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In the late summer of 2002, which is somehow nearly twenty years ago, I moved west across the Mississippi River, from St. Paul, Minnesota to Minneapolis, into a studio apartment just off Nicollet Avenue. I’d spent the previous three years living with friends I’d made while attending a nearby Christian college. After graduating, I started working at a Borders bookstore in the neighborhood, and made just enough money to pay for rent, food, and the occasional rock concert. Work gave me access to more books and magazines than I could ever read, more music than I could ever listen to, and more movies than I could ever watch. I made a valiant, but unsuccessful, attempt to satiate my hunger for all three types of media. I read...

Most days, I carry a copy of Lunch Poems with me on my bus ride to work. It has been an icebreaker, a talisman, a security blanket, and much more. This 50th anniversary edition is a great opportunity to revisit one of the most celebrated poetry collections of the 20th century, or to discover it for the first time. It also includes 14 pages of illuminating correspondence between O'Hara and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as a preface by John Ashbery. And it's finally in hardcover, so it'll last even

Set in suburban Seattle in the 1970s, this graphic novel is the tale of a mysterious plague that has descended on the area's teenagers. Burns has a distinctive style, particularly suited to the disturbing stories he tells. While I love all his books, Black Hole is his masterpiece

Set in 1990, Necessary Errors follows Jacob Putnam through his first year after graduating from Harvard. While most of his friends continue their schooling immediately, Jacob spends the year far away from everyone he knows, teaching English in Prague. He spends time exploring the city, makes friends with other expats, and also frequents a gay bar where he falls in and out of love with two local men. This remarkable first novel made me reminisce about spending time abroad in my early 20s and also reminded me to be my most authentic self, even if others may not always

Maps usually plot things like mountain ranges and bodies of water on a grid in an attempt to make travel more efficient. This innovative book is in fact a box containing 16 individually bound maps, each one using geographical techniques to instead plot memories, thoughts, and feelings on a piece of paper. The result is experimental in form but as emotionally resonant as any essay collection I've read in recent

I remember the first time I read this funny, amazing book. I remember thinking: What is this? Is it poetry? Is it prose? Is there going to be a plot? Is the entire book going to be statements that begin with the same two words? I remember, a couple of pages later, not caring about my questions anymore. I remember turning the final page, and then immediately starting over because I couldn't bear for it to end. I remember buying every copy I came across, so I could hand it out to friends and still make sure I had one left for

In 1989, Javier Marias published a novel titled All Souls. Many readers assumed it to be a fictionalized account of his time as a professor at Oxford. In Dark Back of Time, Marias describes his return to Oxford, and his attempts to reclaim his previous book and its characters as pure fiction. In doing so, he ends up writing an exceptional memoir about the nature of time and perception and the fluidity of

In Very Recent History, Choire Sicha, two-time editor of Gawker and cofounder of The Awl, manages to do three seemingly disparate things at once. First, he's written a kind of guide to our times for a visitor from far in the future. Our everyday life has never looked so foreign and strange. Second, he's taken readers on a gossipy, episodic romp through the romantic and erotic lives of a group of young gay men trying to find love and/or sex in New York City. Finally, and most impressively, Sicha has managed to describe, in frustrating detail, how unlivable New York has become to all but the most wealthy of its citizens. I've never read a book quite like this one. Utterly sui

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Set in 1990, Necessary Errors follows Jacob Putnam through his first year after graduating from Harvard. While most of his friends continue their schooling immediately, Jacob spends the year far away from everyone he knows, teaching English in Prague. He spends time exploring the city, makes friends with other expats, and also frequents a gay bar where he falls in and out of love with two local men. This remarkable first novel made me reminisce about spending time abroad in my early 20s, and also reminded me to be my most authentic self, even if others may not always

When faced with tragedy, have you ever wished you could escape to another time — one that you imagine to be kinder, simpler somehow? What if you woke up one morning and FDR was president? Or Woodrow Wilson?  In this moving book, we walk with Greta Wells as she learns to navigate three different years: 1918, 1941, and 1985. You may find yourself wondering, as I did, How might I be different if I were born in another era? Or, What is the essence of ME — the part that would never

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