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Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Hardcover)

By Geoff Dyer
$24.00
ISBN-13: 9780307377388
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Published: Pantheon, 1/2012
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After reading Zona I am convinced Geoff Dyer could pen a book on the life and times of a dust mote and make it infinitely fun and engaging. The man’s range is breathtaking: everything from art criticism to novels to travel writing to history. Here Dyer trains his protean, ever-capacious lens on the film Stalker, by the late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Brief description: brooding, densely atmospheric dystopian sci-fi foreshadowing Chernobyl by seven years. Granted, as one of many ex-film grads who share in an obsession over this cinematic gem, I’m an easy target for Dyer’s scene-by-scene treatment of this long, ‘boring’ film where not very much seems to be happening in terms of plot. (This, sadly, may be a prerequisite for getting into this book at all.) That being said, Dyer’s pub chum voice and probing, often surprising, observations are enough to enthrall and spike any neophyte with a burning curiosity to watch this film and eventually leap into the late Russian master’s oeuvre. Also strongly recommend But Beautiful, Dyer’s marvelous book on jazz.

The Flame Alphabet (Hardcover)

By Ben Marcus
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780307379375
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Published: Knopf, 1/2012
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Forget zombies, vampires and their tame brethren. Adults in America are afflicted: their tongues are swelling bulbously; their faces are shrinking beyond recognition; their skin grows jaundiced and seeps with virulence. The vector of infection is the speech of children. Everywhere parents are besieged by their deadly brood and flee in cowering heaps to the countryside and state peripheries to avoid infection.  Fragmented transmissions received via flesh-pulsing listening pods must be decoded into gibberish to filter the language beyond its rampant toxicity. Sam, Claire and their murderous daughter Esther are a family caught at the heart of this terrifying epidemic. Ben Marcus is a writer of ferocious talent and has penned a Kafkaesque masterpiece: a heart-breaking allegory about family dysfunction and the viral implications of language that is as chilling as it is brutally hilarious. The Flame Alphabet is a scorchingly good read. Watch David Cronenberg option this one for his next film.

Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery (Hardcover)

By Alexander Theroux
$29.99
ISBN-13: 9781606994658
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Published: Fantagraphics Books, 11/2011
It’s a crying shame Alexander Theroux isn’t hailed as a national treasure. The author of the masterpieces Darconville’s Cat, Laura Warholic & Three Wogs will express unrepentant schadenfreude over the fact that all these books are way out-of-print. But to wit: The (Estonian)language is a vowel dump, an explosive alphagram-drill full of repeated letter combinations with multiple bingoes!/ He was a Virginian of middling height with eyeglasses whose odd, blunt-muzzled head was shaped exactly like a capybara’s/ On Alan Dershowitz: This hustlingly ambitious, jumped-up gnat-catcher and argumentative logic-chopper who races to enter every hole like a rat up a drainpipe/In the Bible there is no mention the sky is blue—yet we locate heaven there. This book is a cornucopia bursting with such gems. Did you know Jonathan Swift reread the Book of Job every year on his birthday or that a dying sperm whale will always turn toward the sun? To read any book by this unacknowledged master of American letters is an education that begins in awe and invariably ends in sheer wonderment.

Leaving the Atocha Station (Paperback)

By Ben Lerner
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781566892742
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Published: Coffee House Press, 9/2011
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This is bound to be one of those sleepers you don’t fully hear of until way after it's seared its meteoric course in the literary zeitgeist. Lerner’s first novel Leaving the Atocha Station is written in a ruminative prose that reflects all the strengths and charms of his poetics in what may very well be a surprisingly unflattering stab at self-portraiture. The narrator of these pages suffers from an acute dissociative disorder (possibly bipolar, anhedonia) and is adrift in a sea of drugged, digitally-induced malaise. In these pages human relationships, art, theories of art, the difficulties of translation, terrorist attacks, Google searches and poetry braid and are caught in a subjunctive bear trap amid the striking surrounds of Madrid and Barcelona. (His musings on the work of John Ashbery alone are priceless.) Lerner creates a sublime experience of language’s failings that explores that most elusive of subjects: happiness.

The Hour of the Star (Paperback)

By Clarice Lispector, Giovanni Pontiero, Ben Moser
$12.95
ISBN-13: 9780811219495
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Published: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 11/2011
There is a quiet dignity to this novel whose soundings will echo long after the last page has been turned. The sad story of Macabéa unfolds like that of some rare orchid no longer in existence glimpsed in a dream tucked away in the memory of a star…Here innocence and wonder pulse their ephemeral lives and are finally severed in cruel games of authorship that mirror the universe’s indifference to our own doomed plight. Lispector’s language’s poetic sweep will provoke physical reverberations and the deepest empathy for characters mercilessly trapped in their own intractable lives. An undeniable masterpiece by any measure.

C (Paperback)

By Tom Mccarthy
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307388216
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Published: Vintage, 9/2011
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Ok, so first off, you should know this novel was penned by none other than the founder of the International Necronautical Society. This gives you a pretty firm foothold on the harrowing and increasingly strange journey upon which you're about to embark. Imagine a sociopathic Buckminster Fuller under the influence of a high-grade intoxicant writing a novel whose prose skritters, clicks and crackles in the insect poetica of an alien race, observing ours while effecting wild connections between telegraphy in its budding stages, aviation, the calculus of aerial bombardment, bizarre entomological excursions (namely the notorious Balkan Beetle of Capt. Haddock fame), séances, opiate-induced reveries, a gangrenous limb turned conduit for time-space travel, Egyptian archaeology, and a bijoux trove of carnal delights to rival Bataille. Ah, the sweet joys of being jaded. This one goes well with a glass of absinthe.

Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History (Paperback)

By Matt Taibbi
$16.00
ISBN-13: 9780385529969
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Published: Spiegel & Grau, 8/2011
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To those greatest of pop lyrics “This is not my beautiful house/ This is not my beautiful wife” we can now add “This is not my beautiful country” Anymore. Griftopia is a down-the-rabbit hole account of how the Grifting Class in Wall Street has highjacked our economy & run amok with people’s livelihoods the world over. Remember when oil prices were skyrocketing everywhere and all the pundits and politicians were saying it was a problem of supply-and-demand? Try a full-blown manipulation of the commodities market. What exactly are Credit Default Swaps and Collateral Debt Obligations & how did these lead to a complete cratering of the global economy? Taibbi packs a Molotov wit & displays an insider’s knowledge & writes an infectious prose that will clock you left, right and center with astonishing facts about how it all went down & how everything remains the “Same as it ever was.”

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (Paperback)

By Graham Robb
$17.95
ISBN-13: 9780393339734
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 4/2011
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CAVEAT LECTOR: Upon reading Robb’s glorious book about the City of Lights you may experience something akin to Paris Syndrome, that is: acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, etc.The prose is a gleaming, perfectly calibrated time machine well worth these side effects. Dear Reader, you are in the presence of one of those rare intellects: an historian whose muscular erudition is only matched by his magus’ ability to dazzle and enthrall. Ricochet w/Marie Antoinette in her carriage through side streets and alleyways in a last-ditch attempt to flee Paris on the night before her execution; be privy to the plot of unspeakable evil and betrayal that inspired The Count of Monte Cristo; keep Zola company during a thunderstorm. But fear not, Dear Reader, there may be a palliative yet by book’s end: to follow Robb’s wise counsel to buy your ticket (while it’s still summer in that magnificent city).

The Long Goodbye: A memoir (Hardcover)

By Meghan O'Rourke
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9781594487989
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Published: Riverhead Hardcover, 4/2011
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It is my temperament to avoid memoirs like the plague, for all the known reasons: often these trend towards the narcissistic, self- consuming I in ways that simply recast banality in tedious prose excursions. But Reader, do not make the mortal mistake of letting this one fall into that leaden rubric. In luminous prose that is unburdened by the psychobabble its subject usually produces, O’Rourke delivers a searing calculus of grief. Through language that is unsparing and devoid of sentimentality but not without poetic precision she grapples with the process of grieving as her mother suffers through cancer in its terminal stages and beyond to what it’s like to be unmoored in the world after her ineluctable loss. What’s truly amazing about this book is how O’Rourke manages to capture grief and absence in their very real, physical manifestations in the awayness of the remaining world for those still living.

Chronic City (Paperback)

By Jonathan Lethem
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780307277527
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Published: Vintage, 8/2010
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The Manhattan of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City is to be found somewhere between the latitude of DFW’s Infinite Jest and the longitude of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. There’s something wondrously intoxicating and marvelously perverse about this strange hybrid of a narrative in whose pages we find an amalgam of obscure pop culture ephemera and an hallucinating ensemble by the outré names of Chase Insteadman, Perkus Tooth, Russ Grimspoon and Georgina Hawkmanaji (better known as the Hawkman) whose predicaments include a spectral gray fog that chronically materializes at various points in the city, an obsession over a certain virtual commodity called a chaldron, a lost astronaut who sends Chase heart-rending love letters from space, an ever-morphing tiger that could be the dreaded beast of Sumatra’s riverbanks or a subterranean demolition machine gone amok. There are also myriad allusions to Infinite Jest and anyone familiar with that masterpiece will experience a soft halation when those passages go gliding by…Lethem is one of the few anointed mesmers of American Letters. Bravissimo!!!!

The Anthologist (Paperback)

By Nicholson Baker
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781416572459
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Published: Simon & Schuster, 7/2010
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A prose hymn to procrastination, Nicholson Baker’s “The Anthologist” is a delightful ‘plum’ of a book. This is how the narrator refers to poems that don’t rhyme. Paul Chowder’s a poet caught up in a bog of self-doubt and ruminations on poetry and the lives of the poets—offering up meaty morsels on Millay, Auden, Keats, Roethke, Bishop, among others—while trying to write an introduction to the anthology he’s just edited. Find out why the term “Iambic Pentameter” has proven so disastrous to poetry, according to Mr. Chowder… This book is sure to have you humming out sonnet measures in melodious counterpoint to a chorus of scrub jays, the dog barking and the ever-droning lawnmower.

Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition): (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Paperback)

By Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller
$21.00
ISBN-13: 9780143039945
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Published: Penguin Classics, 11/2006
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“A screaming comes across the sky.” And so it begins…set during WW II during the time the Germans were developing the V2 rocket, the fantastic voyage of Tyrone Slothrop, an American everyman whose genetic material has been altered by British and American Special Intelligence to be disposed to have sexual erections when German missiles strike within a certain mile radius, is a masterpiece that reads like a history of 20th Century ballistic missiles as told by Mad Magazine by way of Joyce and Rabelais in the precise, crystalline prose of an erstwhile technical writer for Boeing. Peppered throughout are delightful ditties that will have you bursting into lunatic song and the saga of Byron the Bulb will break your heart. This is literature with a blast yield of 21 kilotons. TORA! TORA! TORA!

Words for Empty and Words for Full (Paperback)

By Bob Hicok
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780822960775
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Published: University of Pittsburgh Press, 3/2010
Hard to convey the urgency with which you should pick up this or any other poetry collection by Bob Hicok, except to say he is without doubt the most vital, necessary American poet writing today. If you think this is an exercise in hyperbole, do yourself the greatest favor since getting that last biopsy or smashing haircut all your friends went batty over, and read “For the time capsule,” pg 95 or the first poem in the collection, “In these times.” Or dip into 3rd gear and take the scenic route along “Meditations on a false spring” pg 57. Come to think of it, just buy this book and tune into the pulse of a country as it hums out its last days of empire in city, factory, prairie, home and school. Not since Whitman or Ferlinghetti has America been so vindicated by one with such a generous bardic gift.

Point Omega (Paperback)

By Don DeLillo
$12.00
ISBN-13: 9781439169964
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Published: Scribner, 12/2010
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This taut spiraling narrative is a haunting meditation set in deep, geologic time on identity, war and the ever-encroaching threat of nuclear annihilation: in short, our collective Point Omega. Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho video installation, in which Hitchcock’s masterpiece is literally slowed down frame-by-frame to play itself out in a 24 hour time-span, and the Mojave desert serve as the perfect backdrops for this novel of disquieting crescendo. Under DeLillo’s fractal lens no one thing is fixed and contingencies of sometimes murderous consequence dream forth his characters’ every step. A superbly orchestrated nocturne of a book of the military industrial complex that gave birth to the America we know.

Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy (Paperback)

By Will Bunch
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781416597636
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Published: Free Press, 2/2010
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Whuaaaa!!! This book just crashed my Tea Party!! You mean to say Reagan really had nothing to do with the Berlin Wall coming down or the collapse of the Soviet Union and that negotiations for the Iran Hostage Crisis had already been drawn up under the Carter Administration before the Gipper even took office?! You mean to say that contrary to what all my party representatives have asserted, Reagan's economic policies were really disastrous and these engendered the Wall Street culture of deregulation that led to our current economic upheaval?! Ok, so what exactly did Ronald Reagan do to cement a legacy that has spawned more public monuments, libraries and freeways under his name than any other president in this country's history, including a GOP-led campaign to have his face permanently sculpted into Mount Rushmore?

In these times of wacky Tea Parties when reverential invocations of the Gipper are made from both sides of the aisle and the politics of resentment are marshaling their forces for 2012, this book arrives as timely antidote and sound account of what the 40th president was REALLY about. Highly recommended.

Cosmos (Paperback)

By Witold Gombrowicz, Danuta Borchardt
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780802145628
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Published: Grove Press, 11/2011
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Take a rollicking tour of the Carpathians with an ensemble cast that would make even David Lynch turn tail and RUN. A woman’s lips, a ceiling crack, a twig, a dead bird strung on a wire are just some of the recurring clues and motifs Gombrowicz offers up in ever stranger constellations in this mystery-cum-comedy of manners. If Sigmund Freud, Kurt Schwitters and Philippe Petit were thrown together in one petri dish, Gombrowicz might be the resulting enfant terrible. Gombrowicz’s genius narrative probes the psyche’s dark crenellations to reap bursts of linguistic horseplay, a mad monk’s Latinized punning, delicious extirpations of the rational while never losing sight of his obligation to dazzle and entertain his readers. For in the end, this novel is compulsively readable and will have you turning its pages in an ecstatic blur and fits of perverse glee, nevermind some serious switchbacks that will have you reading some of the same passages over and over in gawking astonishment.
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