{"title":"Preorder","description":"\u003cp\u003eOrder your upcoming releases through Lot 49 Books. We offer in-store and Center City pickup, and offer shipping to most places. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCheck back for regularly updated lists of Preorders, or see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/lotfortynine.com\/pages\/request-book\" title=\"Request-A-Book\"\u003eRequest-A-Book\u003c\/a\u003e page to make a special request. \u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"a-table-for-fortune-box-set-pre-order","title":"*Pre-Order* A Table For Fortune Box Set","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003ePre Order\u003c\/em\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBook release is slated for March 3rd, 2026\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Table for Fortune\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003e, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts from the balcony-level of history the last half-century of American politics, war, and life. At once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic, this 3,000+ page, four-part novel may be our most ambitious writer's most ambitious work.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eParts 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past -- Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses -- to form a vivid and mesmeric epic centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSpanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together -- with Vollmann's trademark generous wit and Olympian prose -- a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Not since \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eWar and Peace\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eElliott and Matthew Stevens are \"passengers within a divine bullet,\" which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44507107229878,"sku":null,"price":199.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/atableforfortuneboxset.jpg?v=1768604384"},{"product_id":"my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein-a-fiction","title":"*Pre-Order* My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude Stein: a subversive imagining of a truly subversive female artist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva’s cat is missing―also, she wonders, where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the facts: Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, “an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new―an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063356776630,"sku":"9780374602079","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780374602079.jpg?v=1776355408"},{"product_id":"one-leg-on-earth-a-novel","title":"*Pre-Order* One Leg on Earth: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the author of the National Book Award finalist Ghostroots, a debut novel that thrills with its eerie mix of folklore and history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe lonely daughter of a distant mother, Yosoye arrives in Lagos ready to change her life. Weeks after she begins an internship at a fancy architectural firm, she discovers she is pregnant. Yosoye is joyful―a new life brings the hope of connection and companionship.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut an inexplicable force is haunting the pregnant women of Lagos. As construction speeds ahead on the firm’s glossy new development on land reclaimed from the ocean, stories of the uncanny deaths in the city’s open waters reach a fever pitch. Yosoye finds herself stalked by a presence she can neither ignore nor appease―without risking her unborn baby and her precarious hopes for the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn One Leg on Earth, ‘Pemi Aguda turns the question of who belongs in a city into an arresting exploration of what it means to be a mother in an unforgiving world, and a haunting vision of the dark side of progress.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063356940470,"sku":"9781324065876","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9781324065876.jpg?v=1776355408"},{"product_id":"how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius-what-architects-stuntwomen-paleoanthropologists-and-computer-scientists-reveal-about-the-world-s-game","title":"*Pre-Order* How To Watch Soccer Like a Genius: What Architects, Stuntwomen, Paleoanthropologists, and Computer Scientists Reveal About the World’s Game","description":"\u003cp\u003eA brilliant and entertaining deconstruction of the most popular sport in the world, just in time for the 2026 World Cup in North America, from the bestselling author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter reading this fun book, you’ll never look at soccer the same way again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius, Nick Greene calls on a turf manager, an expert on color theory, and a landscape historian to understand the field itself, a paleoanthropologist to talk kicking, and an Anglican priest to explain schisms―how American football, soccer, and rugby could all develop from the field games of rowdy 19th-century British schoolboys.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGreene delves deep into what defines the game, how it developed, and what happens during a match’s 90 minutes (and then some). His expert commentators include a domino toppler, a developmental neuroscientist, an art historian, a civil engineer, and more.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the surface, soccer seems like the simplest of games: one ball, two teams, two goals, and (preferably) some grass. There’s a reason it’s the first team sport little kids learn to play. But the closer you look, the more you dig into the game’s history, the more infinitely complex and complex the picture becomes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063356874934,"sku":"9781419777172","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9781419777172.jpg?v=1776355408"},{"product_id":"john-of-john-a-novel","title":"*Pre-Order* John of John: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003e“Douglas Stuart is a genius.”—Washington Post\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOut of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft where he grew up and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn't the only one in the croft house keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart's reputation as one of our greatest working novelists.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063356907702,"sku":"9780802167194","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780802167194.jpg?v=1776355408"},{"product_id":"five","title":"Five","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn offering of five unbelievably daring and masterful novellas from the unstoppable genius César Aira\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFive, selected from over 100 untranslated novels and stories by “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer), brings together―each an astonishing work―Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill. Following a cast of dreamlike characters including cyber nuns, a young princess forced to be a hack translator, a news-paper vendor, and General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, Five shows the many facets of Aira’s multifarious mind as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFive is a must-have for Aira’s legion of devoted fans around the world and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated. A satisfyingly hefty installment from this “exquisite miniaturist” (WSJ) and writer whose “cubist eye sees from every angle” (NYT); because “once you start reading Aira, you don’t want tostop” (Roberto Bolaño).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063357038774,"sku":"9780811232364","price":23.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780811232364.jpg?v=1776355410"},{"product_id":"killing-spree-poems","title":"*Pre-Order* Killing Spree: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eA new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions―ecological, political, technological―set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance? Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063357071542,"sku":"9780374618025","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780374618025.jpg?v=1776355409"},{"product_id":"you-wont-get-free-of-it-stories-of-mothers-and-daughters","title":"You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters","description":"\u003cp\u003eA collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, by the award-winning author of Strangers to Ourselves\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063554072758,"sku":"9780525657057","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780525657057.jpg?v=1776365841"},{"product_id":"equinox","title":"Equinox","description":"\u003cp\u003eA brilliant new collection by the great Caribbean writers and scholar: “an engaging, deep-hearted, strong-spirited, and richly musical poet” (The Multicultural Review)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEquinox is an unforgettable and never-before-published masterwork completed by Kamau Brathwaite before his death in 2020. Written in his unique Sycorax typeface and replete with compelling images and photographs, Equinox contains poems written in Brathwaite’s singular Barbadian vernacular and visionary style―poems about the Middle Passage, the natural world, Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, the Kumina dance in Jamaica, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and Breughel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” among many tidalectic topics. The lyrical poems in Equinox weave together history and culture with the imagery of Brathwaite’s native Barbados, weaving a lush tapestry of injustice, redemption, and hope.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45063556956342,"sku":"9780811224475","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780811224475.jpg?v=1776365965"},{"product_id":"fortress-besieged","title":"*Preorder* Fortress Besieged","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature and a masterpiece of parodic fiction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSet on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of its hapless hero Fang Hung-chien.  After aimlessly studying in Europe at his family’s expense, Fang returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the ocean liner back, Fang’s life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties―Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, “With Miss Pao it wasn’t a matter of heart or soul. She hadn’t any change of heart, since she didn’t have a heart.” When he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a disastrous marriage of Nabokovian heights of distress and absurdity. A glorious tale of calamity, disillusionment, love, war, and wedded unbliss, Fortress Besieged was acclaimed by C. T. Hsia as “the most delightful and carefully wrought  novel in modern Chinese literature.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45065167863990,"sku":"9780811238601","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780811238601.jpg?v=1776451343"},{"product_id":"monique-escapes-a-novel","title":"*Preorder* Monique Escapes: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen Édouard’s mother reveals she is―not for the first time―enduring an abusive relationship, mother and son plot her next steps in what is at once an edge-of-the-seat escape narrative and a meditation on freedom and renewal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLate one night, Édouard receives a telephone call from his mother. In tears, she tells him that her partner, her first since her abusive marriage with Édouard’s father, has been insulting, degrading, and humiliating her. I thought this would be a new life for me and now it’s starting all over.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom afar, in Athens, Édouard swiftly sets a plan in place for Monique; the next morning, she departs the apartment she has been sharing with the man. What takes shape over the next weeks, over phone calls and informal Internet tutorials, on video chats and train rides, is a powerful and transformative shared experience for mother and son as they navigate the aftermath of male brutality, confront the limitations of class and society, and lay bare the pain of their past. With characteristic insight into society’s underpinnings and oversights, and with exquisite and tender portraiture, Édouard Louis’s Monique Escapes is a profound story of a woman, a mother, and a family’s search for more.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45065168584886,"sku":"9780374616809","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9780374616809.jpg?v=1776451432"},{"product_id":"the-veiled-prophet-secret-societies-white-supremacy-and-the-struggle-for-st-louis","title":"*Pre-Order* *Now on \"Shore Fund\" Discount* The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis","description":"Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city’s upper crust gathers for a garish costume party that doubles as a debutante’s ball, a ceremony in which the daughters of high society are paraded toward a cloaked figure in the center of the room who will select one young woman as the “Queen.” Known as the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, at first glance the event is easy to dismiss as outdated and clownish. But the truth is that the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as a space of solidarity for the city’s “fathers,” the wealthy men at the head of businesses, banks, and whole industries who come together to break strikes, quash protests, and enforce racial hierarchies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDevin Thomas O’Shea’s \u003cem\u003eThe Veiled Prophet \u003c\/em\u003eis the definitive history of the Veiled Prophet Society in all its violence and pageantry, offering a colorful alternate history of this Midwestern city through the lens of labor politics, racial inequality, and capital accumulation. O’Shea follows the Veiled Prophet Society from its origins in the wake of the 1877 railroad workers’ strike, the height of its, and St. Louis’s, influence during the 1904 World’s Fair, and the unexpected places its members exerted influence across the globe, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to the halls of power in Washington, DC.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet the power wielded by the Veiled Prophet has not gone uncontested. Orphans armed with simple pea-shooters rose up against the secret society in the late 19th century. Communists organized against them in the 1930s. And civil rights icons and renegade debutantes defied this shadowy band of ruling class elites in the 1960s. The most recent challenge to the Veiled Prophet’s influence was The Ferguson uprising of 2014. Now, as the fight for the soul and streets of St. Louis is as charged as ever, it’s critical that we understand and expose the long sordid history of this powerful masked society, and its ongoing impact on the ordinary people living in the city.","brand":"Lot 49 Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45107288768694,"sku":"9798888905791","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0681\/3600\/9910\/files\/9798888905791.jpg?v=1778084043"}],"url":"https:\/\/lotfortynine.com\/collections\/pre-order\/preorder.oembed","provider":"Lot 49 Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}