West.

 

She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a te

Product Details ISBN-10: 1416540423
ISBN-13: 9781416540427
Published: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 320

La Verdadera Historia De Malinche (Paperback)

$16.95
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A woman who played an active and powerful role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Malinche was an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for Hernán Cortés. She was also a mistress to Cortés and gave birth to his first son Martín Cortés. It through the letters from mother to son, that the author constructs this vivid tale about the woman behind the myth.

Product Details ISBN-10: 0307393216
ISBN-13: 9780307393210
Published: Plaza y Janes
Pages: 192

Glorious (Paperback)

$15.95
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"The seeming inevitability of cruel fate juxtaposes the triumph of the spirit in this remarkably rich and powerful novel, Glorious. Bernice McFadden's fully realized characters are complicated, imperfect beings, but if ever a character were worthy of love and honor, it is her Easter Bartlett. This very American story is fascinating; it is also heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and beautifully written."—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

"Riveting. . . . I am as impressed by its structural strength as by the searing and expertly imagined scenes.”&

Product Details ISBN-10: 1936070111
ISBN-13: 9781936070114
Published: Akashic Books
Pages: 240

Powder Necklace (Paperback)

$15.00
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To protect her daughter from the fast life and bad influences of London, her mother sent her to school in rural Ghana. The move was for the girl’s own good, in her mother’s mind, but for the daughter, the reality of being the new girl, the foreigner-among-your-own-people, was even worse than the idea.

During her time at school, she would learn that Ghana was much more complicated than her fellow ex-pats had ever told her, including how much a London-raised child takes something like water for granted. In Ghana, water “became a symbol of who had and who didn’t, who

Product Details ISBN-10: 1439126100
ISBN-13: 9781439126103
Published: Washington Square Press
Pages: 304

Five Hundred Buildings of Paris

Five hundred buildings of Paris

Available for Pre-Order Now Publication Date: September 15 

Five hundred stunning duotone photographs showcase the finest, most majestic, and interesting examples of architecture in one of the world's most beloved cities

The greatest buildings, monuments, and structures of Paris come to life in these inspiring, neighborhood-by-neighborhood photographic tours. Each building is featured in a rich, fine-resolution duotone photograph. Information including the building's name, its address and location, and year of completion or renovation is included underneath the image. A brief description of each building, which highlights its distinctive features and places it in historical context, is included at the back of the book.


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About Kathy Borrus

Kathy Borrus is the former buyer of the Smithsonian Institution.  Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other publications.  She lives in Washington, DC.

Coming Soon - Presse will host Kathy Borrus for a book signing in October

$19.95
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