A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes New York Review of Books
Our Price: $14.00
This is a strange and lyrical story about wise children and world-weary pirates. I think you might really like it.
Do Bats Drink Blood?: Fascinating Answers to Questions About Bats
by Barbara A. Schmidt-French Rutgers Univ Pr
Our Price: $21.95
If you are interested in bats, this is the book for you. If you are not interested in bats, don't underestimate how fascinating you might find them once you learn a little more.
Hard Times: For These Times
by Charles Dickens Penguin Group USA
Our Price: $9.00
Dickens, in fact, published this book under the title Hard Times, For These Times. I wish publishers would remain faithful to that title because, really, now more than ever. Mr. Gradgrind is the figure of Dickens’ bitter satire of the bloodless Utilitarian approach to education, and the book an extremely gripping, artfully compressed lament on the increasingly mechanized society for which it prepares its pupils.
Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta
by Ilan Stavans Northwestern Univ Pr
Our Price: $13.95
This is the true story of “Dr. Gonzo,” the lawyer character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is not Samoan. He lived (and possibly is still living) a most inspiring life. The furious nihilism of Fear and Loathing renders most surprising Acosta’s dedication to social justice and his intellectual swagger. This is a fine corrective. Stavans’ musings on biography are also great.
The Adventures of Pinocchio
by Carlo Collodi New York Review of Books
Our Price: $14.00
I love this book, and I am so pleased it has come out in an edition for grown-ups, with suitably uncanny cover art. It is full of energy, love, humor, and weirdness.
In the Freud Archives
by Janet Malcolm New York Review of Books
Our Price: $14.95
What an enjoyable, tart, wonderfully concise volume this is. A non-fiction comedy. Malcolm has a real talent for making difficult concepts clear. The main draw here is the fascinating personalities driving the story. They are some intense academics. Quite a lot of fun!
I sent this book to my nephew Nathaniel when he was one, and it was his top bed-time choice for quite a while. Here is what Nat’s father said about it: “My favorite book used to be Anna Karenina; now it is Cowboy Bunnies.”
This is such a good rollicking book to read in the summertime. A scrappy genius orphan, the son of an Irish opium addict, wanders far and wide all around India with a Buddhistrnmonk who seeks the river of life, which will free him from the Wheel of Things. And, along the way, he is enticed into “The Great Game,” the colonial secret service. Such good adventures! I read it in airports, and I cannot normally concentrate in airports, so this is a great credit to it. This version has an introduction that makes for some fine supplementary skimming. Who are we to pshaw at Kipling when Said takes him so seriously?
There are epigraphs at the beginning of the chapters, and here is my favorite:
Something I owe to the soil that grew / More to the life that fed / But most to Allah / Who gave me 2 different sides to my head / I would go without shirts or shoes, / friends, tobacco or bread / Sooner than for an instant lose / Either side of my head.
One of the things I spent my economic stimulus package on was this book, and I am so glad. When I first saw this book, I thought, “Oh what a silly and shamelessly opportunistic anachronism, calling Hokusai’s work Manga!” I was the silly one though, because Hokusai was in fact the progenitor of the genre. The word “Manga” translates roughly as hasty, sketchy, random drawings. The Hokusai Manga is a series of books putatively intended to teach drawing, but in fact providing a meandering, scattershot tour through Edo period Japan, and the man’s own fantastic imagination. That was some good learning for me. These reproductions are beautiful beautiful, the text informative and concise.
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature)
by Edogawa Rampo Tuttle Publishing
This is a book about literary Bartlebys: writers who stop writing. It is comforting, droll and perversely inspiring.
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Penguin Classics
Our Price: $15.00
There are authors that just make you feel better about living in the world, and this author is one of mine. Akutagawa's corpus is I guess divided neatly into early historical fantastical tales and later autobiographical experiments. I find this range quite refreshing, and like very much that this collection represents both kinds. Also, did you know there was a Buddhist Hell? Like something out of Dante. This is some creepy, sweet, sad fun. If it leaves you hungry for more Akutagawa, there is more and more newly in English to be found all the time.
The Enchanted Wanderer: Selected Tales (Modern Library Classics)
by Nikolai Leskov Modern Library
Our Price: $13.95
Leskov won my eternal devotion two tales into this collection. "Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District" was a lurid & sadly sadly romantic story but was not mind-blowing. But then there is "The Enchanted Wanderer," a long comfortably rambling tale of travel & adventure & Russian Orthodox iconography & kidnappings & conversions & concubines & dancing girls. Dancing girls! The Wanderer relates to a group of train travellers the story of his life. He first gains their attention with a story about a priest he knew who prayed for the souls of suicides, but drank enough to imperil his collar. But when the bishop came to unpriest him, he received a dreamy visitation fom a saint who said the priest's prayers were unique & indispensable to suffering souls & redemptive. I don't know what is better than all of that. And his other tales are also weirdly awesome.
It's the 70's, and the kids are not alright. Not only do they have substance abuse and mental health issues but also: many among them are stricken with an inexplicable STD that causes bizarre deformities: tails, boils, extra mouths. Pretty gross, I know, but so is adolescence. This is a beautiful beautiful book. I haven't heard anyone ever give a better description of why we read literature than this: to feel less alone. (I think i got that from Woolf by way of Wallace) And that is how this comic made me feel when I first read it, and still.
The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq
by Christian Parenti New Press
Our Price: $14.95
I am only just beginning to get my head around the Iraq situation circa thernU.S.'s "victory" back in the day. This is well-done war reporting. rnSurprisingly, the often strident Parenti largely eschews his sensationalism rnand knee-jerk leftist proselytizing in favor of a kind of taste for rnabsurdity and irony. Witness the book's title: "The Freedom." But this is rnone of those rare and lovely instances where absurdity and irony do not rndetract from humanity in the least.
This book is very beautiful and very sad. It is not that scary, but on occasion it is damned eerie. I love books about endearingly batty spinsters, though. So if you do not, you might not like it.
The Treehorn Trilogy: The Shrinking of Treehorn, Treehorn's Treasure, Treehorn's Wish
by Florence Parry Heide Harry N. Abrams
Our Price: $19.95
I loved Edward Gorey's illustrations to distraction when I was little, but the morbid character of most of his fare tended to leave me inconsolable. I liked the wryness, but could not brook the tragedy. So huzzah for the pairing of his illustrations with Florence Parry Heide's hilarious, cynical, fantastical stories about Treehorn. Treehorn completely captured my heart when I was little, because he loved candy and comic books and no one ever listened to him and he did not let that ever get him down! Get this for the precocious & senstitive youngster in your life. Make sure you read it yourself before giving it to her or him.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
by G. K. Chesterton Modern Library
Our Price: $8.95
This book spurred a whole revival of dilettantish religiosity in my life. If you want one of your own, or if you just want to read a delightful & goofy & shamelessly earnest allegorical sci-fi spy novel, I urge you to consider Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday .
I copped the book in one of those reading lulls where my inability to focus
on the "difficult" books that normally are my constant (if often unopened)
companions was plaguing me. Also, I was in the midst of a Godfather trilogy
(minus, it should go w/o saying, part 3) renaissance. So it was a page-turner indeed; it didn't wreck or interfere with my experience of the films as essentially separate, superior works of art. But it did completely educate me on a certain strain of the male sensibility regarding the fair sex that it would have behooved me to learn of sooner. It's bizarre and amazing and awesome. Characters who are footnotes in the movie (like Lucy Mancini) are key players here. The writing is what i always imagined
writing described as "robust" or "suffused with lust for life" would be
like. Pauline Kael gets a lot of flack for celebrating the art in the trashy, a celebration largely put forth in her exegesis of the first Godfather movie. But I hold that trashy sordidness soaked through with shame is the stuff of great American tragedy, and Puzo is a master of it.
Stagolee Shot Billy
by Cecil Brown Harvard University Press
Our Price: $14.95
Ishmael Reed really hit the mark in his blurb of this, when he pointed out that it was a true jewel amidst the avalanche of useless crap university press releases ineptly academicizing all the life right out of Hip Hop. (that is a paraphrase). Most of these treatises do namecheck the Stagolee story, as the mythic progenitor of all subsequent pimp narratives. But Brown gives it its due. He theorizes really originally and interestingly on mythology and folklore. He does a bunch of historical research to find the little kernel of fact in the myth. And then he collects many many awesome and raunchy and beautiful and tragic versions of the Stagolee story, from all over the country.
Buy this book if for no other reason than: "cause he was crap-shootin', coke sniffin', hop smokin' bad pimp Stackerlee."
YES!
I Lost It at the Movies: Film Writings 1954-1965
by Pauline Kael Marion Boyars Publishers
Our Price: $16.95
Nobody beats Pauline Kael. She is awesome. One demonstration of this is how fiercely she still (even in death!!) gets hated on by lesser critics like David Denby (see his recent New Yorker article, a slag passive-aggressively disguised as an homage). Her love of movies is inspiring, sort of religious, like Bazin's but cannier. She is wildly opinionated, but one needn't agree with her to profit from her ideas. She brings you to movies you never would have encountered otherwise. A joy. I read this book one summer sitting in the lobby of a temp agency mornings from 9 to 12, waiting to see if anyone in NYC called in sick (no one ever did). It was a total balm.
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans
by Nelson George Penguin Books
Our Price: $15.00
There are several reasons why this book merits purchase:
--Look at the cover. Oh snap! That is AWESOME.
--Tavis Smiley likes it, albeit with caveats.
--The format is nice: snippety fragments of cultural and political history, chronologically arranged.
--Indexes are so key.
--You are overcome with nostalgia for the dawn of gangsta rap and/or conscious rap.
--The shortness of our collective cultural memory is disturbing and this outing presents a useful corrective.
--A. McCarthy is a fan!
The Men Who Stare at Goats
by Jon Ronson Simon & Schuster
Our Price: $24.00
Here is the absurdist hilarity of Catch-22 in a non-fiction format.
Emotionally devastated by the Vietnam war, certain of the army brass seriously explored the application of ideas from various New Age movements to military strategy. All manner of madness ensued, and continues in Iraq and at Guantanamo.
You will laugh and wince alternately. Ronson is a genius.
