Welcome to Detour Books
Click on links in italics.
Read About Us here.
October marked our Second Year Anniversary! We are forging ahead into the gift buying season - reminding all visitors that we offer world literature in English translation for children and adult readers. Many of the authors in our catalog are making their English language debut.
Need it gift wrapped with your personal note? Just tell us it's a gift in the "note to seller" field during check out. Send a party through the post. It's free!
Learn why Kids' Books are not just for kids. Read more here about how and why we are building our curated children's books collection.
Explore Women's History in our Herstory Collection here.
And don't miss our Hardcover SALE - click HERE.
Now - imagine a world where every bookstore has a Yiddish writers section. See ours HERE.
For the exceptionally thoughtful we offer uncommon gifts; decorative textiles, housewares, innovative toys for kids, letterpress note cards and Informal Writ Kits - staionary sets that include postage stamps.
Off you go and enjoy.
Staff Pick:
Written in a conversational tone that sparks with the mind bending truth of the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa’s memoir, The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey offers a way into a history that is often left to scholars and survivors or "fighters" as Reissa describes them.
“'The Holocaust," Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, 'is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it."
Uncommon Gifts
A Benefit Volume to Support Ukraine Relief - a trilingual edition.
Toward Hopeful Skies is a beautifully illustrated children’s book by Yuriy Budiak. First published in Ukrainian in the 1920s and shortly thereafter in free Yiddish translations. As a testament to the universal appeal of children's literature and the joyful contact of cultures that these translations represent. This re-issue is trilingual Ukrainian, Yiddish and English.
World Literature in English Translation
When I grow up I want to be...
Staff Pick
Dr. Rosie Helps the Animals is an innovative picture book that promotes Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. Rosie and her mom, Dr. Celeste Gradil love helping animals. In a story that emphasizes leadership skills and empathy for all living things, Rosie's curiousity about the science of healing animals leads to a lot of good questions for kids and parents to ponder.
A New Photography Book
The Glass Plates of Lublin: Found Photographs of a Lost Jewish World
Excerpt from the introduction by Piotr Nazaruk, curator and editor:
In the winter of 2010 Krysztof Janus, an engineer and specialist in architectural history and monument conservation . . .came upon something astonishing. He and his renovation team found lying in a pile of trash, a box containing almost three thousand glass photographic plates.
~
From the dirty and sometimes broken tiles emerge the faces of Jews and Poles, children and the elderly, young couples flirting, workers, athletes, dignitaries in tails, and anonymous people who posed for a camera long ago, before the war, and never dreamed that their portraits would be of interest to anyone.
Yiddish Literature in Translation
Staff Pick
Winner of a 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Honor!
Not a folktale, not a poem, not a dream, but some whirling mixture of the three, this lulling recitation by Iranian author Hadi Mohammadi affirms generosity as a natural impulse.
--Publishers Weekly
Never underestimate the impact of large format picture books. Readers enter the story through the gentle drawings of Nooshin Safakhoo. As the words of the story skim across each page in English, we can imagine the sound of the original Persian, translated by Sara Khalili.
