Staff Picks

6/15/09

Event coordinator Kelly Amabile posted a few new picks today, all hardcover books that have recently hit our shelves:

Fiction:

Margot Berwin, Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
Who knew that a city girl could get swept away by an adventurous tale about tropical plant magic? But that’s exactly what happened – I loved it! Hothouse Flower is enchanting and exotic, a perfect summer read. Escape to the Yucatan with Lila in this fast-moving mystical debut novel, a story that is sure to inspire passion for all kinds of journeys. (We’re doing an event w/ Margot on July 21 – watch our website for details!)

Richard Flanagan, Wanting
Australian writer Flanagan has crafted a historical novel that is terrifically engaging, a definite page-turner. He weaves a passionate tale about desire that links Charles Dickens’ London and Aboriginal settlements in faraway Tasmania.  It was a pleasure to get caught up in the drama, a gripping story packaged in a small hardcover format with wonderful tattered pages, which added to the reading experience.

Non-Fiction:

Alain De Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
An examination of “ordinary” jobs that is both compassionate and critical of the modern work world. Good food for thought during these economically trying times, whether you are currently employed or not. The photos are fantastic and guide the meditative essays very well. Another well done philosophical perspective on society from the author of The Art of Travel, The Architecture of Happiness and Essays in Love.

Gordon Hempton, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
I haven’t event finished reading this book yet, but I know I want to recommend it to everyone I know. It’s a travelogue for your ear, and if the journey doesn’t spark you to listen more, I’m not sure what will. Hempton’s passion for preserving natural space and its’ soundscape is deeply touching, and inspiring. Fans of Edward Abbey & John Muir should pick this up right away, but anyone with sensitivity to all the extra noise in our lives will find this book a powerful read.

5/31/2009

Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a beautifully written novel. It’s the story of Ellis Lacey, who leaves Ireland for NYC in the 1950s, traveling alone, but with a job and lodgings waiting for her upon her arrival in the US. There are reasons she leaves, and reasons she eventually returns to her native Ireland — the reader is vividly invited into both these worlds, and left to contemplate the meaning of home, as this recent NYT Sunday Magazine article about Colm Toibin explores. My first introduction to Toibin leaves me craving more of this excellent writer’s work. (I’m going to try Mothers and Sons next.) And it leaves me yearning for all the romance of Friday night dances, nylons and pretty dresses, Ebbets Field & Coney Island in the summertime! Brooklyn is a quick and engrossing read, a perfect pick.

– Kelly

Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

This is probably the best novel I’ve read this year, and I doubt anything else will come close to it. A chaotic and brilliant post-apocalyptic story that is funny and heartwrenching by turns. Anti-corporate in the most understanding way possible, a love story, mind-bending, and full of ninjas with long-held grievances. Hard to sum up the plot without giving anything away, so just believe me when I tell you it’s fantastic. Also hard to give you a sense of what the writing is like, because it’s not like anything else I’ve ever read!

I read it on the recommendation of a few friends, and have since been glad to pass the recommendation on to customers. All have liked it so far, including one man who came back today to talk to me about it and point out his favorite lines (which were highlighted in the book!).  It is a book that inspires conversation and devotion, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a person to whom it would not appeal. And don’t wait for the paperback—from the picture, you can see that it’s a lovely violent pink, but what you can’t tell is that it’s FUZZY. A keeper for sure.

–Stephanie

1/27/2009

Fletcher Hanks, I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets, edited by Paul Karasik
Fletcher Hanks is one of the more mysterious comic book artists active in the 1930s and 1940s, underrated because of his “lack of craft” and the weirdness of the stories. This book reveals all the beauty of his visionary art, loved by people like Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Crumb.

From an interview with Paul Karasik: “There is nothing else like it. It is close to looking like the Spacehawk strips of Basil Wolverton, which they just barely predate. But there is a subtle difference. Wolverton’s early work is primitive but very much in control. One gets the feeling reading Hanks’ work that although he drawing appears tight it is somehow, just under the surface, almost magically out of control like a hissing pressure cooker.
Everything is illuminated in the Hanks’ landscape. The foreground, the background and the figures are all cast in a bright shadowless light. Yet darkness lurks under the surface as the heroes of Hanks’ tales torture and maim the hideous villains.
It is important to try to appreciate this work not as campy primitive nostalgia. To do this is to miss the point entirely. Hanks’ work stands up against the strongest work in comics. Single creators doing the writing, drawing, lettering, and inking, has produced most of the greatest comics. Given the assembly line approach to most comic-book-making, it is very rare to find masterwork in comic books. Certainly there are a few exceptions: Kurtzman, Boody Rogers, Walt Kelly, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb. All of these artists produced work that was fueled by a single-minded purpose and towers over the rest of the schlock. Hanks belongs on this list.”

-Luca

1/21/2009

New York Tyrant magazine
New York Tyrant magazine is the place where you can read the newest and most innovative  fiction, by authors like Eugen Marten, Gary Lutz, Dawn Raffel, Brian Evenson, Michael Kimball, and a few underground classics (Gordon Lish, D’J Pankace, Delmore Schwartz). Started two years ago by editor Giancarlo DiTrapano, the Tyrant has quickly gained a cult status among true literature lovers. Every issue sells out in a couple months, so you better hurry up to get your copy. The provocative covers make sure that you will not miss it.  -Luca

Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah (translated by Virginia Jewiss)
If you think you know what Mafia is (or more precisely Camorra, its Neapolitan version, since Mafia is Sicilian), because you have seen a couple Hollywood movies, read this book. It’s as trip to hell, told with passion and lucidity, and with a sense of rhythm that makes Saviano not just a great journalist, but also an incredible storyteller. For the record: after the publication of Gomorrah Robert Saviano was sentenced to death by Camorra and had to be placed under police protection.   -Luca

Stanley Crawford, Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine
Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine has been out of print for a long time. Finally Dalkey Archive has reprinted this masterpiece. Stanley Crawford’s book, a novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve, is beautiful beyond description, written in a language that is pure music. Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond.   -Luca

Butt Book: The Best of the First Five Years of BUTT magazine
Butt Book collects the best of the first 5 years of BUTT magazine in a stylish, all-pink paperback volume. Really, you don’t need to be interested in 21st century gay subculture to like BUTT. We love it because it’s ironic and funny and honest, and the interviews are just brilliant.   -Luca

1/15/2009
Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation
A great novel, written in an inventive, brilliant prose. A book where everybody follows everybody and nothing is what it seems. A story full of endless walks and thoughts, about love, friendship and about things too small to be seen. Deb Unferth pulls the strings of emotion with incredible precision.
“She slipped though crowds, spoke softly, never screeched, but somehow could always be heard. He loved that about her. Even her applause was understated. She had thin hands.”    - Luca

1/7/2009
Some books I loved in 2008:

Thomas Glynn, Watching the Body Burn
Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain Of My Books
Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall
Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator
Olivier Schrauwen, Hair Types (in Mome vol.12)
Michael Kimball, Dear Everybody
Roland Topor, Dessins Paniques
Fletcher Hanks, I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!
J Robert Lennon, Mailman
Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife
Jules Renard, Journal
William H Gass, Omensetter’s Luck
Eugene Marten, Waste
Arturo Loria, The Blind Man and The Beauty and Other Stories
Deb Ulin Unferth, Vacation
Stanley G Crawford, The Log of The SS the Mrs Unguentine
Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco
Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
Rory Hayes, Where Demented Wented

-Luca

3/24/08
Actual Air

by David Berman

In 1999 David Berman (lead singer of Silver Jews) published a book of poetry. Right off the bat there’s a double whammy of skepticism: 1) singer/musician-turned-poet (Jewel, anyone?) and 2) poetry. That’s right, I suck at reading poetry, I have a difficult time with it, being a voracious reader of novels, a reluctant reader of short stories, and a reader of poetry whose experience began and ended with Shel Silverstein. If nobody goes for a ride in a flying shoe I’m out of my element. But the poems collected in Berman’s Actual Air are so surpassingly delightful – that is to say bright, earnest, wacky, moving, off-kilter, each poem pierced through with a vision that takes in the absurdity of the important and the importance of the absurd, each poem an antidote to the mundaneness of everyday objects or events. Together they constitute a deeply gratifying reading experience.

-Davi

3/22/08

The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño

Not since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle have I been blown away by such an enormous, bizarre, unpredictable, endlessly entertaining work of literature, nor been so completely absorbed into a fictional world. We start in Mexico City with a group of teenage poets who call themselves the Visceral Realists. Youth for them is sex and violence and poetry – especially poetry. To read this book is to believe that literature is a powerful, if not the most powerful, force in the world. From Mexico City the narrative begins to explode like fireworks all over the rest of the globe – Austria, Spain, France, England, Israel, Africa – as a consuming quest for a lost poet hurls the two enigmatic youths at the center of this story through 20 years of adventure, hardship and depravity.

The Savage Detectives is an important book, a testament to the power of literature and a rebuke to the notion that originality and ambition have left the field of the novel. Please don’t miss it – it’s a big deal!

–Davi

The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa

Darker and deeper and more sad and beautiful and lucid than anything I’ve ever read. This book is an absurdly rich vein of wisdom and poignancy. And it is never cheesy, always somewhat surreal and dreamlike, as if Pessoa had been granted access to a realm just outside regular existence and wrote back to us from this vantage point. Written from the perspective of an alter-ego, a severely introverted accounting clerk who lives by himself in a small apartment in Lisbon, The Book of Disquiet is collected from a trunk full of unpublished manuscripts found in Pessoa’s home after his death. I can’t help thinking that literature would be a much smaller thing if it hadn’t been discovered, the same with my notion of what’s possible with the written word.

–Davi

1/16/08:

We promise to try to stay more on top of this section of the site in the future, but for now, feel free to check out my page on GoodReads to see what I’m reading.

-Christine

11/29/07:

The National Book Critics Circle just launched their Most Recommended List, a great resource which we will try to post here regularly. It’s a monthly list of book recommendations compiled from votes cast by NBCC members as well as famous writers and critics, and here’s the first one:

Fiction

1) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2) Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
3) Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
4) Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
5) Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

Nonfiction

1) Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
2) Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
3) Noami Klein, The Shock Doctrine
4) David Michaelis, Schulz and the Peanuts
5) Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes

Poetry

1) Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005*
2) Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998*
3) Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music*
4) Rae Armantrout, Next Life
5) Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

*These three titles tied for first place in the poetry category.

10/11/07:

Christine:

-is currently reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics (fiction, $15.00)

-read Absurdistan (fiction, $13.95) and liked it, but didn’t love it

-read The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us (story collection, $15.00). This one was not as light and humorous as I expected from the cover, but still worth reading. Some of the stories in the collection are powerful and dark.

-read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (young adult, $16.99). I enjoyed this one, and think it’s definitely appropriate for the young adult (14 and up) crowd. Boys should love it.