What Square Books Can Do for You

• QUICK & EASY SHOPPING Students in Mississippi can get their required school reading tax free. You can place your order in store, over the phone, or here on our website.orders for in-stock titles are often ready for pickup in less than a day. Some tips:

  • Look for the listing On Our Shelves Now for most in-stock titles. If we do not have a title, we will do our best to get it for you as quickly as possible — as soon as overnight, in some cases.

  • Search for your books by ISBN-13 (the numbers near the barcode) to be sure you’re getting the correct edition. 

  • We are a trade bookstore so we won’t be able to provide textbooks but we have access to just about every novel, essay collection, etc. currently in print.

  • You’ll need to have your class number handy (ie ENG 101) for tax-free checkout.

  • More questions? Each order is hand processed by a Square Bookseller (no robots). Give us a call, email, or leave any concerns in the order comments and we’ll be sure to answer before capturing payment.

• OPEN-TO-ALL EVENTS We welcome authors from across the country to share their books with our community. The vast majority of our events are free to attend and take place at Off Square Books (where you can shop lifestyle and bargain books during the day). Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date!

   

• FREE LOYALTY REWARDS Every Square Books shopper is invited to become a Constant Reader. Each item purchased earns a credit. After 20 purchases, Constant Readers receive a coupon totaling the average of those credits. There is no cost to join.

   

• FUEL & FOCUS Visit our cafe for affordable, locally roasted coffee and study with friends on the Square Books’ balcony.

   

• SQUARE WARES Pick up a roomy tote bag to schelp around campus, a sweatshirt for chilly lecture halls, or an author coffee mug to inspire you during late night study sessions. Find even more Square Books merch here.

University students are an invaluable part of our community. Thank you for supporting Oxford by choosing to shop local. We wish you a happy and successful semester and look forward to seeing you in store and at our events!

In analyzing our annual round-up of the year’s best sellers, we find a couple of things that are striking. One phenomenon some of you have noticed the past couple of years, especially once we recently expanded with new shelf space for them: romance novels. These are not your mama’s Harlequin bodice rippers. Many take on more contemporary themes and attitudes, e.g. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (#9) and Daisy Jones and the Six (#35) by Taylor Jenkins Reid; The Court of Thorns & Roses (#16) and The Court of Mist and Fury (58) by Sarah Maas; Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (19), It Starts with Us (40), Verity (53), and Ugly Love (86); Happy Place (20) by Emily Henry; Lucy’s Score’s Things We Never Got Over (49), Things We Hide from the Light (74); and Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment (54).

Another noticeable fact: at least thirty of the authors of these 100 books either now live in Oxford or have in the past, and twenty-five more are writers who appeared at our store to present or read from their books. John Grisham had several books on the list, beginning with our number 1 – The Exchange, of course, which, due to the novel’s connection to The Firm, moved out of Square Books at a faster rate than any book in recent memory. The Boys from Biloxi (#2) was still going strong, however, when The Exchange was released. Sparring Partners (29) and Sooley (62) also showed up. Not to be outdone, William Faulkner’s paperback and Modern Library editions scatter the list, including The Sound and the Fury (47), the Selected Stories (22), The Bear (6), As I Lay Dying (48), and the fairly recently reissued corrected edition of Faulkner’s mystery stories, Knight’s Gambit (52). Two Oxford, Mississippi volumes from John Cofield made the list – Vol. 2 at #12 and this year’s Vol. 3 #11.

Treasured Mississippians are here: Richard Ford and his excellent and perhaps last Bascombe novel, Be Mine (42) (on the SB YouTube channel, his event in Oxford); Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (92); Deer Creek Drive, by Beverly Lowry (33), and Jesmyn Ward’s knock-out Let Us Descend (4): (revisit her reading at the Powerhouse here). A parade of Oxford writers follows: Curtis Wilkie and his eternal The Fall of the House of Zeus (76), Vishwesh Bhatt and I Am From Here (8), Michael Farris Smith’s Salvage This World (27); A Place Like Mississippi (28), by Ralph Eubanks; John Currence’s Big Bad Breakfast (71) and John T. Edge’s Potlikker Papers (96); Wright Thompson, with Pappyland (hardcover edition #25 and paperback #39) and The Cost of These Dreams (78); Daffodil Hill (85) by Jake Keiser; Lee Durkee’s splendid Stalking Shakespeare (41); another year on the list for World of Wonders (43) by the indomitable Aimee Nezhukumatatil; a nice surprise from John Hunter, his Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M. (64); ditto Tyler Keith’s bit of noir, The Mark of Cain (88), and a distant reminder of Richard Grant due to The Deepest South of All (37). In our record book for numerous years on this list are Wyatt Waters’ An Oxford Sketchbook (31) and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council’s Square Table (44), now being stalked by Ed Croom’s lovely treatment of Faulkner’s grounds, The Land of Rowan Oak (31). Ann Abadie’s marvelous American Landscapes (93) arrived only in November and quickly scrambled onto this list, while Charles Wilson’s The Southern Way of Life (15) was available all year. 

Many of the writers put books on this list by virtue of a visit or event here. Ann Patchett could not do a reading but did zip by one day to sign enough copies to have her Tom Lake be our #7. Jesmyn Ward helped her cause in a sold-out event at the Powerhouse, as mentioned, and Cody managed to persuade Chuck Palahniuk to come here with Not Forever, but for Now (10), an event in which apparently no one got hurt. We will long remember a special visit from Laura Dern with her co-author mother, Diane Ladd, which launched their Honey, Baby, Mine to our #13 spot – thanks, y’all. Luke Russert made an impressive showing on Thacker Mountain with his Look for Me There (99), while Charles Frazier returned to SB with his The Trackers (34) and another long-time favorite here, Ron Rash, came to us with The Caretaker (79). 

 Daniel Mason’s appearance on behalf of a personal favorite novel, North Woods (45), was memorable. Harrison Scott Key killed it here with How to Stay Married (56) and Jeanette Walls impressed with Hang the Moon (63). Two excellent noir writers brought out crowds – S. A. Cosby and Eli Cranor, with All the Sinners Bleed and Ozark Dogs (#80 and 82, respectively). A lovely and inspirational little book, Quotations of Martin Luther King (30) returned, about whom this fall Jonathan Eig spoke eloquently about in King (89), only to be matched by Margaret Renkl with The Comfort of Crows (83) and Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of In the Pines (95). Trae Crowder ‘n them’s classic Liberal Redneck Manifesto (77) continues to resonate from their previous appearance; ditto for two favorites now in paperback: Kathryn Schulz’ Lost & Found (90) and Casey Cep’s Furious Hours (73). 

Books that have appeared on most of the nation’s bestseller lists often climb onto ours, too, of course, including Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (72), The Woman in Me (86) by Britney Spears, The Dictionary of Lost Words (#84, with help from Jude), Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (67), Midnight Library (81) by Matt Haig, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club (75), A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (91), Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient (24), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (68) by Gabrielle Zevin, Trust by Hernan Diaz (69), The Covenant of Water (46) by Abraham Verghese, and, in spite of its title, I’m Glad My Mom Died (100), by Jennette McCurdy. Also listed are Make Your Bed (66) by retired Admiral William H. McCraven, and The Fourth Wing (38) and Iron Flame (51) by Rebecca Yarros, both of which would have fared far better had the publisher’s supply kept up with demand here. There was also Prince Harry’s Spare (59), and although he — Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton, Baron Kilkeel – did not come here, his ghostwriter was once here; some of you will remember this author of a fine book, The Tender Bar: J. R. Moehringer. David Gran made a double play — The Wager (36) and Killers of the Flower Moon (32) — and there were very strong performances by Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (17) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning Demon Copperhead (18).

The world of sports gave us our #3 bestseller, from the great sportswriter Rick Cleveland, with Neil White — The Mississippi Football Book; Ole Miss 2022 Baseball National Champions continued to sell at #23, Michael Oher’s When Your Back’s Against the Wall (5) and Resilient Rebels by Chase Parham (#14), while from the kitchen beckoned Elizabeth Heiskell with Come on Over (21) and Robert St. John and his breakfast recipes in Mississippi Mornings (26). We are grateful to a number of publishers for supplying us with stock signed by the author, which no doubt helped some titles make the list: Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams (94), The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (65), The Making of Another Major Motion Picture by Tom Hanks (70), James Lee Burke’s Flags on the Bayou (87), The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (97), The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (98), and Only the Dead (55) by Jack Carr – greatly abetted by the author’s having shot a bullet hole through one of the book’s pages. In every copy. For real. 

2023 was a great year for books and we appreciate our partnerships and support from writers, publishers and their reps. Square Books had an exceptionally strong year in 2022 and managed in ’23 to squeak beyond that; so, most of all this report is to you and for you, Constant Reader and Square Books friend, and we thank you for making it all possible. 

Sincerely,

Richard, Lisa, Cody, and Lyn

P.S. Look for similar news from Paul at SB Jr – and Happy New Year!

Square Books Jr. employees are working hard to get the store back together!

Please join them for story time tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 10AM 

JUST ANNOUNCED! 

Join us Sunday, March 10th for a free, virtual event with Chris Benfey and Willa Cather biographer Ben Taylor for a lively discussion of My Ántonia. Learn more here. 

—

SQUARE BOOKS is delighted and honored to be the Winter 2023–24 partner of Book Post, a book-reviewing newsletter.

When you make a purchase of $100 or more in store, online, or over the phone, Square Books readers can enjoy a free one-month subscription! Just send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com to gain access to the newsletter.

But wait! There’s more!

To help us while away the dark and lonely months, Chris Benfey will join Book Post in February to read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

Interested readers can save 15% on My Ántonia here (discount applied automatically in cart).

From Book Post:

Chris has written for Book Post on subjects as eclectic as hunting, kites, Whitman, election days of yore, and the Austrian fabulist Adalbert Stifter. He’s a for-real scholar with books on Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, and Kipling in America, as well as a poet who’s written a family memoir about pottery, bohemia, and American wandering (plus the Gilded Age’s infatuation with Old Japan and introductions to books on tea and Lafcadio Hearne).

He thought My Ántonia would be just the right book for us to get us through February, and indeed in our book group poll last summer you all opted for a novel out of our literary past, plus, it’s way shorter than Middlemarch, for those who were too busy last time for such a big bite. 

SUBSCRIBE TO LEARN MORE.

bookpostusa.com @bookpostusa

Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as occasional free posts to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Please subscribe and support our work. Become a paying subscriber to receive our straight-to-you book reviews.

What Square Books Can Do for You

• QUICK & EASY SHOPPING Students in Mississippi can get their required school reading tax free. You can place your order in store, over the phone, or here on our website.orders for in-stock titles are often ready for pickup in less than a day. Some tips:

  • Look for the listing On Our Shelves Now for most in-stock titles. If we do not have a title, we will do our best to get it for you as quickly as possible — as soon as overnight, in some cases.

  • Search for your books by ISBN-13 (the numbers near the barcode) to be sure you’re getting the correct edition. 

  • We are a trade bookstore so we won’t be able to provide textbooks but we have access to just about every novel, essay collection, etc. currently in print.

  • You’ll need to have your class number handy (ie ENG 101) for tax-free checkout.

  • More questions? Each order is hand processed by a Square Bookseller (no robots). Give us a call, email, or leave any concerns in the order comments and we’ll be sure to answer before capturing payment.

• OPEN-TO-ALL EVENTS We welcome authors from across the country to share their books with our community. The vast majority of our events are free to attend and take place at Off Square Books (where you can shop lifestyle and bargain books during the day). Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date!

   

• FREE LOYALTY REWARDS Every Square Books shopper is invited to become a Constant Reader. Each item purchased earns a credit. After 20 purchases, Constant Readers receive a coupon totaling the average of those credits. There is no cost to join.

   

• FUEL & FOCUS Visit our cafe for affordable, locally roasted coffee and study with friends on the Square Books’ balcony.

   

• SQUARE WARES Pick up a roomy tote bag to schelp around campus, a sweatshirt for chilly lecture halls, or an author coffee mug to inspire you during late night study sessions. Find even more Square Books merch here.

University students are an invaluable part of our community. Thank you for supporting Oxford by choosing to shop local. We wish you a happy and successful semester and look forward to seeing you in store and at our events!

In analyzing our annual round-up of the year’s best sellers, we find a couple of things that are striking. One phenomenon some of you have noticed the past couple of years, especially once we recently expanded with new shelf space for them: romance novels. These are not your mama’s Harlequin bodice rippers. Many take on more contemporary themes and attitudes, e.g. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (#9) and Daisy Jones and the Six (#35) by Taylor Jenkins Reid; The Court of Thorns & Roses (#16) and The Court of Mist and Fury (58) by Sarah Maas; Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (19), It Starts with Us (40), Verity (53), and Ugly Love (86); Happy Place (20) by Emily Henry; Lucy’s Score’s Things We Never Got Over (49), Things We Hide from the Light (74); and Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment (54).

Another noticeable fact: at least thirty of the authors of these 100 books either now live in Oxford or have in the past, and twenty-five more are writers who appeared at our store to present or read from their books. John Grisham had several books on the list, beginning with our number 1 – The Exchange, of course, which, due to the novel’s connection to The Firm, moved out of Square Books at a faster rate than any book in recent memory. The Boys from Biloxi (#2) was still going strong, however, when The Exchange was released. Sparring Partners (29) and Sooley (62) also showed up. Not to be outdone, William Faulkner’s paperback and Modern Library editions scatter the list, including The Sound and the Fury (47), the Selected Stories (22), The Bear (6), As I Lay Dying (48), and the fairly recently reissued corrected edition of Faulkner’s mystery stories, Knight’s Gambit (52). Two Oxford, Mississippi volumes from John Cofield made the list – Vol. 2 at #12 and this year’s Vol. 3 #11.

Treasured Mississippians are here: Richard Ford and his excellent and perhaps last Bascombe novel, Be Mine (42) (on the SB YouTube channel, his event in Oxford); Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (92); Deer Creek Drive, by Beverly Lowry (33), and Jesmyn Ward’s knock-out Let Us Descend (4): (revisit her reading at the Powerhouse here). A parade of Oxford writers follows: Curtis Wilkie and his eternal The Fall of the House of Zeus (76), Vishwesh Bhatt and I Am From Here (8), Michael Farris Smith’s Salvage This World (27); A Place Like Mississippi (28), by Ralph Eubanks; John Currence’s Big Bad Breakfast (71) and John T. Edge’s Potlikker Papers (96); Wright Thompson, with Pappyland (hardcover edition #25 and paperback #39) and The Cost of These Dreams (78); Daffodil Hill (85) by Jake Keiser; Lee Durkee’s splendid Stalking Shakespeare (41); another year on the list for World of Wonders (43) by the indomitable Aimee Nezhukumatatil; a nice surprise from John Hunter, his Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M. (64); ditto Tyler Keith’s bit of noir, The Mark of Cain (88), and a distant reminder of Richard Grant due to The Deepest South of All (37). In our record book for numerous years on this list are Wyatt Waters’ An Oxford Sketchbook (31) and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council’s Square Table (44), now being stalked by Ed Croom’s lovely treatment of Faulkner’s grounds, The Land of Rowan Oak (31). Ann Abadie’s marvelous American Landscapes (93) arrived only in November and quickly scrambled onto this list, while Charles Wilson’s The Southern Way of Life (15) was available all year. 

Many of the writers put books on this list by virtue of a visit or event here. Ann Patchett could not do a reading but did zip by one day to sign enough copies to have her Tom Lake be our #7. Jesmyn Ward helped her cause in a sold-out event at the Powerhouse, as mentioned, and Cody managed to persuade Chuck Palahniuk to come here with Not Forever, but for Now (10), an event in which apparently no one got hurt. We will long remember a special visit from Laura Dern with her co-author mother, Diane Ladd, which launched their Honey, Baby, Mine to our #13 spot – thanks, y’all. Luke Russert made an impressive showing on Thacker Mountain with his Look for Me There (99), while Charles Frazier returned to SB with his The Trackers (34) and another long-time favorite here, Ron Rash, came to us with The Caretaker (79). 

 Daniel Mason’s appearance on behalf of a personal favorite novel, North Woods (45), was memorable. Harrison Scott Key killed it here with How to Stay Married (56) and Jeanette Walls impressed with Hang the Moon (63). Two excellent noir writers brought out crowds – S. A. Cosby and Eli Cranor, with All the Sinners Bleed and Ozark Dogs (#80 and 82, respectively). A lovely and inspirational little book, Quotations of Martin Luther King (30) returned, about whom this fall Jonathan Eig spoke eloquently about in King (89), only to be matched by Margaret Renkl with The Comfort of Crows (83) and Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of In the Pines (95). Trae Crowder ‘n them’s classic Liberal Redneck Manifesto (77) continues to resonate from their previous appearance; ditto for two favorites now in paperback: Kathryn Schulz’ Lost & Found (90) and Casey Cep’s Furious Hours (73). 

Books that have appeared on most of the nation’s bestseller lists often climb onto ours, too, of course, including Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (72), The Woman in Me (86) by Britney Spears, The Dictionary of Lost Words (#84, with help from Jude), Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (67), Midnight Library (81) by Matt Haig, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club (75), A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (91), Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient (24), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (68) by Gabrielle Zevin, Trust by Hernan Diaz (69), The Covenant of Water (46) by Abraham Verghese, and, in spite of its title, I’m Glad My Mom Died (100), by Jennette McCurdy. Also listed are Make Your Bed (66) by retired Admiral William H. McCraven, and The Fourth Wing (38) and Iron Flame (51) by Rebecca Yarros, both of which would have fared far better had the publisher’s supply kept up with demand here. There was also Prince Harry’s Spare (59), and although he — Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton, Baron Kilkeel – did not come here, his ghostwriter was once here; some of you will remember this author of a fine book, The Tender Bar: J. R. Moehringer. David Gran made a double play — The Wager (36) and Killers of the Flower Moon (32) — and there were very strong performances by Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (17) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning Demon Copperhead (18).

The world of sports gave us our #3 bestseller, from the great sportswriter Rick Cleveland, with Neil White — The Mississippi Football Book; Ole Miss 2022 Baseball National Champions continued to sell at #23, Michael Oher’s When Your Back’s Against the Wall (5) and Resilient Rebels by Chase Parham (#14), while from the kitchen beckoned Elizabeth Heiskell with Come on Over (21) and Robert St. John and his breakfast recipes in Mississippi Mornings (26). We are grateful to a number of publishers for supplying us with stock signed by the author, which no doubt helped some titles make the list: Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams (94), The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (65), The Making of Another Major Motion Picture by Tom Hanks (70), James Lee Burke’s Flags on the Bayou (87), The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (97), The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (98), and Only the Dead (55) by Jack Carr – greatly abetted by the author’s having shot a bullet hole through one of the book’s pages. In every copy. For real. 

2023 was a great year for books and we appreciate our partnerships and support from writers, publishers and their reps. Square Books had an exceptionally strong year in 2022 and managed in ’23 to squeak beyond that; so, most of all this report is to you and for you, Constant Reader and Square Books friend, and we thank you for making it all possible. 

Sincerely,

Richard, Lisa, Cody, and Lyn

P.S. Look for similar news from Paul at SB Jr – and Happy New Year!

Square Books Jr. employees are working hard to get the store back together!

Please join them for story time tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 10AM 

JUST ANNOUNCED! 

Join us Sunday, March 10th for a free, virtual event with Chris Benfey and Willa Cather biographer Ben Taylor for a lively discussion of My Ántonia. Learn more here. 

—

SQUARE BOOKS is delighted and honored to be the Winter 2023–24 partner of Book Post, a book-reviewing newsletter.

When you make a purchase of $100 or more in store, online, or over the phone, Square Books readers can enjoy a free one-month subscription! Just send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com to gain access to the newsletter.

But wait! There’s more!

To help us while away the dark and lonely months, Chris Benfey will join Book Post in February to read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

Interested readers can save 15% on My Ántonia here (discount applied automatically in cart).

From Book Post:

Chris has written for Book Post on subjects as eclectic as hunting, kites, Whitman, election days of yore, and the Austrian fabulist Adalbert Stifter. He’s a for-real scholar with books on Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, and Kipling in America, as well as a poet who’s written a family memoir about pottery, bohemia, and American wandering (plus the Gilded Age’s infatuation with Old Japan and introductions to books on tea and Lafcadio Hearne).

He thought My Ántonia would be just the right book for us to get us through February, and indeed in our book group poll last summer you all opted for a novel out of our literary past, plus, it’s way shorter than Middlemarch, for those who were too busy last time for such a big bite. 

SUBSCRIBE TO LEARN MORE.

bookpostusa.com @bookpostusa

Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as occasional free posts to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Please subscribe and support our work. Become a paying subscriber to receive our straight-to-you book reviews.