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Blue Heron Books offers an eclectic selection of new, used, and banned books for all ages and all budgets. Located in historic High Falls, NY, our store is dedicated to your right to read.
“I am forever changed after reading this book.” —Javier Zamora, author of Solito
From the renowned Palestinian scholar, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.
Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.
In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother, Eva, would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, Rima, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life—still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.
After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past, and begins to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him: hushed whispers overheard, stories of his mother’s years as an activist in Beirut and her return to Palestine during a moment of calm.
Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.
This is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781668068564Publisher: Washington Square Press
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2025-11-04
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780593320648Publisher: Knopf
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-06-02
Love songs and Hollywood romances make it all sound so simple: you find your soul mate, move in together, get married, never stray from the path of monogamy, and live happily ever after. But real life tends to be more complicated. Many couples pursue alternative living arrangements, and some even pursue alternative loving arrangements.
The twenty-nine personal essays in this collection offer a variety of perspectives and experiences with nontraditional relationships and forms of cohabitation. The contributors include married couples who live in separate cities and single people who find companionship through communes and cohousing. These essays also present varied outlooks on the practice and ethics of having multiple partners, with some embracing large polycules while others opt for ?monogamish? relationships. Everyone has a different story to tell, from close friends living together to form a chosen family, to couples navigating the shifting boundaries of their relationship as one partner begins a gender transition. With contributors across generations and representing the full ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, Loving Arrangements demonstrates the myriad ways that we live and love today.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781978844544Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-06-09
Frankie doesn’t quite know what to make of Paige and her eight-year-old son Bobby, who’ve just moved to the Upstate New York town where she’s lived her whole life. Paige, seeking refuge from her previous relationship, is equally thrown: Does this eternally single, charming, gay vegetable farmer think she’s a citiot? And could the attraction she’s feeling toward her grow into something more?
Edition Details
ISBN: 9798893311464Publisher: Authors Equity
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2026-06-23
Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, The Color Purple writes a message of healing, forgiveness, self-discovery, and sisterhood to a new generation of readers. An inspiration to authors who continue to give voice to the multidimensionality of Black women’s stories, including Tayari Jones, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jesmyn Ward, and more, The Color Purple remains an essential read in conversation with storytellers today.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women—their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.
Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.
“Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.” —Tayari Jones
“The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” —Kiese Laymon
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780143135692Publisher: Penguin Books
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2019-12-10
“Atwood’s powers are on full display” (Los Angeles Times) in this deeply compelling Booker Prize-winning novel, now updated with additional content that explores the historical sources, ideas, and material that inspired Atwood.
More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.
Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.
With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780525562627Publisher: Anchor
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
The Canterbury Tales has entertained readers for centuries, with its comic animal fables, moral allegories, miniature epics of courtly love, and rollicking erotic farces that bring fourteenth-century England to life on every page. The gloriously varied stories, narrated by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, are peopled with saints, sinners, and ordinary mortals in a vivid panorama of the medieval world. This prose translation renders these tales as accessible and irresistible to modern readers as they were to Chaucer’s contemporaries.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780307743534Publisher: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2011-07-12
Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. And he almost is, until the new girl in school, Leslie Burke, outpaces him. The two become fast friends and spend most days in the woods behind Leslie’s house, where they invent an enchanted land called Terabithia. One morning, Leslie goes to Terabithia without Jess and a tragedy occurs. It will take the love of his family and the strength that Leslie has given him for Jess to be able to deal with his grief.
Bridge to Terabithia was also named an ALA Notable Children’s Book and has become a touchstone of children’s literature, as have many of Katherine Paterson’s other novels, including The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jacob Have I Loved.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780064401845Publisher: HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2017
This 75th Anniversary Edition includes:
• A New Introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction
• A New Afterword by Sandra Newman, author of Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...
A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
• Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read •
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780452262935Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 1983
If you or someone you love isn't living up to his or her potential –– and suffers from even one or two of these feelings –– here is a program that can help. In Your Own Worst Enemy, Dr. Kenneth Christian details the telltale signs of what he calls self–limiting behavior –– everyday habits that can seem harmless but that over time can send high potential people into a tailspin of dead ends and frustration. And he offers a practical fifteen–step guide to help underachievers shake off their old habits and start taking an active hand in their own futures.
Your Own Worst Enemy will help underachievers everywhere visualize their goals, break through their barriers, and start realizing their unlimited potential.
Edition Details
Publisher: HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2004-01-06
Passover is a beloved holiday that millions of people from all over the world have celebrated for centuries. And the customs and rituals that are practiced today are a reflection of those many people, places, and times that came before.
Now, in a rich and fascinating compilation, award-winning writer Eric A. Kimmel presents this ancient festival through stories, songs, poems, prayers, and commentary, which make this timeless, ever-changing holiday understandable and relevant to today's readers.
Here is a book for the whole family to read before or during the holiday.
Edition Details
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781560443520Publisher: FalconGuides
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 1995-05-01
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780821228180Publisher: Bulfinch
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2002-04-12
"Backgrounds" includes five of Anderson's letters, which illustrate his ideas about the stories; memoirs in which he wrestles with the revision process; and eight reviews of Winesburg, Ohio by Anderson's contemporaries, among them H. L. Mencken and William Faulkner.
"Criticism" collects six of the most illuminating assessments of the book published in the last three decades. A variety of perspectives is provided by Walter B. Rideout, Sally Adair Rigsbee, John Updike, Joseph Dewey, Kim Townsend, and David Stouck.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.
Edition Details
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 1996
"[A] bittersweet feminist antiwar novel . . . Brilliantly written, and cleverly mixing humor with bitterness" (Library Journal).
Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for its "furious, indignant power" and winner of the Prix Severigne in France as "the novel most calculated to promote international peace," this story offers a rare, funny, bitter, and undeniably feminist look at war and its effects on all those who take part.
First published in London in 1930, Not So Quiet . . . follows a group of British women ambulance drivers on the French front lines during World War I, surviving shell fire, cold, and their punishing commandant, "Mrs. Bitch"--even as their parents swell with pride that their girls aren't shirking their duty to king and country.
Taking the guise of an autobiography by Smith--a pseudonym for Evadne Price--Not So Quiet . . . is a compelling counterpoint to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel's power comes from Smith's outrage at the senselessness of war, her own daily contact with the suffering and the wounded, and at her country's complacent patriotism and willingness to sacrifice its children.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780935312829Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 1989
The eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.
In a dystopian world with no men, women are "rehabilitated" at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte.
Asja Bakić deploys the speculative and weird to playfully interrogate conversations around artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and environmental degradation. As she did in her acclaimed debut Mars, Bakić once again upends her characters' convictions and identities--and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781952177729Publisher: Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: 2023
All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.
Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.
Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.
Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780593804056Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-03-17
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780385548717Publisher: Doubleday
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-05-26
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780385550505Publisher: Doubleday
Format: hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-07-21
Summer Salon! Join us for an evening of new literature, poetry, and visual art with Stephanie Davies, whose new book Surviving a Patriarchy on Steroids helps us find “islands of sanity” in an insane world; poet and meditation guide Jacinta Lanz whose new book On Our Way/En Nuestro Camino is a bilingual work that lives at the intersections of language, body, and breath; Hudson Valley award-winning poet and writing mentor Janlori Goldman who’ll read from Bread from a Stranger’s Oven; and visual artist, Nancy Ostrovsky, a “pioneer of performance painting” who in addition to being an artist who has exhibited all over the world, designed the cover art for Stephanie’s new book Surviving a Patriarchy on Steroids.
We're excited to partner with Intuitively Wild for a monthly spirituality-themed Book Club. We’re beginning with HomeSchooled by New York Times bestselling author (and fellow local) Stefan Merrill Block - a deeply moving memoir that explores family, belonging, and the homeschooling system through one unforgettable story.
How it works:
• Sign up for Book Club.
• Pick up your copy of HomeSchooled from either Intuitively Wild or Blue Heron Books (your ticket includes the book! and the author will be joining us!).
• Read along with us.
• Arrive on August 20th at 6:30 PM for our very first gathering. - Stefan, Rachel, and I will be present to facilitate the conversation.
Whether you're an avid reader or craving more moments of community, we'd love to have you.
Reserve your spot through this link at Intuitively Wild: https://book.squareup.com/classes/pazrojk7w5iuno/location/LE0R4RKAF7XY6/classDetails/clssch_brjt0chbvg58zv?dateStart=1787265000
NYT Bestselling author and chef Julia Turshen is adding romance to the menu! Please join us to celebrate her debut romance novel Down to Earth, which, as Alison Roman writes, is a “steamy modern romance for anyone who finds sexual tension in the produce aisle”! Help us close out the summer with some literature, love, and some laughs!
Yes! and as promised, Deborah Lutz is back in High Falls with her new biography, the first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades, This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, a Life (2026). As her publisher writes, “Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her - most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.”
Join us! in celebrating this extraordinary book with the author who brings us the latest scholarship on Emily Bronte, the 19th century novel, and the Victorian Age.
Happy Lughnasadh [ritual] and [Romance] Awareness Month!
I was going to go with Dog Days and Deep Reads, but when we discovered that August was Romance Awareness month… AND… we are hosting Julia Turshen’s debut romance novel Down to Earth (our Book of the Month selection) as our farewell-to-August event on Saturday, August 29th, at 6 pm, then everything, like true love, fell into place.
Finch (at 9 featured left; now at 12! featured right)
Our first reader for Kids Read to Kids!
As I write, a 23-year-old, wild card qualifier, Arthur Fery, has made it to the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. He grew up around the corner and still lives there.
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were "stifling his creativity." Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.
Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son's battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother's insatiable love.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781335000989Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-01-06