Staff Pick
All Staff Picks
Pay Dirt Road
Minotaur Books, April 2022. First Edition. Hardcover. Friday Night Lights meets Mare of Easttown in this small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress. Pay Dirt Road is the mesmerizing debut from the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize recipient Samantha Jayne Allen. Annie McIntyre has a love/hate..... More
Staff Pick
Giovanni's Room (Vintage International)
Vintage, September 2013. Trade Paperback. James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel whose frank exploration of sexuality and self-acceptance was decades ahead of its time--named one of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the past 100 years "Baldwin writes . . . with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity."--The New..... More
Staff Pick
Antwerp
Picador, September 2024. Paper Back. "Legendary . . . Bolaño has proven [that literature] can do anything." --Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review "A supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores." --Giles Harvey, The New Yorker Often called the "big bang" of Roberto Bolaño's..... More
Staff Pick
By Night in Chile
Picador, September 2024. Paper Back. "Extraordinary . . . [Bolaño's] greatest work." --James Wood, The New York Times Book Review "A marvelous river of feeling, a brilliant meditation, an enthralling fantasy--By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place..... More
Staff Pick
Ficciones (English Translation)
Grove Press, June 1969. Trade Paperback. "These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power." --The Atlantic Monthly The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers..... More
Staff Pick
Dust
Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, January 2024. Paper Back. In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South's oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is..... More
Staff Pick
Nadja
New York Review of Books, June 2025. Paper Back. A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life. In Paris, during the fall..... More
Staff Pick
Banal Nightmare
Random House Trade, August 2025. Paper Back. A "vividly, chillingly current" (The Washington Post) novel by the author of The New Me, one of the boldest voices in American fiction "[Halle Butler's] talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every..... More
Staff Pick
Parable of the Talents
Grand Central Publishing, August 2019. Trade Paperback. From a celebrated author, the thrilling sequel to The Parable of the Sower--a cautionary novel ahead of its time, perfect for fans of The Broken Earth trilogy. In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction and ruin of everything she knew. Her peaceful..... More
Staff Pick
If on a Winters Night a Traveler
Harcourt, 1981. Trade Paperback. Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William Weaver. More
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Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Vintage, July 1975. Trade Paperback. PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York. One of the Modern Library's..... More
Staff Pick
Boy from the Sea
Knopf Publishing Group, April 2025. Hardcover. Set on Ireland's west coast in the 1970s and 80s, a captivating debut novel about a baby boy who is discovered on the beach beside a small fishing town, as told by the locals who fall under the boy's transfixing spell. "Compassionate, lyrical and..... More
Staff Pick
Month in the Country
New York Review of Books, September 2000. Trade Paperback. A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter--and fully embrace--normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village. In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War..... More
Staff Pick
The Hearing Trumpet
NYRB Classics, January 2021. Trade Paperback. An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to..... More
Staff Pick
Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
Algonquin Books, September 2025. Paper Back. *A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL* "Like the objects collected in this deliciously haunting book, Midnight Timetable will absorb you in the shadows of its imagination, marvelous oddness, humor, and heart." --Gerardo Sámano Córdova From the author and translator of..... More
Staff Pick
Piranesi
Bloomsbury Publishing, September 2021. Trade Paperback. The award-winning, New York Times bestselling fantasy sensation that Madeline Miller called, "a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling," Piranesi is an intoxicating, hypnotic novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Piranesi's house is no..... More
Staff Pick
Extinction of Irena Rey
Bloomsbury Publishing, June 2025. Trade Paperback. NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL..... More
Staff Pick
Futureproof: A Novel (P.S.)
Harper Perennial, February 2009. Trade Paperback. More
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Ubik
Mariner Books, April 2012. Trade Paperback. Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending psychological thriller about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. "From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling..... More
Staff Pick
Tarantula
Simon & Schuster, October 2004. Trade Paperback. WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Music legend Bob Dylan's only work of fiction--a combination of stream of consciousness prose, lyrics, and poetry that gives fans insight into one of the most influential singer-songwriters of our time. Written in 1966, Tarantula is..... More
Staff Pick
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
Picador USA, November 2024. Paper Back. A Must-Read: Vogue, Nylon, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, Frieze, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, InsideHook, The Next Big Idea Club, "[Lauren] Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur . . . Sharp and cool . . . [Art Monsters is] exemplary. It describes a...... More
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Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents
Viking, April 2026. Hardcover. A fun, smart and surprising dive into the past, present and future of accents - and the enduring power of sounding different Accents have long held our fascination. As far back as the 7th century BCE, Egyptian pharaohs experimented with babies to test out theories about..... More
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Jack the Modernist
New York Review of Books, October 2025. Paper Back. A cult classic now back in print, this novel about sex, obsession, and art is one of the defining works of 1980s gay fiction. A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love..... More
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Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
W. W. Norton & Company, September 2024. Paper Back. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death..... More
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