Spring 2025—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 Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross
Last year I had the pleasure of being invited to a New School student encampment protesting the war on Gaza, where I read poetry to student protesters with several other NYC poets. It was a miracle to see their commune in action: organized, egalitarian, ever expansive. Kristin Ross does an amazing job at re-situating the May ’68 protests as more than just a discrete historical event, but a form that can be practiced and embodied. So many aspects of living in America are calculated to make us feel powerless, as individuals. But collective action makes change, at the local and national level.
The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated by Peter Filkins
Perhaps the book of the 20th century, and of now. A collection of aphorisms and essays by Elias Canetti that plunder the ruins of history and literature to build a new structure against thanatological morbidity, revealing the shallowness of nihilism—yes, Death should truly not have undone so many.
Lisa’s Picks
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
When Cassandra Edwards drives back home to the family ranch for the wedding of her twin sister Judith, it’s not exactly clear what might happen. Suffice it to say that Cassandra’s complicated feelings about Judith, as well as the presence of their retired-professor father and the ghost of their dead mother, will not make this easy for anyone—except the reader. It’s pure pleasure as well as tragic comedy at its absolute best. And don’t miss the afterword by Deborah Eisenberg.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza
When Cristina Rivera Garza sets out to locate her sister’s case file twenty years after she was murdered and discovers that the Mexican government cannot locate the records, she decides instead to resurrect the memory of her sister. Through letters, journals, interviews, and her own memories, she brings Liliana back to life and makes a case at last for justice. This is a brilliant feat of feminist investigative journalism as well as a grief memoir that shines a light on a life cut tragically short.
Adi’s Picks
Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré stumbling through living arrangements and professorial responsibilities at a US college campus in the ’50s. He could teach us all how to love more expansively, with more purity. Failing that, he could teach us more than one squirrel-related fun fact.
A short story collection largely set in occupied Kashmir, from which Hari Krishna Kaul was made to flee in 1990. These stories, translated by Kaul’s niece and a team of scholars, are blunt about the religious tensions that led to that displacement and the rootlessness that followed.
Will’s Picks
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh
The story of six walks taken in the West Bank between 1978 and 2006. It’s an unflashy book that slowly took hold of me. I prefer this way of understanding the world, not through breaking news but at the scale and speed of a walk.
Roman Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Thinking and feeling move together as one. Reading this book is like walking around Rome with Pasolini and sharing in his “old stupendous privilege of thinking.”
Hayley’s Picks
Zama by Antonio di Benedetto, translated by Esther Allen
This story of infinite waiting crept up on me, following the sword-wielding, paranoid Don Diego de Zama as his world devolves and decays into a beautifully feverish nightmare. Dedicated “To the victims of expectation.”
Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Beryl Stockman
Marriages, deaths, remarriages, losing cats, going to the movies—Ginzburg writes about the complexities of relationships and loneliness in a way that is so sharp, compelling, bittersweet. I feel like I know everyone in these two novellas, and wish I could send them a postcard.