Chang-Rae Lee, author of Aloft, suggests: |
The Iliad
by Homer and Robert Fagles
price: $15.95
Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Robert Fagles brings the energy of contemporary language to this enduring heroic epic. This timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amid devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to its terrifying, tragic conclusion. |  |
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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
by ZZ Packer
price: $14.00
Packer takes us to a Girl Scout camp, where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls, whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must decide where his allegiance to his father lies; to Japan, where an international group of drifters find themselves starving, unable to find work. |  |
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Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
price: $14.00
"Gibson's first novel to take place in the present takes you on a reckless journey of espionage and lies and doesn't promise a safe return…A dangerously hip book." –U.S.A. Today |  |
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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
price: $15.00
Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Eugenides was named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker. |  |
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The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
by Fergus
Henderson
price: $19.95
Fergus Henderson -- whose London restaurant, St. John, is a world-renowned destination for people who love to eat "on the wild side" -- presents the recipes that have marked him out as one of the most innovative, yet traditional, chefs. |  |
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Mountains Beyond Mountains
by Tracy Kidder
price: $25.95
At the center of this wonderful book stands Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor, a renowned infectious-disease expert and anthropologist, a man who refuses to accept conventional wisdom about what is possible and who practices more than he preaches. Moving from Harvard to Haiti, to Peru, Cuba, and Russia, Mountains Beyond Mountains reveals how change can be fostered through the story of one man doing all he can to heal the world. |  |
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The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda
price: $14.00
Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of intuition and pure imagination. |  |
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Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
price: $13.95
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. |  |
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The Composition
by Antonio Skarmeta and Alfonso Ruano
price: $5.95
In a village in Chile, Pedro and Daniel are two typical nine-year-old boys. Up until Daniel's father gets arrested, their biggest worry had been how to improve their soccer skills. Now, they are thrust into a situation where they must grapple with the incomprehensible: dictatorship and its inherent abuses. |  |
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And Now You Can Go
by Vendela Vida
price: $19.95
A sharply humorous and fast-paced debut novel about the effects--some predictable, some wildly unexpected--that an encounter at gunpoint have on a (previously) assured young woman. The gun is pointed at 21-year-old Ellis as she walks through a New York City park. Although she escapes unharmed--and unrobbed--she is left psychologically reeling. |  |
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Awake
by Elizabeth Graver
price: $23.00
A mother seeks freedom for her young son with a rare genetic disease--and rediscovers her own need for it in the process--in this powerful novel about family, identity, and love. |  |
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Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
by Joel Glenn Brenner
price: $24.55
America's candy empires are some of the world's most secretive businesses -- and when Joel Glenn Brenner stepped inside, she discovered a land even stranger than Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. From chocolate's earlier image as a physician-touted, nutritious food to the real reason E.T. ate Reese's Pieces instead of M&Ms, this is the most deliciously entertaining all-American business story ever told. |  |
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Take Them at Their Words: Startling, Amusing and Baffling Quotations from the G.O.P., Their Friends and a Few Others
by Bruce J. Miller and Diana Maio
price: $15.95
Take Them At Their Words is an amusing, shocking and revealing compendium of quotes taken from a wide variety of sources such as the Congressional Record, radio and television, newspapers, books, magazines and websites. The quotes are grouped under headings like "Earth day at the G.O.P." and "Love Thy Neighbor." Twelve contemporary political cartoons are also included. |  |
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On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction
by Karl Iagnemma
price: $13.00
Winner of the Paris Review Discovery Prize for best first fiction and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2002, Karl Iagnemma has been recognized as a writer of rare talent. His literary terrain is the world of science, with its charged boundary between the rational mind and the restless heart. “Elegant, witty and concise, Iagnemma's stories precisely capture the hopelessly imprecise nature of love.”—Publishers Weekly |  |
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The Heaven of Mercury
by Brad Watson
price: $14.95
Finus Bates has loved chatty, elegant Birdie Wells ever since he saw her cartwheel naked through the woods near the backwater town of Mercury, Mississippi. With "graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious" prose (USA Today), Watson chronicles Finus's steadfast devotion and Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city. |  |
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The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
price: $24.00
A stunning first novel in the vein of Umberto Ecco and Dan Brown. Two friends find the key to the labyrinth that holds the secrets of an ancient text called the "Hypnerotomachia." But when a fellow researcher is murdered, they suddenly realize they are caught in a web of great danger.
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All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown V. Board of Education
by Charles J. Ogletree
price: $25.95
Presenting a vivid pageant of historical characters including Thurgood Marshall. Martin Luther King, Jr., Earl Warren, Anita Hill, and Clarence Thomas, Ogletree discusses the ambivalence of America's judicial system and reflections on the first half-century of "Brown v. Board of Education." |  |
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The Dew Breaker
by Edwidge Danticat
price: $22.95
The Dew Breaker is a book of interconnected lives—a book of love, remorse, and hope; of rebellions both personal and political; of the compromises we often make in order to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. |  |
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Growing Up Fast
by Joanna Lipper
price: $25.00
In Growing Up Fast Joanna Lipper tells the life stories of six teen mothers whom she first met in l999 when they were all enrolled at the Teen Parent Program in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. This raw material is the basis for this book in which, according to The New Republic, "Lipper has actually conveyed the social and personal history of a growing class...for whom there is little help and less hope." |  |
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Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
price: $35.00
An illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose with stunning speed to become George Washington's aide-de-camp, a member of the Constitutional Convention, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, leader of the Federalist party, and the country's first Treasury secretary. With masterful storytelling skills, Chernow presents the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life. |  |
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