Customer Comments

I told my husband that I would turn the nightstand light off after ten more pages, and that was sixty pages ago. I can't stop reading this book, or shaking my head in total astonishment at the RIGHT-ON-NESS of it: the way Egan inhabits her characters' voices, captures the evolution of the American pop-cultural ethos from the early 1980s to today, and locates with great emotional precision the thin line between confused and crazy in a way that will make even the sanest person squirm with recognition. I'm blown away by the simple genius of the book's construction as a collection of chapters each told from a different character's point of view in a different time period, allowing the reader to assemble them into a cohesive whole. This book is funny, tragic, insightful, and absolutely BRILLS.

I tend to roll my eyes when reviewers say that a book is "a meditation on ________," but I also can't think of a phrase that suits this book better. Hall's Life Work is, yes, a meditation on the definition and significance of work, tracing its meaning through his family's agricultural roots to his own life's work as a poet. From the tools of work to its daily routines to the loss left in a life when work is taken away by illness or financial collapse, Hall's thoughts on his subject are associative, reflective, and ultimately ask the reader to question his or her own relationship to daily tasks and routines and whether work is a chore, as we often think of it, or actually one of life's truest pleasures.

An amazing book of layered metaphors and stories within stories, The Artist of the Missing follows a lonely portrait artist named Frank on his odyssey through the dark and curious factories, prison cells, and late-night salons of an anonymous and myth-laden Every City. It's the first book in ages that I started reading again as soon as I finished.

Stephen O'Connor's short stories are peopled with lovesick minotaurs, atheist angels, war veterans and graduate students who seem to step surreally into the reader's brain, move things around, and retreat with a matter-of-fact wave to the world from which they came. The stories in this book will puzzle you, haunt you, and make you laugh out loud weeks later while you're stirring a pot of soup on the stove. Buy this book!

A captivating, elegaic novel about family and transcience and what it means to be at home, filled with startlingly exact and illuminating moments of prose. I wore my pen out underlining sentences.

Absolutely one of the best books I've ever read. Nick Flynn's memoir is honest, poignant, funny, and downright odd. An inspiring writer of both prose and poetry, Flynn gives and gives and gives-- and still has something left to surprise you in the final turns.

This is an interesting read for anyone who likes to explore the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction. Slater's prose is just gorgeous, and she puts it to good use in this memoir, with intimate symbols and vivid imagery that come looping back again and again. The whole thing is about illness as a metaphor, diagnosis as a narrative truth, facts as constantly changing, themes of control and surrender. I've read it twice-- the first time I read it shaking my head; the second time, I read it nodding along.

I can't recommend Eula Biss's essays highly enough. I'm new to her work; I had just read her essay "Relations" in the 2009 Best American Non-Required Reading anthology, and I was in such admiration of her deftness with the essay form. Next I picked up The Balloonists: a short, impressionistic memoir built up out of little woolly bricks of moments, half-memories, images and quotes. Now I'm moving on to Notes From No Man's Land, which I'm happy to see also includes that "Relations" essay. She is astonishingly good. You'll want to read her all afternoon and then send copies to your friends.

An old friend just sent me this book in the mail. As someone who is often cynical about illustrated words of wisdom in general and advice books for writers in specific, I have to say, I was blown away. I absolutely love this book. A great gift for any writer.

Katherine Dunn's Geek Love has consistently been my top recommendation to friends looking for a great novel over the last several years, and of the friends who've picked it up on my recommendation, every one has loved it and said they now recommend it to others. The book is peopled with strange and vivid characters whose humanity makes them as relatable as they are unforgettable. I've never read anything like it and I'll keep recommending it.