Ghosts Of Booksellers Past
While these booksellers themselves aren't necessarily ghosts, their recommendations still stand even after they've left our stores.
Queneau is one of my all-time favorite authors. He is also hands down the most consistently funny author. I can easily recommend Zazie in the Metro and do, highly. The Flight of Icarus is the one I wish more people would read though... It is hysterical, unbelievably clever, and it's Queneau. I feel like a lot of people shy away from the play format but this is a novel by a truly enjoyable author.
-- Nick
There are few moments where you can call a novel perfect. There are even fewer moments when few have heard of that novel and that author. Since New York Review of Books reprinted Stoner a lot of people have rediscovered Williams's masterpiece. This is what the writer/reader relationship should be like always. A deft novel that will leave you a different person from which you started.
-- Nick
I could say this book is beautiful, and it is. I could say it’s moving, masterful, powerful - and it is. But what I have to say is that if you live in America you can’t afford not to read this book.
-- Lauren
Miller Oberman is changing the landscape of contemporary poetry. This collection is unlike any book I've ever read. A hybrid of original poems and Old English translations, The Unstill Ones is a magnificent rumination on everything from Medieval motherhood to the trans identity.
-- Lauren
When I think of prose poetry, I think of Anne Boyer. In Garments Against Women, her writing melds the two genres perfectly in a manner so seemingly effortless that it could only be the result of extremely intricate work. There are so many lines in here that I wish I could just tear off the page and take with my everywhere.
-- Lauren
I didn't know what to expect when one of my favorite fiction writers published a memoir, but I found myself enjoying this book even more than Keret's fantastic short stories. He deals with becoming a father, losing a father, life as a writer/self-described "ambi-Israel" Israeli, as well as a very big lizard. Through all this, Keret never loses his sense of humor & wonderment.
-- Lauren
To read Bianca Stone's poetry is to enter the most bizarre and profound imagination. MSCOG takes you to the edge of extreme discomfort (see, "Making Applesauce With My Dead Grandmother, p. 35), to grief to catharsis. Stone's words on Emily Dickinson's poems are true of her own as well; they are "grenades that fit in the hand/ and we here bask in the debris."
-- Lauren
ordinary beast, the first full-length collection from poet nicole sealey, is a masterpiece. Her poetry, her way of telling, her distinct way of seeing and distilling are a pure and enormous gift to readers. I love this book.
-- Lauren
I never thought a book about science and specifically genes could be so beautifully written. Mukherjee weaves his family history with the history of the gene in such a way that makes this a surprisingly easy and enjoyable read.
-- Calla
If you've read My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, pick up Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days. It's a similar story with an abusive father-daughter relationship and descriptions of nature, but Fuller's story is more nuanced and I'd say superior.
-- Calla
This is an intense book, well researched, well written and extremely relevant to current events. Kendi makes the reader confront their understanding of race, its history and one's own racial thinking. Everyone should read it.
-- Calla
If you haven’t read anything by Greif yet, catch up! This is a fantastic collection of his writing, some previously unpublished in his magazine n+1 an some with new afterthoughts and exegesis. Sure, a little pretentious. But still really good essaying.
This is a gorgeous and highly-lauded collection of poems and lyric essays by Sun Yung Shin, recently put out by Coffeehouse Press. Her writing is as richly allusive as Ulysses, and tracing her influences and references would provide you with a pretty excellent reading list.
-- Delaney
Sometimes a book finds you at just the right time, and it changes your life a little bit. This is that book for me. I used to be a very intense athlete--I worked under an Olympic world record holder--I trained, I competed, and I won, and eventually I stopped doing all three, in some non-numerical order. Now I stress about grad school. Reading this book was a salve for the me that wonders what could have been, and the me that now wonders what could be.
-- Delaney
The greatest survey of horror across genres (literature, art, cinema, etc.). An aesthetic and philosophical inquiry into a slippery subject. If horror is such an unpleasant feeling, why do we actively seek it out? And what differentiates horror from other feelings like terror, fear, awe? Carroll quite literally wrote the book.
-- Delaney
Hunt is a master of the minute, the visceral, and the ironic in a similar way that David Lynch is. You won’t be disappointed.
-- Delaney
Peter Mendelsund is the best and most iconic book cover designer since Alvin Lustig back in the 1940s. Not one of, but THE best. You might not recognize his name but you definitely know his covers. And here is a brilliant little book, gorgeously illustrated, describing his phenomenology of reading, of what happens when we visualize characters and fictional spaces and scenes. This is a book about books by someone who clearly loves books. Accessible, whimsical, and erudite all wrapped in one well-designed package.
-- Delaney
I’m really into Jesse Ball right now after reading his latest full novel, How To Set a Fire and Why, which caught my eye because of the fantastic title. Here’s his previous book with another equally great title. The plot definitely riffs on some old ideas—erasing pain and memories a lá “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”—but Ball is a great writer who really brings his characters to life in a unique way. A talented, immensely current young novelist to keep tabs on.
-- Delaney
This is a wild ride through the beginnings of noise music from someone who experienced it firsthand. Novak documents the genre's birth in Japan and charts its journey to the rest of the globe from there. Sometimes dense and academic, but never uninteresting. If you've seen and liked the HANATARASH bulldozer gig videos and pictures, read this book. If you haven't seen them, google them.
-- Delaney
A nightmare trip through the bowels of the NYC subway system. The book, I mean; although that describes most people's commutes too. Robbe-Grillet's ingenious nouveau nouveau roman style is on full display here, with cinematic writing, visceral body images, and surreal erotic acts. He writes horrific scenes into and then out of existence, but they linger on in the reader's mind.
-- Delaney
