Author: Half Price Books

Behind the Book The Minimalist Home by Joshua Becker

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Popular minimalist blogger and author Joshua Becker provides methodical instruction on how to turn your home from a storage unit into a place of peace, contentment and purposeful living. His new book, The Minimalist Home, helps you to declutter your home and learn how to address the underlying issues that contribute to over-accumulation in the first place. We are delighted he provided us with more insight below! Minimalist Home Book Jacket

Why did you write The Minimalist Home?
I’ve been writing my blog (Becoming Minimalist), teaching minimalism, and speaking about the joys of owning less at conferences around the world for a decade now. And I’ve seen repeatedly, more times than I can recall, that there is an almost magical effect when people right-size the quantity of their possessions—in the process, the people themselves are changed in positive ways. Owning less creates opportunity to live more. I wrote The Minimalist Home to give people a practical guide to help them experience that. At its best, minimalism is about transforming your home so you can transform your life. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Watching You by Lisa Jewell

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Having started her first novel for a bet in 1996, Lisa Jewell has grown into one of the UK’s most beloved and popular fiction authors. Jewell’s writing is addictive, her characters fleshed out and her storylines original. We were thrilled she agreed to write this piece about the inspiration behind her latest novel, Watching You. Read on to discover how this book came to be! Lisa Jewell- Watching You cover

The first glimmer of the genesis of Watching You was a feeling that there seemed to be an awful lot of news stories about very suburban people in very suburban love triangles committing murder. Either the mistress would kill the wife, or the husband would kill the wife, or the wife would kill the mistress or some other combination of the three.

So, if I was to write about suburban love triangles then I needed a suburb, and that was when the book really started to take form in my head; there is a suburb of Bristol in the UK called Clifton which is famous for its high set rows of brightly painted houses. It used to be a rough area, but has become increasingly gentrified over recent years and is now so “chi chi” that it has its own branch of the Ivy (an upscale restaurant chain in the UK). Continue reading →

A Bestseller Flashback- 2018 in Books

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Throughout the year, our buyers curate a selection of new, bestselling books to offer in our stores at 20% off the cover price. Here’s a closer look at some of 2018’s standouts!

melmoth
Melmoth (Sarah Perry)
Melmoth is a full-on gothic horror novel from the author of The Essex Serpent. The story crosses many different time periods and focuses on people who are in the midst of difficult situations. It is primarily centered on Helen Franklin, an English translator working in Prague, who disregards an obscure local monster legend before a friend’s disappearance reveals that Helen is being watched. This particular book asks the question, “What’s the difference between someone who orders a horrific act be done and the person who turns a blind eye towards it?” It’s a very chilling, and at times horrific, book that stays with you. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Diane Setterfield is a magical storyteller. The way she weaves her stories makes readers demand more, more, more! We are delighted to be able to present an in-depth review of the inspiration behind her latest novel, Once Upon a River.

once upon a river cover

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I wrote a novel called The Thirteenth Tale.  People took this book to their hearts in an extraordinary way and I spent over a year travelling to meet readers all over the world. It was a very special time, and when the last trip was done I came home buzzing: so many readers and bookshops, so many cities, countries, continents. What I needed now was to get my feet back on the ground, recalibrate myself for normal life lived at a normal pace. I needed to slow down. I needed a holiday. Continue reading →

Behind the Book- Queen of Air & Darkness by Cassandra Clare

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: From the master of young adult fiction comes the final novel in the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling The Dark Artifices trilogy, Queen of Air and Darkness. This magnificent conclusion to a spellbinding series involves dark secrets and forbidden love, which threaten the very survival of the Shadowhunters. We had the opportunity to catch up with Cassandra Clare and ask her some questions about the series and Shadowhunters.

QueenofAirandDarknessbyCassandraClareCoverHiRes

What first inspired you to write about Shadowhunters?
The idea came to me one afternoon in the East Village. A good friend of mine was taking me to see the tattoo shop where she used to work. She wanted to show me that her footprints were on the ceiling in black paint — in fact the footprints of everyone who’d worked there were on the ceiling, crisscrossing each other and making patterns. To me it looked like some fabulous supernatural battle had been fought there by beings who’d left their footprints behind. I started thinking about a magical battle in a New York tattoo shop and the idea of a secret society of demon hunters whose magic was based on an elaborate system of tattooed runes just sprang into my mind. When I sat down to sketch out the book, I wanted to write something that would combine elements of traditional high fantasy — an epic battle between good and evil, terrible monsters, brave heroes, enchanted swords — and recast it through a modern, urban lens. So you have the Shadowhunters, who are these very classic warriors following their millennia-old traditions, but in these urban, modern spaces: skyscrapers, warehouses, abandoned hotels, rock concerts, thrift stores. In fairy tales, it was the dark and mysterious forest outside the town that held the magic and danger. I wanted to create a world where the city has become the forest — where these urban spaces hold their own enchantments, danger, mysteries and strange beauty. It’s just that only Shadowhunters and Downworlders can see them as they really are. Continue reading →

All Things Printed & Recorded: Ephemera, Etc.

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

EDITOR’S NOTE: This year in our HPB calendar, we’re celebrating all things printed and recorded—and played, solved, watched, etc. In other words, all the cool stuff we buy and sell in our stores. For December, we’re looking at one of our smaller but most interesting product categories: ephemera—miscellaneous printed materials that have become collectible over time. Common examples found in HPB stores include sheet music, postcards and posters.

TIMELIMEsheet music singers
1457  The Mainz Psalter is the first printed book to include music, though the notation is added in by hand. 
1840  The world’s first picture postcard is sent when British writer Theodore Hook mails a self-made card to himself.
1891  Toulouse-Lautrec’s artful poster designs spark a poster craze in Paris.
1917-1918  During World War I, the US government prints 2,500 different posters to aid in the war effort, including the famous “I Want You” recruiting poster featuring Uncle Sam.

DID YOU KNOW?

  • Cheret posterBefore the advent of recording, sheet music dominated the music industry. The late 1800s saw the zenith of “parlor music,” with people gathering around the piano to play and sing the popular songs of the day.
  • “Large letter” postcards, usually printed on linen-textured paper, were popular during the mid-20th century. The style was developed by Chicago-based Curt Teich and Company.
  • In the 1880s, French painter and lithographer Jules Chéret ushered in modern advertising with a new printing process that allowed for brighter colors and more economical mass production of large posters.
  • Psychedelic posters of the 1960s, like the ones produced by The Family Dog, were influenced by Art Nouveau and Surrealism.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these great products!

book A History of Postcards: A Pictorial Record From the Turn of the Century to the Present Day, Martin Willoughby
book Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, David Prochaska & Jordana Mendelson
book Toulouse Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880–1910, Phillip Dennis Cate, et al.
book Toulouse Lautrec: A Life, Julia Frey
slate_film-512 Discovery of Art: Toulouse Lautrec
book World War I Posters: 100th Anniversary Collectors Edition, Edward J. White
book World War II Posters In Color, Philip Martin McCaulay
book Jules Cheret: Artist of the Belle Epoque and Pioneer of Poster Art, Michael Buhrs, et al
book Posters of Jules Cheret: 46 Full Color Plates and Illustrated Catalogue Risonne, Lucy Broido
book High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster, Ted Owen, Denise Dickson & Walter Patrick Medeiros
book Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters From San Francisco, Amelie Gastaut & Jean-Pierre Criqui
slate_film-512 24 X 36: A Movie About Movie Posters
music-note-2 American Classics: Parlor Music Revisited, Daniel Kobialka

Behind the Book: The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Kate Morton is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lake House. Her newest book The Clockmaker’s Daughter is the rich, spellbinding new novel that tells the story of a love affair and a mysterious murder that cast their shadows across generations, set in England from the 1860s until the present day. Special thanks to Sara Rattaro for this insight into what went in to the writing of Kate Morton’s The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

mortonbookcover.png

 How did you manage to intertwine different narrative plans with such ease and without any flaws? How do you write and develop your novels?
I wrote The Clockmaker’s Daughter differently from my other novels. In the past, I have written each chapter in the same order that it appears in the published book; this time, however, I wanted the structure of the novel to support the thematic exploration of time. It was important to me from the start to show the way different layers of time had transpired within a single place. I knew up front that the novel would contain a number of short vignettes – snapshots into the lives of various residents of Birchwood Manor, the house at the novel’s heart – linked together by an over-arching first-person narrative. I wrote the historical vignettes first so that when it came time to write Birdie Bell’s story, I – like she – was privy to the experiences of all of the other characters across time. Because I wrote the past interludes simultaneously, I was better able to glimpse the silvery threads that tied them together.

Continue reading →

Behind the Book: Night of Miracles by Elizabeth Berg

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: For Elizabeth, stories provide both an escape from trouble times and an answer to problems. Her latest novel, Night of Miracles, reflects her desire to remind people of the good things in life. Read on to discover Elizabeth’s take on what has inspired her novels.

When I was nine years old, I wrote and submitted my first poem to American Girl magazine. It was called “Dawn,” and it was a stinker of a poem, even by the most lenient of standards, but it did two things. One was that it got me on the path of buying my father a Cadillac—for I thought surely the poem would be published and I would receive somewhere around a million dollars. Unfortunately, my poem was rejected, and should have been, and I did not get a million dollars, or even the pittance that the real payment must have been. But I got something else. Writing that poem showed me the pleasure of getting what I was feeling inside, out. Continue reading →

Behind the Book: The Keto Reset Diet Cookbook by Mark Sisson

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Mark Sisson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Keto Reset Diet, the groundbreaking ketogenic diet plan that helps to reset your metabolism in 21 days. His newest book, The Keto Reset Diet Cookbook, contains 150 keto-aligned recipes to help you slim down, get healthy and go keto the right way. We had the opportunity to catch up with Mark recently. Read on to discover his thoughts on the Keto craze and what led him to write The Keto Reset Diet Cookbook! Plus, get a sneak peek into some delicious Keto recipes! 

ketoresetdietcookbookbookcover

Confession: Even though I consider myself to be plugged into what’s happening on the cutting edge of nutrition, health and fitness, I was caught off guard by the “keto explosion”— the surge of interest in the ketogenic diet these past few years. The general public and scientific circles can’t stop talking about keto. On the plus side, this has shined a light on the many benefits of a low-carb, real-food way of eating like the one I’ve been writing about for years. On the other hand, it seems like keto came out of nowhere to become the hottest thing around, so it’s being labeled (unfairly) as a fad. Continue reading →

Behind the Book: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray

/ Half Price Books / Leave a comment

The Star Wars fandom can rejoice! Claudia Gray, author of Star Wars novels Lost Stars and Bloodline, has returned to that universe once again, with Leia: Princess of Alderaan which describes how a young Leia first becomes involved in the Rebellion. This Young Adult novel is Leia-centric, focused on the character in her younger years before Han Solo and Luke Skywalker entered her life. Her passion, dedication and the pull of responsibility are just getting honed in this precursor to A New Hope, and the novel in paperback November 6, is sure to excite Leia fans of all ages and genders.

Evernight, Firebird, Constellation, Spellcaster and Star Wars— you truly are the master of multiple genres. How does writing in Star Wars canon differ from creating your own series?
The main difference is that with my original work, the world building is all up to me–but the world of Star Wars is already out there, deeper and more developed than anything I’ve done on my own. The world’s greatest designers have already invented planets, ships, creatures and thousands of years of history. It’s a luxury to be able to call upon that when writing Star Wars books.

How do you do research for novels set in an established universe?
Being a big old nerd who already knows a lot of this stuff just through being a fan–that really helps. Beyond that, I’m able to call on my editors and the whole crew at Lucasfilm to ask questions or look at material that feels important to the story.

bookcoverLeia: Princess of Alderaan is not your first foray into the Star Wars galaxy. What makes it different from Lost Stars or Bloodline?
It’s a true young adult novel, for one–Lost Stars really is only YA in its first half, before the characters age into adulthood. Princess of Alderaan is firmly focused on the coming-of-age experience for Leia, as well as some of the people around her. Also, while Leia was the main character in Bloodline, in that book, readers spent time in the POVs of several other characters, getting a wider look at what was going on in the galaxy in the years before The Force Awakens. Princess of Alderaan stays with Leia the whole way, showing us only her understanding of people and politics—which expands over the course of the book, as she learns more. Continue reading →