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

Terrance’s Picks

A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quignard

I’m on my fourth copy of this book, I keep giving it away. An etching artist is horribly scarred by his lover’s husband, and wanders the countryside making etchings of landscapes, the inscribed marks forming a kind of language.

Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary

Crary asserts the physicality of the “cloud–” piercing through any technobabble sales pitches, and makes clear the dire nature of the world as it is now, opening a new future in which we reject wanton resource extraction and energy expenditure. Thinking of this alongside Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney’s Groundlings With My Brothers (Verso).

Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile by Joseph Jarman

Thinking of oracular speech, how to capture what is spoken and sung so the reader can really hear. Along with Jjjjjerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies,  and the works of Ghassan Khanafi and Mohammed El-Kurd and Mahmoud Darwish and Rafaat Alereer.

Sophie’s Picks

Fierce Attachments byVivian Gornick

 A classic memoir from one of our very best writers and thinkers about the complex relationships between mothers and daughters — I gave this to both my mother and grandmother! 

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

 A girl finds herself in Andy Warhol’s Factory transcribing his only novel a—less about Warhol, more about getting caught up in a scene as a young person.

Lisa’s Picks

Mitz (The Marmoset of Bloomsbury) by Sigrid Nunez

A “tender and imaginative mock biography” of the lives of Virginia & Leonard Woolf and a sickly marmoset named Mitz.  The year is 1934, so not the jolliest of times, but Nunez’s spot on sentences as well as her wit and humor make this an extraordinarily perfect read and a rare treat. 

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

From the delightfully ingenious Storybook ND Collection, this is DeWitt at her very best. An “amorality tale”about the publishing industry at its absolute worst. A book to reread the moment you finish it (at least once!

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

When Lily dies from suicide and Finn discovers her (somehow) undead, the two long time lovers decide a road trip is the only thing that makes sense. This is love story like no other. It’s Lorrie Moore at her best. 

Liz’s Picks

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

A spooky, sci-fi scenario sets up this beautiful book by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, which features entrancing descriptions of nature and human-animal relationships––I highly recommend. 

Telling the True as it Comes Up by Alice Notley

 
I love Notley’s (lesser known) non-fiction. All of her essays in this Song Cave collection, Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018, are great, and I enjoyed the essay “Instability in Poetry,” where she discusses her book Mysteries of Small Houses (1998)––one of my favorite books of poetry. If you missed the incredible event for this book, you can find the recording here.

Victoria’s Picks

Fruit Catalog: An absolutely stunning object! Included in this book are watercolors created by the US department of agriculture to help identify fruit. These images are breathtaking in their simple beauty. What I like most is that the book contains not only images of fruit in their ideal state, but as they’re rotting as well, which challenges the relationship between beauty and perfection.

The Sea: Really nice for a smaller gift any time of the year and perfect for voyagers. This is a probing account of the sea and its relationship to man by Jules Michelet, chronicler of the French Revolution. And the green integer edition is its first English translation since 1861!

Rosemary Tonks: Not many authors have made me laugh as hard as Tonks. She’s sharp, witty, and sometimes a bit cruel, and these three factors make for some of the most comical dinner scenes I’ve ever read. We’re lucky to be able to read her at all—in the middle of her life, she took a spiritual turn and decided that the devil was in all her work. Tonks then tracked down every novel of hers she could find and burned it. Her path of self-destruction makes these reissues gifts in themselves. And Tonks’s characters, too, seek a certain self-effacement, though theirs comes through events as grand as failed romance and as small as keeping silent about finding a caterpillar in one’s food.