American Literature
Harkens back to Dave Chappelle at his most incisive and Thomas Pynchon at his most stoned.
— Will
Reading these linked stories feels like living in a neighborhood and watching days go by for all the faces you recognize on the corners. Howland's sociological lucidity is unmatched, and her (re)discovery by A Public Space is long overdue.
— Kyle
Maybe you've heard there is a crazy moment near the end of this book--it's not a surprise (Chekhov's gun anyone?) nor is it the climax. Choi flips narrative on its head at least three times throughout, and each time you want to write it off as cliche or gimmick, she proves you wrong. And at least in this case, you'll love being proved wrong.
— Bekah
In the '70s, when virtually no gay literature was being published in the mainstream, Larry Mitchell decided to open his own press and publish The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions himself. Part fable and part manifesto, this gem of a book has endured the last few decades through multiple reprints and the passing of queer hands. Read and you may never feel truly alone again
— Caelan
Perhaps the perfect New York novel.
— Sam
Reading this quintessential New York novel is like using the Street View option in Google Maps: you can see everything, but not all of it, and not all at one time.
— Matt
Since Watergate, Renata Adler believes that the best way to tell true journalism is through fiction. Have you ever gone to a loft party, had a wonderful time until about half-way through when you realize each person there is like a parody of society? Adler feels you.
— Rachel
So good -- fierce and fiery, fueled by rage, by sympathy, by sadness travelling across centuries -- it'll make you want to be turned into a tree in order to be pulped to print more copies of Wake, Siren. (Also: it's by my sister.)
— Sam
There are few writers I trust more than Lydia Davis, even and maybe especially in this story, which attempts and often fails to organize the bits of debris left behind years after two lovers untangle. It is cold and brilliant like a mirror, and clear like a window. The sparseness and precision of Davis's prose feels lonely, distant, and overly rational -- everything her narrator is to a fault. As her only novel, it is a damn near perfect one.
— Sarah G.
Perfect for a drive from LA, to LA or through LA.
— Sandeep
You don't need to like short stories to like Bad Behavior. Without being directly related, each story, usually about a couple, informs the previous and following so this collections reads like a novel. As the characters manipulate and misunderstand each other, again and again, Gaitskill makes perversity seem ordinary...maybe because it is.
— Bekah
There is the premise of the book: a post-apocalyptic New York City full of the fevered who are doomed to repeat their everyday routines and daily tasks like zombies until they waste away and die; the protagonist, a young Chinese-American woman who joins a ragtag group of survivors headed to a facility near Chicago. And then there are the stomach-dropping, mindboggling scenes of horror, and the general feeling of unease or straight-out nausea that you feel reflected in the recognition of these portrayals of the hamster wheel of late capitalism.
— Bonnie
Here is my basic pitch: MacArthur Park reads as though Ben Lerner, Wayne Koestenbaum and Chris Kraus got together to co-write an essay-novel about the weather, whilst encompassing the art-world, cults, sex, contemporary New York, and the end of the world. But I am aware that that is such a poor description of how wonderful, how important, this book feels. I started reading MacArthur Park at the the same time as two other people in this store, and we spent the next week greeting one another with the words ‘oh my God!’ accompanied by occasional hand-clapping, and jumping, and goldfish-mouthed astonishment. It is truly, truly remarkable. So I leave you with my original sentiment. Oh my God.
— Madeleine
This wonderful, wistful, intelligent novel recounts what happens to an accomplished New York writer of a certain age whose mentor/lover commits suicide, bequeathing his Harlequin Great Dane to her care when she lives in a tiny Chelsea Apartment and does not want to lose either her friend or her apartment. Oh, and it just happened to be the deserving recipient of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.
— Cheryl
Bitingly funny, sad, and true. For the one who loves hard, and has known loss. For the dog lover, literature buff, jaded New Yorker. The friend offers all the feels, and a lot of room for reflection on the big and small questions of life.
— Genay
The gentle voice of rage and memory. He was my teacher, my mentor and my friend.
— Cheryl
Here are ten stories about the downtrodden, those unseen who fall in-between the cracks of society, written with a tenderness and mercy that can only be given by someone who themselves has been one of those people and has known their company. McPherson's debut short story collection is filled with prose as crisp, clean, and comforting as a fresh apple, with a pathos for those who are destroyed and discriminated against by the world, not explicitly but by a thousand societal paper cuts. Classic and timeless in the best sense of both of those words.
— David
I believed every word Myles wrote. Probably for my own sake, however -- she makes the dirt of the city seem tolerable and sometimes fun, as well as one's own dirty past. And, having read Chelsea Girls after Chris Kraus, I'm getting to see the light of writing without sacrificing yourself, flaws and all, to grammar (and spelling, I loved all the "scarey" stuff). I really loved this book.
— Audrey
If you wished Just Kids was gayer.
— Landon
For luminous, masterful, unabashedly beautiful writing, behold James Salter. I read this book, and then I read it again. And again. And again. Each time it yielded something new—to quote the novel, “like memorizing the reflections of a diamond. The slightest movement and an entirely new brilliance appears.” The premise is simple: a handsome young American and his girlfriend drive around provincial France and make love. But no one writes sex like Salter—it’s primordial and transcendent and awkward and gorgeous and scary and sad. Think Hemingway with a heart.
— Maddie
An absolute ice pick of a collection that uses its surreal and incisive edge to chip away at the toxic mundanity of privilege, while it sculpts the complexities of identity, aimlessness, and feminine desire. A book that will truly – as one of it's protagonists aspires to – "strike fear, into the soft pulsating hearts of golden boys and girls, everywhere."
— Tom
The Seas is about a girl who believes she's a mermaid, wo lives in a town so far north the highway only goes south. She's in love with a returned soldier who won't touch her. She's afraid she might have to kill him. A book full of oceans and baths, drinking and drowning, water in all its forms - and a love story, unabashedly - The Seas is a gorgeous fever-dream of a novel which I read straight through over one sleepless night.
— Madeleine
Don't judge The Idiot on its plot. A bookish teen starts at Harvard in 1995, develops a crush, goes to teach English abroad, and stumbles her way through introductory Russian and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. These are ostensibly the ingredients of a lesser novel. But they are transformed by the quality of Batuman's writing: her lol-funny dialogue, her uncanny observations (a public toilet emits a "death roar," "just biting" into a croissant "made you feel cared for"), and most of all her infectious and wise affection for all her imperfect characters. The Russian whom Batuman most recalls isn't Dostoevsky (of her title) but the much funnier, wilier Babel.
— Maddie
A speculative novel set in present-day Berlin, Oval takes place in a milieu shaped by tech utopianism, sustainability culture, gentrification, and the listless drifting characteristic of the overwhelmed. There's a Pynchon-esque corporation which absorbs everything it sees and an alienated protagonist who falls somewhere between Didion and Moshfegh, all taking place in a weatherscape which has flipped, an uncanny premonition of things to come. A novel where the natural and artificial, where human and plant, begin to dissolve, ending at last with just one woman in a landscape while the city burns. Oval is like a bad dream you're comforted to watch unfold, so inevitable does it feel.
— Madeleine
My favorite Baldwin and one of the only New York novels that so well captures the simultaneous muchness of The City through vibrant, compelling characters. They live uptown and downtown and in every borough. They are out late until it's early and then they are out early. They hustle and halt and fail and fuck it all. They surprise themselves and the reader, are tender, are angry, are knit together through the end and so on and on. These characters will never leave you.
— Landon
"It's 1999 in San Francisco and the apocalypse looms. There are roaches everywhere and it's never been so hot. Enter Michelle: punk, lesbian, writer and bookseller who is just beginning to think she has a substance abuse problem. When we meet her she's doing crack with a convict. When we leave her the world is on fire. For anyone trapped in a cycle or city who worries moving to LA would be the end of the world."
— Landon
A perfect summer read. Full of lust and heat, flush with beauty and desire, Dancer From the Dance includes some of the best sentences ever written about gay nightlife, Fire Island, camp humor, and cruising. If nothing else, do it for the disco.
— Landon
Tight. Deep. Hot. These descriptors only touch the surface of what makes Paul a captivating character. Oscillating between introspection on gender and trysts in alleyways, this book is empathetic and humorous while exploring queer life in the early nineties—a time much harder to find someone willing to pee on you.
— James
When Dave Chappelle quit/ended his eponymous program back in 2006, he said he did so because he noticed certain people laughing at the sketches in a manner unsettling—taking the surface caricature as the end of the analysis. In Erasure we follow the whole process of frustrated novelist Thelonius “Monk” Ellison crafting a satire that no one understands, yet everyone laughs.
— Tilghman
Adultery, murder, childhood, and regret all written so well I've begun confusing the narrator's memories for my own. A To Kill A Mockingbird for the Great Lakes region. It's that good.
— Landon
A class-savvy novel of queer party scenes, of complicated friendship, of fraught sexual freedom and the ambient threat of AIDS, of all the things one does to live, even destructively, delivered in breathless, agitational prose. The final pages of this book are an incredible, crashing crescendo, refusing any easy resolution. To read this book will be to recommend it.
— Cam
Both utterly contemporary and a time-capsule of nineteen-seventies Soho, written in the kind of contagiously interior, manically piqued prose that starts to infiltrate the rhythms of a reader's thought, Modern Love is every bit the precocious classic heralded by this reissue. The reading is both breezy and bewildering: scenes and sentences recur to different, or the same, results, and a nutritious historical excursus on the Spanish Armada intervenes at perplexing length, only to effortlessly collide with the present. Let it illumine your commute.
— Cam
Novels can be like great brick edifices with broken elevators that you trudge through, floor by floor, breathless and exasperated, determined to get to the rooftop to take in the view. Other novels are like a spring breeze that carry you away, suspending all knowledge of time and place other than the world of its creation. The Grammarians is just such a work of magic and wonder. The eponymous Grammarians are wild red-headed identical twin sisters, bound first by their invented baby language, then torn apart by their rivalrous passion regarding the nature of words, story, interpretation and grammar. This is the perfect read for both writers and readers, rich with insight, wisdom, humor and compassion. Schine continues to be one of my favorite authors and inspirations.
— Cheryl
Tales of second generation immigrant angst from the heart of the modernist movement. Considering he imagined them in the 30s and 40s, Schwartz's listless bohemians seem uncannily familiar today. Schwartz was Lou Reed's teacher at Syracuse, and he was the basis for Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift, but he died a pauper and an alcoholic in 1966. In the last years of his life he lived alone in the Chelsea Hotel, and when he died it took two days for his body to be identified. This book is an early work, from his glory days, when everything was ahead of him.
— Jacob
Like watching a J train showtime(!) with your Jewish grandparents...on psychedelics.
— Bekah
Doubles, hysterics, lost fathers and sons, a notorious art star who may or may not be responsible for a real murder, What I Loved is a book haunted by many ghosts. At once an epic saga of two families, this novel is also a stunning meditation on the endurance of friendship, memory and art that considers the limits of what we can ever really know about those we love. It’s also an ode to things that have been lost—including a vision of pre-911 downtown New York. — Madelaine L
It's 1926 in New York City and Joe and Violet Trace have each done something heinous: a murder and a mutilation of a corpse, respectively. That's just the first paragraph. The rest of the novel provides context to their desperation and made even their worst deeds somehow holy. I'm convinced that, given the same circumstances, I would murder or mutilate too. It's Morrison's only NYC novel and one of her best. Each paragraph is so dense with beauty you may want to pin it to your breast.
— Landon
Let's face it, there just isn't enough space here to list the many reasons for you to pick this book up immediately. DeWitt's first novel follows a brilliant single mother's attempt at balancing a floundering academic career with raising her son, a child prodigy who goes through libraries of books within days. His eventual quest to find a father long out of the picture provides the fulcrum to this one of-a-kind story. You want prose that impresses with each page? Characters too interesting to read about once? IQ-raising explorations of language, music and history? Oh and you want to learn Japanese & Greek in the process? Then why are you still reading this? Pick it up already.
— Musa
Scores before me (in this very bookstore) lauded Williams' exquisite meditation on the sober, luminous banality of the arc of days. Devastatingly beautiful, lucid passages abound. When I jump a bandwagon I like a harvest bountiful. R.E.M sang: "come on aboard I promise you it won't hurt the horse. We'll treat him well and feed him well." Nourish.
— Doug
Toomer's novel of Jim Crow America is...not quite a novel. Told in short character portraits, each vignette builds on the one before to create one living, breathing South. But it's not just the book's structure that defies definition: as you read, prose will transform to poetry, poetry will become song, and song will take on the gravity and finality of scripture.
— Bekah
I started reading this collection, having never read anything by Eisenberg before, mostly to see if anything could possibly live up to such a ridiculous title. And it turns out every piece of hype was warranted. Eisenberg writes with a caustic and surprisingly brisk intensity, capturing the far too well-off in all their ludicrous and spoiled nature, though constantly poking at the humanity that lies just below the surface. Everything teeters on the absurd in these stories, but only because anything less than that wouldn't be honest.
— David
You're reading this thinking "Oh, yeah, I heard that was good" but you can't remember who recommended it. You'll be reminded of this again the summer it goes to paperback and every woman on the subway in a sundress you like is holding a copy. Whoever told you it was good, they were right.
— Cristin
Colson Whitehead makes the true horrors of racial injustice sing with vengeance. The Nickel Boys is a gripping read written by a master at the height of his powers.
— Cheryl
This epic novel keens, roars and destroys with the ferocity of the hurricane it portrays. Jesmyn Ward takes on Homer, Faulkner and Katrina and wins. Brilliant and harrowing.
— Cheryl
If you haven't read Joy Williams, you owe it to yourself to do so now. Her prose, though plain, is heartbreaking and luminous, her vision piercing. In The Quick & the Dead, she tells the story of three teenage girls with little in common but loss - but more than anything, as with almost all her work, the book is about the catastrophe of civilization, the rape of nature, and the grief that chokes the minds of those sensitive enough to understand what has happened, and continues to happen, to the world.
— Nick
It's actually insane how good Lorrie Moore is. Extraordinarily funny, devastatingly clever, and not the kind that's annoying - the kind that makes you think, "Wow! This funny, clever person exists in the world and if I can't hang out with her I might as well read everything she's ever written."
— Bekah
Follow art student-turned-Hollywood set designer Tod Hackett and nervous wreck Homer Simpson (you heard me) as they vie for the affections of wannabe starlet Faye Greener in this tragicomic novella of fame-seekers, hangers-on, gawkers, washouts, and bums. Featuring an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom become figures in Tod's apocalyptic drawing, The Burning of Los Angeles. Very possibly my favorite book of all time.
— Nick
One of the most strikingly original books I've ever read, told by one of the most memorable narrators you're likely to find anywhere in literature, Riddley Walker is set in an England which, many years after a devastating nuclear cataclysm, has devolved into a loose collection of clans, whose members are raised on folktales about times back way back, before Bad Time. When his father is crushed to death while excavating a piece of antique machinery, young Riddley inherits the role of storyteller and soon sets out across the blackened isle to discover for himself what caused the Bad Time and what the leaders of this ruined state are doing in attempt to restore the mythic technology of old. Don't be thrown off by the pidgin language - you'll pick it up quickly, and I actually came to love Riddley's storytelling, which improves as the book goes on.
— Nick
How does one overcome a disappointing seven generation legacy of all-too-American insipid, brown-nosing Tommery? How does one refute the sins of the father, grandfather, great-uncles, great-grandfathers? Beatty’s debut novel is a bildungsroman concerning a modern messiah born in the purported political corrections of late-20th century America — the early history of Gunnar Kaufman as he leaves the lazy life of Santa Monica surfing for the pressed-crease unknown of Hillside, CA.
— Tilghman
Capital-a Absurd story about an epidemic called “Jes Grew” — an anti plague that enlivens the host with an uncontrollable joy, and thus threatens the West, ie, means the End of Civilization As-We-Know-It. Attempts are made to combat this Creeping Thing with modern medicine, hoodoo, an Android saboteur, and an ancient secret fraternity committed to the occident. A formally exciting novel coming from a singular voice in American letters.
— Tilghman
Confessions of the Fox recounts the life of Jack Sheppard, a folk hero of eighteenth-century England and the basis for the character Macheath in Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Rosenberg's Sheppard, however, is a transgender man, and this brazenly revisionist history doubles as a political survival manual for the present day. Footnotes relate a contemporary subplot, following the romantic exploits and intellectual curiosities of an erstwhile Marxist academic, until these stories suddenly converge in an insurrectionary denouement. An exhilarating moment of contemporary agitprop.
— Cam
A husband and wife rent asunder by the drowning deaths of their two infant children. Together – but just barely – they will dredge the entire ocean to get them back. The husband is building a massive aquarium in the living room and is edging towards an affair with their next-door neighbor. The wife is sleeping with their next-door neighbor and knitting tiny dresses so they can walk the fish. A very sad sad book about grief and barriers, made even more devastating by its shockingly irreverent, and in turns, shockingly reverent, style.
— Tom