Sarah H. Staff Picks
Sarah hails from the suburbs of Atlanta. She's a manager at the 114th location and enjoys leaving the bookstore door open on sunny days.
If the title being a reference to a Radiohead song (and a Gertrude Stein quote) isn't enough of an indicator of how good Tommy Orange's debut novel is, I'll keep going. This book is urgent, haunting, and incredibly important. It will leave you wanting to stay with the characters that will, by the end of the book, really break your heart. Orange's monumental first work is worth your time.
In this undeniably timely and elegiac essay, author Valeria Luiselli recounts her experiences as an interpreter for child immigrants, describing our present United States as, “a country as beautiful as it is broken.” Through the lenses of mother, immigrant, and activist, Luiselli exposes the atrocities migrants overcome both crossing the border and the unending limbos they’re forced into upon arrival.
-- Sarah
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I chose this book as one of my summer staff picks. I should also preface that I generally enjoy psych/self-help/mind-and-body books (Year of Yes, Braving the Wilderness, You Are a Badass, and Big Magic are some of my favorites) so I knew this would be delectable going in.
Reader, I can't even tell you how highly I recommend this book. What was once just a tidbit of wisdom to her friend at a poetry-slam competition turned into a work, a manifesto, and a movement. The Body Is Not an Apology is a guide for anyone who has ever questioned the validity of their physical being. An intersectional, sex-positive, self-love manual is what you have in front of you. What are you even waiting for.-- Sarah
Looking for something to break your heart? Search no further. In a mere 203 pages McEwan takes hold of your heartstrings then snips them one by one as the Fates would. Good old masochistic fun!
In witnessing the rise and fall of characters Edward and Florence, the reader is left with a very important lesson: if you let good love get away you will inevitably be left alone on a rocky English beach.-- Sarah
First of all, ignore the title. This is a brilliant collection of confessional essays ranging from Chee's time as an AIDS whistleblower in the Castro District of the 90s to the connection between personal trauma and art to working as a waiter/caterer for Mr. and Mrs. William Buckley in the Upper East Side. In short, it's not a how-to guide but an offering to past and present selves.
-- Sarah
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Being a Georgian lady myself, Flannery has always had a very special place on my bookshelf. Her mastery of the short story has yet to be beat; merging southern gothic with human grotesques, her characters are so far ethereal they almost seem inhuman (and sometimes are likened to vegetables, in fact). O’Connor sums up her work the best: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by a northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be realistic.” Enjoy!
-- Sarah
If you are like me and relish in the worlds of Austen, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, this novel is for you. Hardy paints a pastoral masterpiece that achieves what so many male novelists of his time strive to do – he gives his readers a realistic depiction of a young woman vacillating between the pulls of her head and her heart.
-- Sarah
Oh man…this one is great if you’re young and fresh in the city. It’s also great if you’re not. Laing follows five artists who struggled with loneliness in NYC, studying their solitude to find comfort in her own. Laing beautifully elaborates on the light and noise-filled beast that is NYC – that monster we love to live with but sometimes leaves us feeling lonely.
-- Sarah
