Customer Comments

This book is a heart bleeder. It is sensual, exhilarating, cataclysmic. It is a novel as ars poetica. Lidia Yuknavitch merges every genre of art into this book: it's a alchemical, it grows stronger with readership, art feeding art ad infinitum. Yuknavitch has the courage and artistry to write about the tragedies inflicted by war and violence and to do something transformative with that enormous force of power that most of us are too scared to touch. Whatever you are doing--stop, and get this book. This is the kind of art that changes you. This is the new landscape of literature. This is the new wave now.

If you love Dorothy Allison, you need to eat this book alive. This is Allison at her best. This book makes you taste butter and grease. It makes everything around you melt into a Southern drawl. This collection of stories is filled with heartache, loneliness, stubborn belligerence, and sex... soooo much hot lesbian sex. Rarely have I seen erotica interlaced with literary brilliance in this way. Some of these stories are incomparably amazing: Mama, Monkeybites, Don't Tell Me You Don't Know, Demon Lover, and Her Thighs. These are stories I'll come back to again and again.

Impossibly imaginative and brilliant! Jonathan Safran Foer writes a caricature of himself into this work, flirting with the fiction/nonfiction divide, weaving the whole thing together with the threads of memory and lineage and imagined versions of ourselves. If only the war hadn't happened, Jonathan might have been Alexi. It's a fascinating, mesmerizing kaleidoscopic book full of Yiddish folklore and unapologetic hyperbole. A must read for visual-linguistic creative thinkers who like non-conformist writing.

This gorgeously illustrated children's book illuminates the magical life of e.e.cummings, inspiring people of all ages to embrace and engage in poetry! The illustrations are brimming with a love of language: words piled into the texture of trees and reflected in puddles, and small details that evoke the flavor of life in New England and New York City in the early 1900s. Children and adults alike will be captivated by the story of a whimsical child (and his first poems at the age of three!) who was nurtured by a supportive and special family and community, and grew into a courageous artist committed to the "new and true" forms of art. The book includes many original e.e.cummings poems and many wonderful historical facts (the poet's beloved eighth grade English teacher was also the first African-American female principal in New England). The author's note of how he came to write this book is a bonus in the back! This beautiful book is sure to be loved and remembered by many.

One of my favorite books ever! Joy Harjo's memoir illuminates the years of her young life as she untangled herself from her family and grew into the kind of woman she longed to be. With humility and courage and an unparalleled confidence, Harjo melds the spiritual with the material as she maps the world around her and her place in it. A visual artist and musician, Harjo uses many voices and perspectives in Crazy Brave to build a collage through words.

A meditative memoir on the art of living inspired by the dynamic voices that permeate Moby Dick, Hocking explores the era of emerging adulthood through surfing, skating, and relationship.

This is an adorable book for any kid who loves food, animals, or humor. It's clever and witty and silly and the illustrations are sweet and captivating. Makes a great gift!

Slippers for Elsewhere is a collection of poetry in which the everyday is made spectacular. Language spills over the tops of these poems like a bubbling froth of excitement and color. Charming and sensual, ecstatic and at times absurd, these poems are composed with a unique slant laden with echoes of James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, Lorca, Ginsberg, and Whitman. Burgess captures moments of the whirling spin of New York City life and collages them with tantalizing bits of intimacy culled from a rich and vibrant eye for living.

The Evening Hour is a rich, compelling novel that pulls you into the complex lives of a small community and doesn't let you leave. The characters caretake the elderly and deal drugs, handle snakes, and tend bar. They are country folk all trapped together in the shadow of a mountain being blown apart for coal. Moody and dark and gentle, this book is a spellbinding read about a young man tied to his community and the mother and land he discovers he is built upon.

If you love a tender heart-on-your-sleeve bildungsroman, and if you, like me, are a sucker for a sentence that explodes with sudden simile and more hyperbole than you could shake a stick at, then you must read Heather O’Neill’s new novel, The Girl Who was Saturday Night.

I loved this book so much. Not only is this novel crafted with impeccable skill--with imagery and language and pacing, its storyline runs as smooth as the steady tug of a perfectly wound ball of yarn, and you can't put it down, except to take a breath and touch your fear that it might end. I was aching to be with these characters, who were so honest and true about their gritty feelings. It opened my heart to a new understanding of the human condition. Following the protagonist, Ben, through the ins and outs of all his experiences and thoughts helped me understand myself better and forgive myself for my own dark choices. I am also mesmerized by the way Spanbauer weaves some kind of magic patterning into his novels, where the same clipped sentence or broken image can make you feel something new and huge each time it appears. He has a beautiful and unique way of writing that I've never encountered before.

This is one of my favorite all time novels. Set in India, the novel takes place from the point of view of one half of a set of young twins (the girl), born into a tangle of a family within a society that still adheres to the caste system with all its sickening riches and ridicule. Roy writes some of the most jaw-dropping language I have ever read, with such twists in the plot that break your heart. I could happily read this book over and over again, and feel elated and destroyed every time.

I found this novel after hearing a story by Heather O'Neill on This American Life and I enjoyed it so much I looked her up and ordered her book right away. I loved Lullabies so much from the start, I couldn't put it down. It's a gorgeous and heart-wrenching novel set within the eyes of an innocent and fiercely imaginative child on the brink of adulthood. O'Neill's language overflows with the most beautiful and unique smilies and metaphors which capture and enhance the vivid atmosphere of life on the streets of Montreal for a child who still believes in magic. Like this: "In the window, the mood had made itself so tiny it was just a hole in the elbow of a black sweater."

Vitello's characters come alive before you even after death in this enchanting fast-paced young adult novel. With vivid scenes and unforgettable characters, this book unfolds in your hands as a whole world within which you are immersed and invested. A family suffering a tragedy, and the impact of that within each interpersonal relationship is masterfully woven into a narrative of one girl's discovery of self. Long after I finished this read, I still think about the characters and the place Vitello paints them in, and how the protagonist, Brady, had such composure and skill for communication with her shut-out parents and distracted psychologist, how she rallied above convention to maintain unlikely friendships with her classmates and teachers. I highly recommend this book for the teenage set, and fans of YA, but also for other writers who want to see how to take a moment and blow it up into a dynamic swirl of richly developed characters in a story imbedded with all the complexities of human interaction.