Ghosts Of Booksellers Past
While these booksellers themselves aren't necessarily ghosts, their recommendations still stand even after they've left our stores.
This book is about a fantasy video game that empowers young women gamers, and ends up teaching a lesson about global economics. It's a perfect compromise between story and substance. The Introduction should be read by the concerned parent but skipped by the reader.
-- Anna
The Sandwich Thief is about a boy trying to figure out who is stealing his lunch every day, it's hilariously written and illustrated, and it's a perfect early picture book for a funny kid that's getting braver about reading on their own!
-- Anna
This is my favorite new ABC book - it takes International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie) and illustrates each letter! Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault means that it's a work of art as well as a great picture book.
-- Anna
A picture book about a little girl who wants to find the perfect present for her mom. She goes around town to all the little shops to find the perfect thing. Beatrice Alemagna is an important maker of picturebooks, and is well respected in Europe where she lives and works. She has said that "a picture book is a work of art that grows up with a child."
-- Anna
Nuts in Space is about a band of animal space explorers on an important mission. This is perfect for the energetic kid that wants to laugh all the way through a book, and be part of the action. This picture book has a loose plot but is full of speech bubbles of the characters making jokes and getting into trouble. It's good to read out loud and for the child to start to read some of the bubbles themselves.
-- Anna
Illustrated by Delphine Perret, this is a cheeky story about a boy who is grumpy during his vacation in the country. He comes across some farm animals that demand what he's good for, which makes him very indignant. In the end he learns to enjoy and appreciate the little pleasures of being on vacation, and being a kid. This is good for reading out loud at story time, and for early readers.
-- Anna
In an accessible and engaging voice, Dr. Epstein contextualizes the Buddhist teaching of mindful meditation within modern psychotherapeutic understanding and the emotional development of the future Buddha. Infused with personal insights, professional experience, careful readings of Buddhist sutras, and strong narratives, this book makes a compelling case that, Buddhist or not, "there may be nothing else to do with the traumas that befall us than to use them for our own awakenings."
-- Michael
As a child, Betty Smith's autobiographical protagonist is read one page each day from the collected works of Shakespeare, said to contain "all the wonder of life...; all that man has learned of beauty, all that he may know of wisdom and living..." For the same reasons, this "deeply, indelibly true" American classic ("a story about what it means to be human") is my all-time favorite novel.
-- Michael
Speedboat is what you'd get if Joan Didion wrote a novel, put it through a shredder, and let Pound stich the pieces back together. Totally wild!
This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of literature in our cacophonous, media-saturated, self-reflexive culture. An excellent, thoroughly provocative read.
Please enter these prose poems and enjoy their uncontainable energy, their sudden insight, and their constant ridiculousness. Mary Ruefle is a mad genius.
-- Ryan
For any fan of Mad Men: a history of advertising's "Creative Revolution" in the '60s. Frank shows that, rather than simply taking advantage of the counterculture, the business was very much a part of it. Deeply researched and replete with anecdotes about Madison Avenue's odder folk.
-- Ryan
In this essay collection, Leslie Jamison explores how we assimilate feelings of pain in ourselves and others. Critically fluent and with a highly refined style (something akin to a sestina), she complicates the standard understanding of empathy -- that it is simple, reflexive, and morally pristine. I would particularly recommend the essay "In Defense of Saccharin(e)." Like Notes From No Man's Land, a winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.
-- Ryan
In these essays Eula Biss investigates the complex history (and present) of race in America. With her remarkable talent, the result is a clear-sighted, always-empathetic portrait of racial privilege, violence, and division -- and sometimes transcendence. If only we could all be as graceful and thoughtful as Eula B. The first step is reading this wonderful book.
-- Ryan
Is it excusable to lie to children, to the dying? Is it just to lie in order to avoid great harm?: Some of the topics covered in this enlightening, refreshingly pragmatic account of the ethics of deception.
-- Ryan
Though one of his less-read novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is where Murakami most imaginatively articulates his belief in the essential dual nature of reality.
-- Ryan
This book takes place entirely during one office worker’s trip on an escalator up to his office’s mezzanine. Tactile, neurotic, architectural -- it has an engaging logic that will make you reconsider all the little objects in your life.
-- Ryan
Miranda July is also a filmmaker (You, Me, and Everyone We Know) and a general personality. She writes in the lineage of “empathy lit” -- stories about human foibles and silly fantasies. Check her out on YouTube and David Sedaris reading her story on the New Yorker fiction podcast.
-- Ryan
The nature of Elena Ferrante’s identity has generated much debate, but more interesting are her bold and uncompromising novels. My Brilliant Friend is the first in her Neapolitan series, about the turbulent friendship between two intelligent girls born into poverty in Naples after WWII. For anyone who has ever felt like a sidekick, or been in awe of prodigious talent, this is a great book, full of truth.
-- Ryan
Ben Lerner is mostly a poet, and this is his first novel. It’s a semi-autobiographical account of his time in Spain on a Fulbright. Fraudulence, meta-anxiety about art, hashish: the major items on the menu.
-- Ryan
