         Staff Picks Stephen's Picks
Love may be the reason that poetry was invented and the world turns and the oceans weep, but as many as have written and mulled over the subject, none have more adequately tossed it, mentally dismantled it or ruminated on it than Barthes has here. The most authoritative text on the most wily subject.
As this pair goes through the Russian canon they are making the standard of the art of translation their own, almost to the point that these novels didn't exist before their translations but only the essences of the novels. Here, Doctor Zhivago is given a new life, based on the original banned text. Where the previous translation was rushed into print on the eve of Pasternak's Nobel prize -causing a cold war debacle, this has been attention never before given the text.
These poems are why I search bookstores, the reason why I read -- in hopes of coming across works as good as this. Brilliant, sad, funny, expertly devised, beautiful, perplexing poems.
A powerhouse of fantastic, fantastical illustrations, a tour de force of numbers and also a whopping big bee.
Based on the bawdy ramblings of Bohumil's uncle, this one sentence ode to memory and life's charming buffooneries is like running downhill without being able to stop. I honestly believe that this country, much less the world, is a better place now that this book is back in print. Please, sweet lord, bring back 'The Little Town Where Time Stood Still' for us. These books go so very well together.
Few people can geek out like my good man Gavin Pretor-Pinney, and I am for sure thankful that for every book that he puts out. His book on waves (traffic waves, ocean waves, light waves, all kinds of waves) is one of my favorite books of all time. And his previous book on clouds shows the art available to every human being on the earth -clouds! This is a companion piece, and light as it is, it can travel with us everywhere there are clouds - which is everywhere.
These are the types of kids books that I love the most! Sweet but not saccharine, clever, playful, never talking down to its audience... which is extraordinary when the audience for this could be four years old or forty. Toon Tellegen works with the genre in the way that Milne did when he wrote the Pooh books. And they are something that I will constantly come back to for a great read.
Sometimes, with Lydia's ear for words, it's hard to tell whether her one page snips are poetry or stories. Niether! They're incredible! And while classifiable they may not be, they are saturated with the wonder of little moments.
As this pair goes through the Russian canon they are making the standard of the art of translation their own, almost to the point that these novels didn't exist before their translations but only the essences of the novels. Here, 'Doctor Zhivago' is given a new life, based on the original banned text. Where the previous translation was rushed into print on the eve of Pasternak's Nobel prize -causing a cold war debacle, this has been attention never before given the text.
On the 150th anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s birth, Wandering Stars has been published in English for the very first time. Yiddish is notoriously under-translated and this book, by the grandfather of Yiddish lit, is proof that there are a lot of gems out there yet to be represented. A love story taking place in the theater, Wandering Stars reminds in scope and in amplitude of the classics of Russian fiction written by Aleichem’s contemporaries such as Tolstoy, Dosteovski. If you are familiar with the characters in Aleichem's other works, the compassionate and the gritty schmucks, some of the most authentic people in all of literature, then you will know and love the cast of this book.
Ms. Bender blends senses in this synesthesiaic opus to growing up. The pains and ecstasies of childhood are imbedded into the ordinary for Rose, who tastes the emotions of whomever prepared her food. She is forced to watch (from her tongue) the turmoil of those around her: lunch-ladies, cooks, those in food bag assembly plants, and her mother. Bender never becomes cliché, always pushing for new ways to expand herself as a writer and the end result is the reader becomes expanded as well, never to look at the next meal the same. This may be Ms. Bender's most intense and charming work to date.  Regards
to the Man in the Moon Ezra Jack Keats Ezra Keats always fuels our engines, and in this he takes us into outer space in a makeshift spaceship. This is for anyone who ever made a fort using chairs and bed-sheets, a mansion out of a refrigerator box, a broadsword with a stick or magically turned the air inside of a plastic teapot into hot Irish breakfast.  Jacques
Cousteau : The Sea King Brad Matsen Jacques Cousteau was certainly the greatest explorer of the 20th century, but maybe he was also the greatest explorer ever because he sought not to exploit his discoveries but rescue them. I recently, after reading this, went back to watch many of is videos, and they are as exciting and worldly as anything else in the great frogman's life. Here, local author Brad Matson takes us through the great man's life from WWII espionage, his inventing the SCUBA, to the tumultuous end of life estate matters that left the beloved Calypso adrift and rotting in a boat yard.
Happy birthday Bohul! (March 28, 1914) In this, our melancholic-farceur tells of his courting with his beloved wife, Pipsi, from the point view of his beloved wife, Pipsi. So this ends up being a sort of autobiography, or maybe a biography of his wife while she looks back at him. Hrabal treats all of his characters with such care and anyone who has read his other work will recognize the people in his daily life. Don't think that you must read his other work first though, Hrabal is charming and sweet and most of all entertaining in this as much as any of his other works. Why did Kundera acknowledge him as "Our greatest writer"? Because there's so much concern and care seeping out of his eyes straight onto the page. The second if this trilogy is coming out in May, and the third in 2011.
A surly ghost haunts a decomposing apartment complex. Meanwhile the inhabitants fret through a post soviet Russian winter. The Ochsner spins through her characters, making them real, sad and brilliant along the way. The light plot is a great canvas for their eccentricities and foibles. The oppressions of the poverty in post soviet Russia are made tangible, but not unbearable, and especially good reading.
It's all about perspective, isn't it? This sweet story is accentuated by the wonderful, whimsical illustrations of Morgot Zemach. There's so much going on in these pictures that every time you read this book something wonderful, from piggybacking goats to wally-honking geese, will jump and surprise you.
These never sent letters end up being an autobiography never told to Hrabal's friend April from the 'Delighted States.' Both sad and beautiful, Hrabal comes off as one of the characters in his novels, which means that this collection of letters is more entertaining than your average -or even your better collections of letters. Told in his flowing meter and grandfatherly way, Hrabal recalls his botched trip to the states, his driving around London trying to follow the narrative of T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', and some of the most grimly-angelic references to his wife as a pigeon. Also, Hrabal foreshadows his own death from falling out of a fifth story window which is the fate, he argues, of all the great writers. Hrabal has a way of taking the ugly in the world, the regret or the blood on his pillowcase, or life behind the iron curtain and the paranoia of being questioned by the secret police, and turning it into something more beautiful than sunsets and daisies, and still at the same time bringing the humor of a Chaplin film.
With startling beauty, Antoine describes the birth of aviation. Great adventure
writing taking place at a time when they sent two airplanes to fly together
because chances were, one would crash, so the other would circle and pick
up the cargo. It took a special kind of person...
The process of learning how to cook vegan is largely establishing a new vocabulary of cooking techniques, and half the fun of establishing that vocab is here within. The other half happens when you put the book back on the shelf and experiment.
This book is my new religion. I'm taking collections to go to South America
on a mission to spread the word. It's not a book that you need to read all
at once, instead you can pop these gems into your head and let them dissolve
a while, however there is an arc that forms with long sitting with this book.
From the first sentence, this book sets down an elegant retelling of the life of the 'Mother of Mexican Poetry.' Bolano's rhythms are those of a poet, and he even makes appearances as his literary self-Arturo Bolano. Towards the end, this novel builds and rolls until one of the perfect last pages in literature.
Yes, yes, I know. It's $17. But honestly it's the only edition of this book that I could get in, and it's a wonderful book that every bookstore should have, written with a wonderfulness only rivaled by "Too Loud a Solitude." Holy smokes this book is good!
What better than a Freudian to explore the nature of sexual fantasy? Kahr
uses real life examples from patients in London and New York, along with a
lot of fascinating history, to explore what our fantasies say about both us
as individuals and as a people. Really interesting.
The history and science of the sea is written about so lovingly and personally
that, while you're reading this at the beach, when you look up from the page
the entire world will have changed. What we have missed and not even known
about is framed by what we can know and experience. As dangerous as space and
much less studied, the sea gives itself to myths of every sort. The Complete Fairy Tales George MacDonald Magical stories, more fun per page than I've had in a good long
while. And there are blurbs from W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis, so you feel dignified
while reading about floating princesses and such. Ritter's
Crime Three intelligent and funny stories about constructing your
own world around you. Ritter is an intellectual who, from lack
of money, starts working construction. Author James Brantingham
is a local author who deserves an audience! The
History of Love Lovable, eccentric characters whose company will entertain you
for hours. A 14 Year old girl searches for the author of a book,
an elderly man waiting to die, while her brother learns to deal
with being one of the Lamed Vov (36 holy people who can talk directly
to god). Suite
Francaise Fifty years after her death in the holocaust, Irene Nemirovsky's
manuscript was found locked away in a chest. Originally, this
was going to be the first two novelettes in a five-part work.
We're left with these two, both tracking families and individuals
under the thump of war. The
Killing of Ned Christie An epic standoff between one man and time. Christie survived raging rifles, crashing cannons and vengeful justice before riding two tarnished pistols into flaming fate. This is an underdog story as legendary as the Wild West we romanticize. |
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A Lover's Discourse
Doctor Zhivago
The Suspect 
Tree Ring Circus
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
The Cloud Collector's Handbook 
The Squirrel's Birthday 
Collected Stories
Doctor Zhivago
'Wandering Stars'
Particular
Sadness of Lemon Cake 
In-House
Weddings 
The
Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight 
It
Could Always Be Worse 
Total
Fears 
Airman's
Odyssey
Macrina
Bakery and Cafe Cookbook 
Vegan
Brunch 
Mirrors:
Stories of Almost Everyone 
Amulet 
Closely
Watched Trains 
Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?
Seven Tenths