Twelve Books Still Looking for Homes

We've already posted the top-selling books from our first and second years in business, but booksellers often have a particular affection for some of the books at the other end of the spectrum: the good books that are still waiting to find the right home. Here are twelve books that we've had in the store since we opened—all of them acclaimed, all of which we'd recommend as highly as any others we have—that, for one reason or another, have yet to sell a copy in the two years since we opened.

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Money by Martin Amis

Amis at his most gleefully scabrous. In other words, his best.

The Journals of John Cheever

Anguished, sad, funny, and as finely observed as his classic stories.

What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer

The 1988 campaign (Bush-Dukakis!) might seem an unlikely subject for a 1,000-page book that many consider the finest on modern politics.

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Gaitskill's first collection of stories holds up as well as ever, for its frankness, its style, its willingness to wade into the depths of human behavior—bad and otherwise.

Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Edmond & Jules de Goncourt

I chose this as an Old Book of the Week and have quoted from it in our diary slot a couple of times, but no one yet has taken home this biting, snobby, observant, and compulsively readable record of decades of Paris artistic life.

The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam

The Portland Trailblazers' '79-'80 season was a dud, as the team that won the title three years before slowly drifted apart, except that it became the subject of one of the best books on professional sports (in which the money and fame at stake seem almost quaint by now).

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

We made Jones's first story collection, Lost in the City, a Phinney by Post pick last year, but his second collection is every bit as good as a complex and human portrait of Washington, D.C.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Quite a few folks spotted LeBlanc's acclaimed portrait of poverty in the Bronx when we made it one of our first cover quiz subjects, but perhaps everyone has a copy at home already.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

A great, quiet novel by the perennially rediscovered British master.

Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson

Choosing this as an Old Book of the Week wasn't enough to get any of Robinson's many fans to try her nearly forgotten nonfiction book on nuclear power and the welfare state in Britain.

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

It took us most of a year after we opened to sell any Philip Roth. A few copies (mostly of my favorite, The Ghost Writer) have found homes since, but not yet this one, one of his most inventive, funny, and challenging.

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss

We have a whole shelf of Seuss, where we try to keep almost all his books in stock, but this inventive item, his very first book for kids, has yet to be adopted.