Books We Are Reading, Have Read, Recommend, or Want You to Read

Staff picks are available for purchase in our store and online!

Terrence’s Picks

The Princess Casamassima by Henry James

After The Golden Bowl and Wings of a Dove, probably James’s strangest novel. Classic Upstairs, Downstairs drama, with terrorism. Thinking of this in relation to Bifo Berardi and Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Of political terrorism as an intrusion into the structure of the historical novel itself.

A Drink of Red Mirror by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, and Sue Hyon Bae

One of the best living poets. Hyesoon moves through the physical, i.e. being in the world, being in the socio-historical fabric of Korea, being a woman, beyond, or cumulatively, into mountain-climbing riddles, love letters, and elegies. “I stand bewitched by plum / or cotton blossoms wet from night.”

Lisa’s Picks

Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez

In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez, a recent graduate of the Columbia MFA program, moves into a sunny penthouse on Riverside Drive with her boyfriend, David Reif, and his mother, Susan Sontag. Sontag’s influence on Nunez is profound to say the least and this tiny, perfect memoir of that brief period in her life is charming and exhilarating beyond words.

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore

This is the story of a twenty-year-old Russian conscript who wants to defect from the army and a thirtysomething French woman trying to escape her past. They meet on an eastbound train in Russia and their encounter is thrilling and life-changing and one you will not forget. This 127-page jewel of a book is impossible to put down.

Adi’s Picks

Brasilia–Chandigarh by Iwan Baan

I have family in Chandigarh, and in my more recent visits to the city, it has been striking to notice how different it feels from other parts of India: the numbered neighborhoods, the CCTV cameras that impose speed limits and orderliness on local drivers. Baan’s photos capture the neat uncanniness of planned cities, particularly those where modernist architecture clashes with colonial and precolonial styles.

The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman

Our narrator, a vagabond roaming through Europe as it slips into fascism, is reverent of irreverence: he is attracted to criminality, abjection, other men, and often all these things at once. His writing seems capable of sanctifying everything, from gladioli to gobs of spit—everything, that is, except for the authorities, who smell like garlic.

Will’s Picks

Finding the Raga by Amit Chaudhuri

Chaudhuri combines memoir and music theory in this treatise on Indian classical music. An addictive and absorbing read, especially for musicians and artists.

Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson, translated by Kingsley Hart

Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Warburton

I love the Moomins. They are wistful, rather stoic, pear-shaped creatures who eat pine needles and hibernate when the first snow begins to fall. Jansson began writing the Moomin books during WWII, and her characters are always making do in the midst of change. The books are very funny; the humor is understated and has a touch of melancholy.