The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
by Flannery O'Connor Farrar Straus & Giroux
Our Price: $23.00
I am delighted that Brad Gooch's Flannery has endeavored to shine new light on the quirks and brilliance of Flannery O'Connor, one of the century's most unapologetically weird and opinionated fiction writers. But no one can have better insight into the head of the writer than Flannery herself. The Habit of Being, letters first lovingly compiled by O'Connor's friend Sally Fitzgerald, risks a hagiographic tone in its introduction—but this, I'm glad to report, is summarily dismissed by the crackly voice of the letter-writer.
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
by Cole Swensen W W Norton & Co Inc
Our Price: $25.95
What, another contemporary poetry anthology? But this one is different. Founded on the idea of a conversation instead of a canon, it asks an old question: is American poetry best represented by the traditional or the experimental? And then a new one: is it perhaps true that the most interesting poets reading and writing today do so with mixed influences from both ‘camps’? Swensen and St. John, established and innovative poets themselves, don’t lionize their selections, and leave the conversation open for continuation. Some of my old and new favorites in the volume include: Stacy Doris, Charles Wright, Lynn Emanuel, Forrest Gander, Fanny Howe, and Paul Hoover. Thumb through with the idea of reopening, rather than sealing off, your conception of American poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The Bagel: The Surprising HIstory of a Modest Bread
by Maria Balinska Yale Univ Pr
Our Price: $24.00
This book is addictive: I can eat nothing but bagels since reading it.”
–Andrew Sachs
Who can find an appropriate bagel in Boston? From my earliest years, I cut my teeth on the gargantuan specimens found in Schwartz’s Bagels in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Now I reside an arduous seven miles away from Kupel’s, home of the only bagels worth eating in this town. In my exile from its baked and boiled presence, I have found myself forced to turn to the surrogate pleasure of reading about this honored bread. For those of you in a similar pinch, longing for the cool slide of fresh tomato between the cheeks of a garlicky Everything bagel, slathering this slim and quirky book with cream cheese may be your only alternative. Kindly wait until after you buy it.
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn
by Louisa Gilder Random House
Our Price: $27.50
Do you understand quantum mechanics? Me neither. But I am haunted by the idea that when people try to understand a thing, they can’t help but screw it up, or at least change it a little. Louisa Gilder meticulously and enchantingly presents the story of how some of the 20th century’s greatest minds grappled with this problem through the counter-intuitive, all-but-invisible quantum world. She traces the development of quantum physics by reconstructing, through letters and diaries, conversations between the likes of Einstein, Schrodinger and Niels Bohr that most likely actually happened. The result is a text on a difficult scientific concept that reads like fiction.
You may come away from the last page of the absorbing glossary (yes, the glossary) with a true understanding of particle entanglement in all its tiny glory. More likely, though, is that you will begin to see the world, maddeningly, through the lens of the central debate in quantum mechanics as Gilder relates it: whether or not we can uncover and quantify a reality that remains undisturbed by our looking.
