Ghosts Of Booksellers Past
While these booksellers themselves aren't necessarily ghosts, their recommendations still stand even after they've left our stores.
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
![A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [75th Anniversary Ed] Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/262/736/FC9780060736262.JPG)
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
Billed as “The Things They Carried for the Iraq War,” Redeployment tells of the dissonant homecomings of America’s soldiers. With brutal oo-rah humor, Klay shows us the empty gestures of civilian thanks, missing girlfriends, and the cognitive echoes of an ignored war.
-- Ryan
This is the first novel from long-time N+1 critic Caleb Crain. It’s about a young man who has traveled to Prague right after the fall of Soviet rule, trying to understand his sexual identity and his literary ambition.
-- Ryan
O’Neill writes with superbly intelligent prose in this book about post 9/11 NYC, the immigrant experience, and the quiet satisfaction of playing cricket. A novel about a sensitive observer and his charismatic friend in the tradition of the Great Gatsby.
-- Ryan
Think E.B. White, John Irving, and maybe even Bridget Jones. The Folded Clock is biting, self-aware, stubborn, and refreshingly un-fluffy for a diary-of-sorts. I wish as a sequel she would publish the diary she wrote as an eight-year old; how has nobody done that already? Keep an eye out for Flora: At Eight.
-- Flora
Wolcott’s Wikipedia page lists him as a practicing Transcendental Meditator, but you wouldn’t know it from his zinging, resonant critical essays that in the course of a few years can applaud and then brutally strike down (see: Woody Allen). I appreciate his acknowledgement of the intellect behind all things media, and his ability to call out a phony when he sees one. None of the decades-old essays feel creaky with age; if anything they nostalgically remind us of the power that movies, books, and late-night talk show hosts have on a culture-hungry country.
-- Flora
I never would have guessed that a play about the internal happenings of a movie theater and its employees would so powerfully address the equally mundane and fantastic experience of going to work each day-- what one brings in with them, what they leave, and what they communicate to one another-- but now it seems so perfect. The Flick is funny and depressing, hopeful and quiet, and illustrates the everlasting importance of the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
-- Flora
