Staff Picks

I love John Berger's reckless and eloquent prose and his evident good nature. It's rare to see someone take such delight in writing while also sloughing off brilliant propositions. This collection hops around with no seeming thread and yet everything that follows is a corollary.

 

(Alexis)

Objectivism aside, this book is everything I look for in a summer read: an epic, crackling, sprawling page-turner. Bonus: best catch phrase ever. I totally lost myself in the breathtakingly detailed world; the super heightened drama; the characters standing passionately and furiously for their convictions, with society tumbling down all around. Can't put the Objectivism aside? Well,it's not a bad thing to spend some time with a viewpoint radically different from your own. Who doesn't love a good argument about what it means to be human and what we do or do not owe to our fellow humans? Who is John Galt?.

 

(Annie)

An absurdist love story if there ever was one, Foam of the Daze is an absolute pleasure to discover. Its narrative is bizarre and coasts along like a carousel with a hot jazz soundtrack. Before you know it though, you’re aching and sad and happy and crushed all at the same time. This is a wonderful edition, replete with extensive notes explaining the method to the madness. Enjoy this one while it’s back in print.

 

(Jarrod)

These letters adhere to the belief that poets are the most romantic lovers. Three influential poets send forth proclamations of love to each other, even though they’ve never actually met. For these poets, as their world falls apart around them, they seek the embrace of those they know will understand, even if they happen to be countries away.

 

(Geo)

The reason you have never heard of Tartar cuisine is because there are so many other things to hear about. For instance, Rosa, the original Tiger Mother raising Sulfia, her good-for-nothing daughter, and Aminat, her illegitimate if infallible granddaughter in the twilight of the USSR. If the Soviet Socialist Republics had a l'heure bleue, it is Alina Bronsky who has painted it for us with broad, humorous strokes.

 

(Brette)

Every other book jacket these days seems to boast a comparison to Lorrie Moore, but Laurie Colwin is one of the few that actually merits such a comparison. She's just as gifted at wordplay and capturing exactly what you've always felt about something but never been able to express. Start with this collection of short stories and then order her nine (nine!) other books. My favorite story in here? "The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing" on page 165.

 

(Eleanor)

I think of Chilean literature like a jaguar, a ferocious predator that stalks and ambushes its prey in elegant language and emotional tumult tinged by politics. Seemingly out of place then is The Private Lives of Trees, a fable about the convalescent nature of stories framed in a looming tragedy. What it lacks in ferocity it makes up for in tension, as if the jaguar allows the prey to see him. There is no ambush, but frightening possibility.

 

(Brette)

Hey Brooklynites! Are you tired of the same old conventional, normative, and restricted ideas flooding your coloring books?! Do you long for a coloring book that encourages you to claim and celebrate your completely awesome feminist self whilst coloring outside the lines!? Do you believe in the courageousness that is girl-punk bands, pro choice-rallies, and the witchcraft of gender bending?! Then buy this and while you're at it buy one for a friend because no one wants to color or fight patriarchy alone!

 

(Brette & Angel)

In a decade slammed by the Great Depression, chest-deep in Jim Crow, and anxious about the looming shadows of World War II, Langston Hughes travelled the world to witness and live it all, firsthand and from multiple sources. From lecturing in the South to joining a film crew in Russia to getting kicked out of Japan, Hughes demonstrates just how to live a decade.

 

(Geo)

This debut novel from Hillary Jordan was one of the best I read in 2008. Set in rural Mississippi in the late 1940s and told from multiple points of view, Mudbound tells the story of what happens when two broken World War II heroes, one white, one black, befriend each other upon their returning home and the town's response to their growing friendship. Mudbound is a haunting reminder of recent intolerance and the pain we inflict on others. I can only hope we'll look back in another sixty years as a nation and be just as ashamed of the different kinds of intolerance we're spreading today.

 

(Emily)

It’s a shame that a person sometimes has to die for their work to get attention. I wish I'd known about Anthony Horton before I read about his sad death in a recent NYT article. A homeless artist who lived in a subway tunnel, Horton wrote this moving graphic novel of his short and complicated life. Both the book and the article remind us that humanity is mortal, complex, and not always straightforward (or kind), but sometimes an unconventional person finds their own way of sorting out life's complexities, and that that is okay.

 

(Rebecca)