Staff Picks

The best book I've read so far this year! Ragnarok is the myth of how the Norse gods died. Byatt frames the violent tale within a story of a young girl evacuated to the English countryside during WWII. What Byatt's really writing about is the rich, real world these two stories share. Read it for the beautiful descriptions and the dark, eerily familiar account of self-destruction. 

-Leona 

I'm something of a recent Ben Marcus initiate. I've always heard great things about The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, but it's taken the newly released Flame Alphabet to get things going for me. Man, am I happy it's finally clicked! FA is a bitingly honest and brutal take on a world in which the sound of children's voices make grown-ups fall deathly ill. It's unreal and moving and, quite frankly, nauseating stuff - but in the uncanny way that really great books like 1984 and Darkness at Noon have that sickening, constrained quality from their content. In all likelihood, by the time you read this I will be through with Marcus's other books. Hooked!

-Hal 

I read this book when I was as young and scrambling as the tale's heroine, Dolores. Lamb's incredible, top-of-your-head-blowing portrait of her changed the way I perceived characterization - and, well, writing in general. This book will cradle, slay, love, and alter you. That's if you pick it up and open your heart to it. 

-Chelsea 

Like everyone in Lincoln Square, I have the good fortune of a community of readers and writers constantly wanting to share books with me. When local author Lee Sandlin was here, he made it an emphatic point that I not leave without his new favorite book, A High Wind in Jamaica. I owe him one. This story of the Thornton children, taken aboard a pirate ship for months, is surreal and terrifying and has been famously likened to falling ill as a child. The Darger illustration on the cover says it all. 

-Hal 

Justin Cronin's The Passage is a horror story written with the elegance and universal reach of true literature. The year is 2018. An experiment in a Colorado research facility goes awry. Society crumbles within months. You'll think you know what comes next. You'll be wrong. Within the folds of this post-apocalyptic narrative, we meet an array of intricate characters: a bereaved FBI agent, a faithful centenarian, a death-row inmate innocent of any crime, twelve men who control the minds of millions, and a six-year-old girl who alone holds the key to rebuilding the world. An emotional, challenging read for lovers of The Stand and The Road. 

-Derek 

If you care at all about the situation that is currently going on between Israel and Palestine, then you must read this graphic novel. Sacco, an incredible journalist, tries to unearth the facts surrounding a horrific event that took place in 1956 in a small town in the Gaza Strip called Rafah. But the citizens of the Gaza Strip do not want to talk about the past, because their present day is just as horrific. Read this to become informed. And everything is in gray, not black and white. Just sayin. 

-Sky