The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we thought it a good idea to offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature that will be appearing irregularly. We hope you discover something you like.
+ Take Five (Dalkey Archive) by D. Keith Mano recommended by Garth
D. Keith Who? This guy has written for TV and Sports Illustrated, which hardly explains how, in 1982, he came up with this gloriously funny, word-drunk modern mock-epic. Over the course of 5 days, filmmaker Simon Lynxx, in pursuit of a project called Jesus 2001, loses his senses…one by one. Recommended for: shaggy undergrads, lovers of Pynchon, Barth, Coover, and John Kennedy Toole.
+ Fear And Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (Grand Central) by Hunter S. Thompson recommended by Andrew
I confess: I’m an election junkie. And though I’m a proud Canadian, it’s U.S. presidential elections that really get me going. So as we (and by we, I mean you) gear up for primary season, here’s a masterpiece of political journalism as the irrepressible Hunter Thompson chronicles a year on the campaign trail. You’ll feel like you’re back in 1972, rooting for McGovern, booing at Muskie and “Hube,” your eyes darting about in case the ghost of Nixon is spying on you. There’s lots of minutiae, but as with the best of Hunter Thompson, the devil’s in the detail.
+ Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (Routledge) by Terry Castle recommended by Emily
This collection of essays and reviews, by turns deliciously irreverent (“Was Jane Austen Gay?”), devastatingly funny (the opening of “Women and Criticism”), and astonishingly poignant (“To the Friends Who Did Not Save My Life”), is a must-read for any connoisseur of literary criticism – and, really, any connoisseur of literary style or authorial persona. Castle’s masterfully elegant prose style, her irrepressible and self-deprecating sense of humor, and her shrewd yet humane readings of Cather, Colette, Charlotte Bronte, Austen, Casanova, and Lillian Hellman, to name a few, offer a new hope to those down-cast about the state of criticism, both academic and lay. Recommended for: aspiring Lady-Critics, despairing literature grad students, and belletrists of all stripes.
+ The Dud Avocado (NYRB Classics) by Elaine Dundy recommended by Edan
Originally published in 1958 and reprinted this year by the wonderful New York Review of Books, this book follows the adventures and misadventures of young Sally Jay Gorce, an American expat in Paris. She drinks too much, wears ridiculous outfits, and sleeps with the wrong men – it’s like Sex and the City, but far smarter and funnier.
+ Wheat That Springeth Green (NYRB Classics) by J.F. Powers recommended by Patrick
J.F. Powers writes about Catholic priests the way Michael Connelly or David Simon writes about homicide detectives – they’re all burned out, chain-smoking, overworked, borderline alcoholics. It’s for precisely these reasons that anyone, Catholic or not, can enjoy Wheat That Springeth Green. More of a bildungsroman than some of Powers’ other work, Wheat follows its protagonist, Joe, from childhood through the seminary and into his priesthood at a parish in Minnesota, where he has to put up with the new generation of sandal-wearing, folk guitar-playing priests. Funny, sexier than you’d think, and vaguely political (Powers went to jail for being a conscientious objector during WWII), this book has been a favorite of mine for years.
+ The Horned Man (Norton) by James Lasdun recommended by Max
Too many novels take academia as their backdrop, but few break the mold as thoroughly as Lasdun’s 2002 debut. Amid inter-departmental backbiting, Professor Lawrence Miller discovers a bookmark shifted by a few pages in a book he’s been reading. Beginning with this tiniest lapse from reality, the unexplained events get weirder and wilder: is a vagrant inhabiting his office? is he a killer? This psychological roller coaster is everything I’ve wished Paul Auster’s novels could be.
