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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.
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781644454008Publisher: Graywolf Press
Format: hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-04
When Tyler Sinclair left Stone Mountain at eighteen, he had no plans of returning. With only a duffel bag full of clothes, a few bucks stolen from his father’s dresser, and a guitar, his most prized possession, Tyler disappeared without so much as a goodbye. Eighteen years later, Tyler, now the frontman of a famous band aptly named Stone Mountain, finds himself returning to his hometown for a one-night-only benefit concert to support his old friend, Doc, who lost feeling in his legs following a childhood accident. As Tyler ascends the mountain, memories of his childhood come rushing back—memories of his abusive father and despondent mother, of the friends he left behind—and he quickly learns that, for many people on Stone Mountain, the past does not feel like so long ago, and not everyone has been eagerly awaiting Tyler’s return.
At the concert, resentment simmers just beneath the surface, and Tyler finds himself confronted with faces new and old: there’s Curt, Tyler’s childhood best friend, now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and his star officer, Deb, an out-of-towner who may have bitten off more than she can chew by accepting a job in Stone Mountain. And then there’s Freddi, Curt’s wife and Tyler’s former lover, a woman whose questionable dealings and fraught history with Tyler will become the catalyst for a tragedy that will upend each of their lives and threaten to validate Tyler’s worst fear: that “Stone Mountain is the kind of place you might escape from once, if you’re lucky, but not twice.”
Under the Falls is at once a propulsive thriller, a gut-wrenching portrait of a tight-knit rural community undone by the sins of its past, and an unflinchingly honest depiction of how porous the line between right and wrong, good versus evil, can become. This is a stunning, deeply empathetic novel, one that takes Russo’s penchant for character-driven drama to thrilling new heights.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780593805107Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-11
Nadal and Djokovic . . . Serena and Sabalenka . . . Sinner and Alcaraz . . . The inside story of modern tennis burns bright with fame, fortune, and glamour--and high stakes the likes of which the game has never seen before. Players must excel beyond the court under excruciating pressure, with the public spotlight blazing on those who win, and shunning those who lose. But what toll does it take? And what does it take to win year-in, year-out? If you're outside the top 40, you're much closer to 80 than to number 1. The Cruelest Game offers an intimate insider account of the costs of getting to the top, and the price of the fame and glory that comes with it. Futterman delves into the lives and struggles of modern tennis's most critical players at a critical time for the sport, when fans are searching for a new set of heroes to take over for the legends whose careers are fading to black.
With the likes of Rafa, Roger, Novak, and Serena walking off the court and into retirement, a new crop of aspiring tennis hopefuls faces a shifting landscape. This book builds on award-winning journalist Matthew Futterman's unique access to the very top echelons of professional tennis (he has worked as the top New York Times and The Athletic tennis writer for years), and takes readers inside established and new players' quest for the secret codes that allow them to survive and thrive at the top of a brutal game.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780385550727Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-04
In 1991, fifteen-year-old James Spooner arrives in New York’s West Village, hopeful that he’s finally escaped the extremist racism of his Southern California desert town. Still, a question looms large over his cross-country move: What will New York City make of this tartan plaid-and-leather-clad, mixed race, Black kid with a mohawk? Will he find his people? Thus begins Spooner’s insider’s account of the nineties downtown New York punk and early aughts pre-Giuliani nightlife scenes. In the city’s legendary rock clubs, squat basements, and DIY art spaces, he finds his way to creating zines, starting a record label, and promoting parties, while falling further in love with punk rock’s distorted guitars and politically progressive lyrics. Happy to have left a world of Nazi skins behind he must still navigate the casual racism and bigotry of a seemingly all-white echo chamber; a world stubbornly resistant to his Black/punk identity.
Intent on carving a space for young, Black, politically radical punk rockers like himself, Spooner undertakes a whirlwind tour of the country, collecting the stories that will become his acclaimed documentary, Afro-Punk, and eventually lead to the wildly successful music festival of the same name. But what begins as a way to chronicle the joys and heartaches of being Black and punk rock soon spirals into a multimillion-dollar corporate endeavor. Spooner is forced to ask himself: In setting out to galvanize an underground movement, has he in fact given rise to the least punk rock thing of all—a brand?
Illustrated with a vibrant mix of comics, spot art, and punk ephemera throughout, It Starts with Anger is at once a coming-of-age story about found family, a compelling capitalist cautionary tale, and a raucous celebration of the indelible, rebellious spirit of Black punks.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9780593701386Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-04
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
Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...
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:
9780452262935
Publisher:
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
"Great Black Hope is at once a novel of crime—with a gripping pace, propelled by a question that needs answering—and a timeless coming of age story." —Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Entitlement
A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.
It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.
Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781668077436Publisher: S&S/Summit Books
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2025-06-10
"[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
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781644454008Publisher: Graywolf Press
Format: hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-04
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.
Gear up for Halloween! Fear and Desolation in New Jersey Pine Barrens?! Check out Edgar Award-winning Caitlin Mullen’s new mystery/thriller HEATHER!
![[POSTPONED - DATE TBD] United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope by Alison Kinney](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64ac5a86541d740dc71890c2/1775483158201-B1QUXF8VUGV05UU0FYD2/Kinney--rejection+cover.jpg)
Join Alison Kinney and Jennifer Kabat in a discussion about their new books: Alison Kinney’s The United States of Rejection and Jennifer Kabat’s twin memoirs (it’s a triptych, so stay tuned for #3): The Eighth Moon (2025) and Nightshining (2024).
Because I spend much of the summer season anticipating fall, (I know... I know... be here now : ( September brings a renewed sense of clarity for me. I'm excited to be back to school; back to work; in the bookstore or the classroom, -- both are sacred spaces to me.
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.
In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal low. His new marriage was failing and his career was in danger of stalling. He was forty-two, navigating a digital age, searching for inspiration in a scene driven by music videos, synthesizers, and drum machines.
Driving around that summer, a bootleg cassette of “township jive”—the street music of South Africa—kept him company. Lent to him by a friend, it reminded Simon of the sound and the joy of the early days of rock and roll. He became drawn to the idea of recording with the musicians on that tape. But South Africa was in the thrall of a racist apartheid system, and with economic and cultural boycotts in place, such an undertaking could prove daunting. He became determined to find the right conditions to allow for a collaboration.
Simon took a fateful trip to Johannesburg in 1985. It would turn out to be the first step on a musical journey that would lead him to New York, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and London, and eventually to the release of Graceland, a critical and commercial triumph, winning multiple Grammys, selling 16 million records, and spawning a five-year, worldwide tour.
Days of Miracle and Wonder is the first book to tell the full story of Graceland, offering windows into Simon’s creative process, the technical innovations that brought them to life, the people and places that made the album possible, the forces that helped the album achieve mainstream reach, and the controversies that the music raised—and which remain today. It sheds light on a rare cultural moment, when America opened its doors to the sounds and styles of Africa and other faraway lands.
This is an informed, heartfelt celebration of Simon’s magnum opus, a recording forged in a tense cultural moment, but suffused with hope, change, and a sense of global connection.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781668206751Publisher: Atria Books
Format: hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-11