“I picked this up for the blue sky on the cover and was hooked immediately by Kirshenbaum's rhythmic, paragraph-long sentences and her spacey, beautiful protagonist. The story centers on Valentine, a Jewish teenager in waning 20th century Brooklyn, whose resemblance to the Virgin Mary becomes her obsession. It’s also (possibly?) the source of her incredible magnetism, which ends up disrupting the lives of everyone around her. The narration has a kind of inevitability, adoration and bafflement about it, think Ya Ya Sisterhood meets Our Lady of the Forest meets the Virgin Suicides. It's fun and pretty but sad enough to be rewarding.” —Jessanne Collins

“Originally published in translation in the New Yorker, this short novel offers a geological account of mankind and of a single man. Geiser, a Swiss in the twilight of his life, finds himself cut off from the rest of the world when a series of storms and landslides shuts off the electricity and closes the road leading to his small mountain village. His attempts to comprehend history, geological processes, and the fading events of his own life dominate the story. Frisch’s style is unorthodox: excerpts from scientific texts are juxtaposed with traditional prose narrative, lists and catalogs. But out of this mélange, a compelling tale emerges. Against the impossible backdrop of countless ages of man and earth, Geiser remains undiminished.” —Jeni Paras

“The range of topics explored by this book is as wide as the spectrum it describes. Finlay enriches her prose with geography, chemistry, and historical anecdotes -and combinations of the three. For instance, I hadn't known that French paint-makers in the 1900's were given daily rations of milk to counteract the harmful effects of lead-based white paint-the calcium acted as a natural antidote to lead poisoning. Or that Antonio Stradivari varnished all of his violins with a tiger-orange varnish that nobody can duplicate, because the recipe has been lost. Or even that the inventor who inspired James Bond's gadget-man "Q" invented special green-painted pencils during WWII with tiny compasses and silken maps hidden under the erasers. I could really go on and on in this vein-I learned so much from this book, but clearly the best thing to do is pick up a copy for yourself. There are pictures.” –Jeanne Gardner

“The Eyre Affair is a really fun sci-fi mystery set in a mocking (but in a genial manner) literati society where Shakespeare's authorship is an issue of national and religious debate, where the school of Classical Arts battles the Surrealists in the streets, where an ongoing war between England and Russia is manipulated by an omniscient mega-corporation as government, and where a dowdy yet ass-kicking literary detective named Thursday Next is in hot pursuit of a powerful madman bent on kidnapping the beloved characters of great literature. Tell me this does not sound like loads of fun. Thursday's a great character with plenty of spunk and smarts, and Jasper Fforde's creative energy never sputters out. So far, there are two more books in the series: Lost In A Good Book, and Well of Lost Plots.” –Vicki Yuen

“The premise is audacious--the only copy of an epic biography (on Jonathan Blashette, the three-legged-circus-freak-turned-deodorant-tycoon) was accidentally destroyed, leaving only the footnotes behind. The result is brilliant--a comic, sweeping, (well, not quite a novel) tale of a life lived by definition in the margins. As Blashette rises to mingle with many of the giants of Early-20th-Century America, his life will entertain and perplex you.” -Michael Femia