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LIT MOB’S TOP PICKS |
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KILL YOUR FRIENDS
by John Niven
Not for the faint hearted, easily offended, or politically correct, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends is as much a vision of depravity and self-obsession as I’ve ever read, and deserves comparison to American Psycho. The 1990s British music industry is the setting for the novel, which uses months as its chapters and begins each with a report on successful records and professional movements.
purchase via IndieBound |
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BREATH
by Tim Winton
Still water runs deep, it’s said, whereas the kind of water one surfs—curling, glass-walled water, a hollow of serenity tucked inside a roaring snarl—apparently runs turbulently and dangerously over shark-populated reefs. On the fraught knife-edge between surface and turmoil is where characters live in Tim Winton’s Breath, a lean and taut novel with prose that crests and crashes in impressive resonance with its promising but ultimately tragic subjects.
purchase via IndieBound |
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THE MAGICIAN’S BOOK: A SKEPTIC’S ADVENTURES IN NARNIA
by Laura Miller
When asked to describe the single book that had most influenced her, the cofounder of Salon.com considered fawning over a weighty university-set text before realizing that “the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly—or the ones we’d most like other people to think we read over and over again.”
purchase via IndieBound |
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INVISIBLE MAN
by Ralph Ellison
“I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Throwback to 1952. Ralph Waldo Ellison (not to be confused with the essay-spewing transcendentalist) was such a tremendous rock star that he only needed to write one book during his lifetime. That one book earned him a few big awards and has spent much of its shelf life collecting dust as a deeply underrated stack of paper and ink. Invisible Man provides substance upon which to base the ageist idea that, “they sure don’t write books like they used to.”
purchase via IndieBound |
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WILL STORR VS. THE SUPERNATURAL
by Will Storr
“Life after death is as improbable as sex after marriage,” drones the impeccable Madeline Kahn in the classic 1985 film Clue. While others can attest to the post-nuptial state of physical relations, British writer and journalist Will Storr goes in search of life after death in this eponymous-titled nonfiction. Only his quest is a bit more than a search for ghosts and things that go bump in the night: Storr, an admitted lapsed Catholic and probable agnostic at best, seeks the supernatural with the notion that to believe in ghosts is to believe in life after death, ergo the existence of some spiritual higher being, whatever that may be.
purchase via IndieBound |
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BEASTS! (BOOKS ONE & TWO)
by Jacob Covey
For those of us that never tire of amazing art and fantasy (a pretty great combination for many of us), Fantagraphic’s Beasts! (Volume 1 & 2) sure delivers. Not only are these two books chock full of some of the best drawings, musings, and paintings of “hidden creatures” that we have seen in quite some time, but cryptozoology on a whole has never again been so inspiring.
purchase via IndieBound |
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ALAN’S WAR
by Emmanuel Guibert
Time provides us with the ability to soften wounds, make sense of events that have transpired in our past, and sometimes re-create memories so that they become a bit more manageable, less painful. In the graphic novel Alan’s War, The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope, this may be the case, as the book was based upon Alan’s stories as told to author and illustrator Emmanuel Guibert some decades after WWII came to a close. As a friend and confidant, Guibert was entrusted to bring to fruition the life story of Alan Cope, and he does so in a beautiful and honest manner. Mr. Cope surely would have been proud with the results (unfortunately Alan Cope passed away before the novel was published).
purchase via IndieBound |
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REVISITING: THE ROAD
by Cormac McCarthy
Sometime in 2009, the image of Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in his post-apocalypse novel, The Road, will belong to a haggard, bearded Viggo Mortensen, just as Anton Chigurh is forever and ever a great-looking Spanish actor. Read the book before this happens. Lately, Armageddon and its ensuing dystopia have, by way of global warming, escalating poverty, and collapsing economic ideologies, been pushed to the forefront of our consciousness. McCarthy’s jarring vision of it offers no relief.
purchase via IndieBound |
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BONSAI
by Alejandro Zambra
The first paragraph of Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai effectively spells out the plot of the story we’re about to read, decisively naming the two central characters—essentially creating them out of the air before us—and setting out where they’ll be at narrative’s end. The prose is exceedingly formal and exceedingly conscious of itself: “Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia,” one passage begins. And throughout the novella, this inherently literary style reoccurs: for one stretch, the protagonist finds himself in the archetypally metafictional situation of transcribing a novel that does not, in actuality, exist.
purchase via IndieBound |
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SCHEISSHAUS LUCK
by Pierre Berg
Pierre Berg of Nice, France was seventeen and had aspirations of being a hairdresser and a ladies man, but never imagined that the unspeakable could happen to him. While visiting a friend who owned a shortwave radio the two were captured and sent to Nazi Concentration camps because the Gestapo banned all shortwave radio broadcasting. Pierre and his friend made broadcasts of Laurel and Hardy, which were sent only to neighbors, but the Nazi’s suspected them of making long-range broadcasts. Pierre was sent to Auschwitz and his friend was never heard from again.
purchase via IndieBound |
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2666
by Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño spent most of his life as a broke, nomadic poet wandering through South America, Mexico and Europe. A political exile from his home country Chile, he spearheaded the notorious infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico. He eventually left Latin America for Europe, where he lived the rest of his life. He was only 50 when he died of liver failure in 2003. 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s last and most gut-wrenching novel, which he was still revising up to the last year of his life. The book is made up of 5 parts, and the separate narratives all weave around Santa Teresa, a city based on Ciudad Juarez in Northern Mexico where over four hundred murders of young women have taken place since 1993, and few have been solved.
purchase via IndieBound |
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WHY WE HATE US: AMERICAN DISCONTENT IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
by Dick Meyer
Reality television. Annoying cell-phone ringtones. Bridezillas. The ills of modern American society make us sick, and yet we perpetuate their existence. In his charmingly cranky Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium Dick Meyer attempts to explain why. A CBS News reporter and producer for twenty-three years, Meyer is now an editor for NPR, and—with his news media veteran status—is in a unique position to call bullshit. The book’s thesis is compelling, if semi-problematic: According to Meyer, the liberation of the nineteen sixties alongside the technology of today equates to “why we hate us.” We’re no longer oppressed, but we’ve taken it too far. We’re rude when we should be mannerly, we text message when we should be talking, and I don’t know what we should be watching, but it’s probably not “Rock of Love.”
purchase via IndieBound |
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DEMONS IN THE SPRING
by Joe Meno
Joe Meno’s coming-of-age/coming-to-punk-rock novel Hairstyles of the Damned met the world in 2004. With a collection of resonant themes and defiant first-person narration—not to mention Meno’s outspoken sentiment in favor of independent publishing—it found an unlikely audience in a cross-section of punk rockers, independent media advocates, and literary aficionados. Of Meno’s four novels, though, Hairstyles is in some ways atypical. His earlier How the Hula Girl Sings and Tender As Hellfire (revised for its 2007 reissue on Akashic) were laced with noir tropes and occasionally beatific moments of surrealism. That trajectory was even more manifest in 2006’s The Boy Detective Fails, which impressively sustains a tone somewhere between postmodern pulp and wrenching emotional examination throughout.
purchase via IndieBound |
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A BETTER ANGEL: STORIES
by Chris Adrian
Chris Adrian doesn’t think small. His first novel, Gob’s Grief, concerns itself with the construction of a machine to resurrect the Civil War’s dead. His second, The Children’s Hospital, opens with the modern world swept away by deluge. Each one sprawls, blending hard-scrabble realism with outright fantasy, enmeshing historical figures in ahistorical moments, colliding mysticism and scientific rationality. The endurance of trauma and the horrific side effects of a forceful will are themes that recur throughout Adrian’s fiction, and A Better Angel offers nine distillations of his preferred themes.
purchase via IndieBound |
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 October 6-19, 2008 |
 This is the most recent week |
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