Staff Picks

I became a reader during the era of publishing conglomeration, completely unaware of the industry's transformation. Sinykin's exploration has forced me to rethink my perception of authors and my contribution as a book consumer. Recommended to those curious about why any book gets published.

 

Publisher description:

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature-and literature itself-transformed. Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry's daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction. This deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.

 

Why is climate change largely absent from the modern novel? Is there something about our expectations of narrative that make climate change unthinkable? Ghosh explores these questions while implicating the climate crisis within a crisis of culture, calling our time of climate inaction a derangement.

 

Publisher's description:
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counter-intuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s challenge to his peers to create works that confront this urgent need before it is too late.

 

In this thoughtful series of vignettes--one for each her fifty years as a poet--former Poet Laureate Joy Harjo reflects on how her Native heritage and life experiences have shaped her work. Library Journal calls this "a comforting island for writers who enjoy reading about how authors succeed." Recommended for readers who enjoyed Ann Patchett's recent memoir, These Precious Days.

 

Publisher's description:

In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Composed of intimate vignettes that take us through the author's life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory--in both the private, individual journey and as a vehicle for prophetic, public witness. Harjo insists that the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.

 

This is a wonderful meditation on reading in general and, specifically, what I'll call "The Book From Childhood." Almost all of us have one. Miller's was The Chronicles of Narnia. Many of us have returned to The Book as adults only to be disappointed in some way. Miller shows us how we can "get back in" and appreciate Our Book anew. I especially liked her take on the great works of children's literature, which are often viewed with condescension by "serious" literary critics but, she argues, shouldn't be. And I love the idea that we can still openly love certain books and great works of art even if their creators had some glaring faults (sexism, racism, etc. among them) or unsavory motives. I found myself relating to her as I read such thoughts as if she were my braver, more honest, more analytical, and more skeptical self.

 

Publisher's description: 

The Magician's Book is an intellectual adventure story, in which Miller travels to Lewis's childhood home in Ireland, the possible inspiration for Narnia's landscape; unfolds his intense friendship with J.R.R.Tolkien, a bond that led the two of them to create the greatest myth-worlds of modern times; and explores Lewis's influence on writers like Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Franzen, and Philip Pullman. Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination. Erudite, wide-ranging, and playful, The Magician's Book is for all who live in thrall to the magic of books.

Find The Magician's Book in our online catalog.

 

Check into the Dream Motel and take a long, twisting walk with Patti Smith down the lanes of her memory during the pivotal year of the monkey. Reading this book, like all her books, is much like losing yourself in one of her songs. Her lyrical words weave through her regret at losing friends to sickness and old age, and express her rage at that year's hostile political climate. It's small. Try it.

 

Publisher's description:
Following a run of new year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith--inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing--this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, "Anything is possible. After all, it's the Year of the Monkey." But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

 

Find Year of the Monkey in our online catalog.

The author in a personal, intimate, and optimistic way, reviews different aspects of our current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity, known as the Anthropocene. He takes subjects that seem so innocuous and injects such poignancy into his essays that each is full of deep meaning. And with each essay, he reviews his subject, as if writing a book review of it with history and research and his own personal experience, to arrive at his rating based on a five-star system. I first discovered Green's podcast of the same title, and I was so moved by the essays and the author that I was excited to pick up this book. And truly, I have learned a lot from his reviews and his own personal journey amid the crazy assortment of topics he has chosen, from Jerzy Dudek's Performance on May 25, 2005 to the movie Harvey, to Academic Decathlons. I loved this book.

 

Publisher description: 

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet--from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu--on a five-star scale. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

 

This book is billed as a guide for writers AND as a master class in the classic Russian short story--and it's wonderful on both fronts. If masters like Chekhov, Tolstoy and their peers have baffled you, Saunders is an able guide to why they matter--and how learning what they do well can make your own writing better. I didn't want this book to end, and I want Saunders to be my writing teacher.

 

Publisher description:

George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes. Funny, frank, and rigorous, this book ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs.

 

Michiko Kakutani's Ex Libris is a love letter to libraries and the love of reading. Of the 100-plus books listed, I have read about thirty of them with many more on my to-read list. Ex Libris is a book to read cover to cover, a book to flip through, and a book to reread again and again.

 

Publisher description:

Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani shares 100 personal, thought-provoking essays about books that have mattered to her and that help illuminate the world we live in today--with beautiful illustrations throughout.

 

I am sorry that this book, written in 1983, is just as relevant today, 36 years and counting, as it was upon original publication. Russ explores multiple strategies that keep women's work and experience(s) out of the cannon of literature, though her insights can be applied widely, from art to science. This book can validate many women's experiences as artists/professionals, though it is not written solely for women. Russ opens up questions of what is considered a universal experience as well as the validity of the notion itself. It is a testament to the power of unconscious bias. Russ provokes the thought--what would our art/culture/society be like without that bias?--and she does it with style and humor.

 

Publisher Description:

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women's Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle--and not so subtle--strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.